Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Protests predicted to surge globally

Another 'Europeanisation'

Some "liberals" are really scared and don't want to see a radicalisation of a movement. After decades of silence and complicity, they are changing tack. Understandably, one is not expecting a Foreign Journal's article to include the capitalist and imperialist settings as a wider context of class and race oppression, the economic policies imposed, the international institution involved, debt enslaving, etc. That would question the "liberal democractic way of life,", the American concept of "freedom", the "cold war" and what it was about, "the definition of terrorism" and discovering American imperialist history. The defenders of the system will do whatever it takes, including concessions and what it sounds leftish discourse, to mollify anger, co-opt resistance, mobilise their troops of intellectuals and celebrities in order to establish a new status quo. If a stronger movement that goes beyond race and racism doesn't chall

"No other region has documented such a long and spatially extensive drought.  Evidence points to Western industrial aerosol pollution, which cooled parts of the global ocean, thereby altering the monsoon system, as a cause. Africa will be hardest hit by climate change, but has contributed the least to causing that change." — Richard Washington, the BBC , 15 December 2019 "Development" of some at the expense of others. Recommended reading Late Victorian Holocausts by Mike Davis

French State violence at home I wonder where the "Je suis Charlie" people are. Je suis sans-papiers /les gilets noirs

It has to be within the socio-economic transformation that produces industrialisation and modernity in Africa. And there has to be a social forces/social forces who have interests in such a change. Cultural, educational and intellectual life breaks away from neocolonial studies in parallel/following a break away from economic hegemony and backwardness. A white curricula in Western universities is a useful tool to foster superiority and ideological legitimation. Hence the dominant paradigms, the belief in NGOisation, international aid, etc. Including some "black/brown" scholars, journalists, feminists, etc in the curricula is like including a black man as president of the US or a woman/gay as a president of an international institution:  maintaining power relations by diversifying the agents of oppression. " How truly decolonise the study of Africa "

Italy and France A row that exposes both hypocrisy and truth Further reading: -  How poor countries develop rich countries by Jason Hickel (LSE) - How Europe underdeveloped Africa by Walter Rodney - Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century  by John Smith

Development In Rodney's view, "the disproportionate weight and importance of even a small African working class offered potentially a more stable base of resistance. But, he emphasizes, that possibility cannot be fully realized as in the “developed” world because production in Africa proceeded on a different path than in Europe. In the latter, the destruction of agrarian and craft economies increased productive capacity through the development of factories and a mass working class. In Africa, he argues, that process was distorted: local craft industry was destroyed, yet large-scale industry was not developed outside of agriculture and extraction, with workers restricted to the lowest-paid, most unskilled work. “Capitalism in the form of colonialism failed to perform in Africa the tasks which it had performed in Europe in changing social relations and liberating the forces of production.”  How Europe underdeveloped Africa: the legacy of Walter Rodney Further reading &g

In a recent article, former World Bank chief economist, Branko Milanovic reckoned there were two curses for European capital: immigration and rising inequality.   “The fact that the European Union is so prosperous and peaceful, compared both to its Eastern neighbors (Ukraine, Moldova, the Balkans, Turkey) and more importantly compared to the Middle East and Africa means that it is an excellent emigration destination. Not only is the income gap between the “core” Europe of the former EU15 and the Middle East and Africa huge, it has grown. Today, West European GDP per capita is just shy of $40,000 international dollars; sub-Saharan’s GDP per capita is $3,500 (the gap of about 11 to 1). In 1970, Western Europe’s GDP per capita was $18,000, sub-Saharan, $2,600 (the gap of 7 to 1). Since people in Africa can multiply their incomes by ten times by migrating to Europe, it is hardly surprising that, despite all the obstacles that Europe has recently began placing in the way of the migrants, t

The underpopulated countries of Africa are in general underpolluted. The quality of the air is unnecessarily good compared with Los Angeles or Mexico. Polluting industries should be encouraged to move to the less-developed countries. A certain amount of pollution exist in countries where salaries are low. I think that the economic logic whereby tons of toxic waste can be dumped in places wehre salaries are low is irrefutable ... Any concern [about toxic products] will anyway be much greater in a country where people live long enough to develop cancer than in a country where the infant mortality rate is 200 in 1,000 by the age of five. — Lawrence Summers*, internal memo of the World Bank, December 13, 1991.  Quoted in Toussaint and Millet, 2010, pp. 255-6 *Summers was at the time chief economist and vice-president of the World Bank. He later became Secretary of the Treasury in Bill Clinton's government, before becoming the president of Havard University, until June 2006. The ext

How fundamentalism works "As economics is not an exact science, the number of counter-examples is irrelevant. If I put forward a hypothesis in physics which is proved wrong by an experiment, I must question the theory. And the theory progresses through such invalidation. In economics, you can undermine the existence of millions of people, but none of that human evidence will affect the ideology of structural adjustment ." — Susan George, vice president of ATTAC France, December 6, 2000 See also "How poor countries develop rich countries" "A tonne of cocoa is roughly US $1,300, while one 4x4 vehicle is now about US $120,000. So you need about 92 tonnes of cocoa to exchange for one 4x4. But to get one tonne, you will need not less than 20 acres of land. The average cocoa farmer in Ghana has only around 2-3 acres, meaning it would take him or her well over 500 years to produce enough cocoa to buy a 4x4.” John Opoku, human rights lawyer and activist, Gha

The world hasn't had this many people dying of famine and diseases since WWII "The international response? Essentially, a giant shrug of indifference." and Invasion of fall armyworms ravages crops in 20 African countries

The Role of Oxfam, Unicef, Live Aid in the Systematic Destabilization of African Nations

56 years ago Patrice Lumumba was assassinated

"This is the importance of Ngugi. Born in 1938, the son of a tenant farmer in rural, British-occupied Kenya, Ngugi grew up working the pyrethrum farms that were once the property of his ancestors. He came of age during the Mau Mau rebellion, followed by the Churchill government’s violent ​response, which included​ the detention of 150,000 Gikuyu people in concentration camps where they were electrocuted, whipped and mutilated. He vividly describes this period in his novels “ Weep Not, Child ,” the first East African novel published in English, “ A Grain of Wheat ” and “ Petals of Blood .” "Such a rich body of work [Wizard of the Crow] is of potentially tremendous importance to our understanding of how the world came to be as it is. Ngugi captures the progression from the raw plunder and violence of colonialism to the corruption of national Third World elites by the predatory forces of global capitalism, which he cheekily represented in “Wizard of the Crow” by the fictional

Concerning Violence ends on a powerful note bound to leave you with a knot in your stomach. Lest our daily brush with the news, with the forces of globalisation, consumerism and capital, with all this new inter-connectedness and our (however valid) criticism of the United States’s imperial ambitions distract us, Fanon reminds us that Europe is at the root of all our problems today, and it is Europe to which we are ideologically and materially enslaved. The camera moves swiftly through the centre of a massive gathering of people in tattered clothing, emaciated, looking expectantly into the camera – the wretched of the earth, literally – as Fanon’s most damning words appear on screen: "From all these continents, under whose eyes Europe today raises up her tower of opulence, there has flowed out for centuries toward that same Europe diamonds and oil, silk and cotton, wood and exotic products. Europe is literally the creation of the third world. The wealth which smothers her

Just another news item "As the rescuers approached, they found overloaded wooden vessels and rafts that evoked scenes of the slave trade."

The stinking big fish ... Compare the title with the content : it says the West, but there is no single paragraph about the West's role in this so-called report. Russia is mentioned once, though.

"Why do we still use the term sub-Saharan Africa?

Britain's New African Empire