Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

The cowardly BBC

John McDonnell  

In an excellent interview at the Register.com, the documentary film-maker Adam Curtis identifies the contours of this regime of affective management.  TV now tells you what to feel.
It doesn’t tell you what to think any more. From  EastEnders to reality format shows, you’re on the emotional journey of people – and through the editing, it gently suggests to you what is the agreed form of feeling. “Hugs and Kisses”, I call it.  I nicked that off Mark Ravenhill who wrote a very good piece which said that if you analyse television now it’s a system of guidance – it tells you who is having the Bad Feelings and who is having the Good Feelings. And the person who is having the Bad Feelings is redeemed through a “hugs and kisses” moment at the end. It really is a system not of moral guidance, but of emotional guidance.  Morality has been replaced by feeling. In the ‘empire of the self’ everyone ‘feels the same’ without ever escaping a condition of solipsism. ‘What people suffer from,

Minor news items do not appear on the BBC fronpage Or When the objective is part of a supreme civilisational mission, collateral damage is worth it. Mistakes happen! Let's remember that we have to terrorize the terrorists there so that they don't kill us in the West.

The Great Libya War Fraud

It is not the first time, but it always makes me laugh "The evidence now shows that Anjem Choudary is one of the most dangerous men in Britain." When we do it it is fighting for "freedom and democracy", when they do it is radicalism and terrorism. We advocate and impose economic and political policies on backward people, in an alliance with the Saddams, Assads and Ben Alis, championing it as "freedom, democracy, way of life, etc" in order to maintain stability so that capital thrives and our geopolitical interests and preserved.  We organise wars and mobilize Muslim and non-Muslim leaders who we define as moderates because they work for our interests and the interests of their respective classes at home an globally, we mobolize our resources and troops to spread our way of life by dismantling the social fabric of fragile societies, causing the deaths and dislocation of millions,  and when those very same economic policies, social relations of powe

On BBC Radio 4

" Such visitations of providence as these no government can do much either to prevent or alleviate." It did not end anytime soon. Famines recurred in 1869 and 1874. Between 1876 and 1878, during the Madras famine, anywhere from four to five million people perished after the viceroy, Lord Lytton, adopted a hands-off approach similar to that employed in Ireland and Orissa.  By 1901, Romesh Chunder Dutt, another leading nationalist, enumerated 10 mass famines since the 1860s, setting the total death toll at a whopping 15 million. Indians were now so poor - and the government so indifferent in its response - that, he stated, "every year of drought was a year of famine." The British Rule and the Famines in India. The Orissa Famine as an Example.

Sunday between noon and 1pm on 104.4 FM (London) Or resonancefm.com (worldwide) Obituary : the Arab Sundanese novelist Tayib Salih. "How the Jewish people were invented , from the Bible to Zionism" is the provocative title of the most recent book to be published in Israel by Shlomo Sand, a professor at Tel Aviv University. Khalil Bendib talked to Sand (from Voices of the Middle East and North Africa on KPFA Radio, Berkeley). The BBC, Jeremy Bowen and the pro-Israeli lobby .