Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Profiting from war

  Despite ongoing claims about “ungovernability,” transhistorical blood feuds, or the racialized nature of “the Arab” and “the Muslim,” there is, in fact, nothing exceptional about war and conflict in the Middle East. The region was left with the obscured but violent legacies of notions like the semi-civilized and extraterritoriality. The War on Terror brought these concepts back to center stage. Blowback from weaponized techniques of extraterritoriality impact the United States as well as the Middle East. One hundred and one years after Versailles, the twinned concepts of extraterritoriality and the semi-civilized continue to shape our world in ways that can no longer be overlooked. From Versailles to the War on Terror

The 'end' of a war that was supposed to end all wars laid the foundations of the biggest slaughter in human history, WWII, when it imposed a humiliating and crippling treaty on Germany, a humiliation that was coupled with the impacts of the Great Depression, spawning the Nazis, who wanted a place under the sun, and propelled the U.S. to occupy a hegemonic place and displace the old empires. "The structural reality is that the First World War took place over empires, for empires, and between empires. For a clear-eyed portrait of the world that it yielded, there is no better place to start than the opening chapter of Dominic Lieven’s study of Tsarist Russia’s road to war,  To the Flame , the latest major contribution to the scholarship of the conflict. In it, Lieven lays out the codes and aims of conduct shared by the ruling classes of Europe, saturated with considerations of honour, prestige and virility, for whom territorial aggrandizement was an automatic criterion of ...

On the 9th of March Noske ordered the Reichswehr to shoot on the spot anything that moved. Then the butchers set about their work. While the facades of houses collapsed under the fire of machine guns and mortars and whole families were buried under the rubble, the proletarians were herded with live fire and bayonets into the schoolyards and stables. Alone, by twos, by threes, in groups: against the wall and shot. At night on the river Spree, the revolvers touched workers’ temples and shot. For weeks the Spree washed up corpses onto the shore. Again and again: “A Spartacist nest has been dug up” and eight human beings shot, thirty shot, thirty four shot, and so it went hour by hour, day and night. The German revolution, 100 years ago

UK Those who now talk about the atrocities of the First World War and patriotism are the same people who would tell you "get over it" and "you have a chip on your shoulder" when you mention the British empire and neo-colonialism.

The First World War in Syria and Palestine

Why I don't wear a poppy From my archive The First World War

Inglorious Empire - What the British Did to India  by Shashi Tharoor, Penguin 2017 Excerpts, part 1, with my comments  The criminal Tony Blair has refused to personally apologise to the Libyan dissident Abdel Hakim Belhaj, who was tortured in a jail in Libya following a rendition operation mounted with the help of MI6 ... 
Compare that with this: "When Willy Brandt was chancellor of Germany, he sank to his knees at the Warsaw Ghetto in 1970 to apologize to Polish Jews for the Holocaust. There were hardly any Jews left in Poland, and Brandt, who as a socialist* [sic] was persecuted by the Nazis, was completely innocent of the crimes for which he was apologizing. But in doing so—with his historic kniefall von Warschau (Warsaw Genuflection), he was recongnizing the moral responsibility of the German people, whom he led as chancellor... Of course not everyone agrees that even atonement is due. Historian John Keay put it best: 'The conduct of states, as of individuals, c...

"Today on the Western Front,” the German sociologist Max Weber wrote in September 1917, there “stands a dross of African and Asiatic savages and all the world’s rabble of thieves and lumpens.” Weber was referring to the millions of Indian, African, Arab, Chinese and Vietnamese soldiers and labourers, who were then fighting with British and French forces in Europe, as well as in several ancillary theatres of the  first world war . Faced with manpower shortages, British imperialists had recruited up to 1.4 million Indian soldiers. France enlisted nearly 500,000 troops from its colonies in Africa and Indochina. Nearly 400,000 African Americans were also inducted into US forces. The first world war’s truly unknown soldiers are these non-white combatants.   Ho Chi Minh, who spent much of the war in Europe, denounced what he saw as the press-ganging of subordinate peoples. Before the start of the Great War, Ho wrote, they were seen as “nothing but dirty Negroes … good for no mo...

We are hearing and reading a lot just now about a war for civilization. In some vague, ill-designed manner we are led to believe that the great empires of Europe have suddenly been seized with chivalrous desire to right the wrongs of mankind, and have sallied forth to war, giving their noblest blood and greatest measures to the task of furthering the cause of civilization.  James Connolly, A War for Civilization, 1915 Armistice Day How the civilised celeberate slaughter, selectively. Western-centric, arrogant and even xenophobic. The elites that sent millions to their death for the ruling classes geopolitical and imperialist interests , organise show annually every 11 November. Other people make money from selling poppies. It is also about how much the nation-state and nationalism have made us immune not only in front of barbarism (carried out by "the civilised" or by "the backward people"), but also towards human solidarity with the dead. Those who were k...

A counter-narrative How did the first world war actually end?