Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

This book [ Genocide in Libya ] is not meant to be conclusive, but to bring out Libya and Libya’s brutal, genocidal colonial history. And to get rid of that common and really absurd way of thinking that goes “I don’t know anything about Libya, so I’m going to talk about tribalism, I’m going to talk about [Muammar] al-Qaddafi, about regionalism or religion.” Who doesn’t have regions? Who doesn’t have these social complexities? An interview with Ali Abdullatif Ahmida Related There was no a Nuremberg trials for Italian fascists

When [sociologist] Zygmunt Bauman turned his attention to camps in the 90s, he argued that what characterises violence in our age is distance – not just the physical or geographical distance that technology allows, but the social and psychological distance produced by complex systems in which it seems everybody and nobody is complicit. This, for Bauman, works on three levels. First, actions are carried out by “a long chain of performers”, in which people are both givers and takers of orders. Second, everybody involved has a specific, focused job to perform. And third, the people affected hardly ever appear fully human to those within the system. “Modernity did not make people more cruel,” Bauman wrote, “it only invented a way in which cruel things could be done by non-cruel people.” Why are they still with us? Related In America: crammed into cells and forced to drink from the toilet

Genocide in Libya The book specifically recovers the hidden history of the fascist Italian concentration camps in Libya.