Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

We attacked a foreign people and treated them like rebels. As you know, it's all right to treat barbarians barbarically. It's the desire to be barbaric that makes governments call their enemies barbarians. –Bertolt Brecht The first time it was reported that our friends were being butchered there was a cry of horror. Then a hundred were butchered. But when a thousand were butchered and there was no end to the butchery, a blanket of silence spread.  When evil-doing comes like falling rain, nobody calls out "stop!” When crimes begin to pile up they become invisible. When sufferings become unendurable the cries are no longer heard. The cries, too, fall like rain in summer.   – Bertolt Brecht,  Selected Poems General, Your Tank is a Powerful Vehicle It smashes down forests and crushes a hundred men. But it has one defect: It needs a driver. General, your bomber is powerful. It flies faster than a storm and carries more than an elephant. But it has one defect: It needs a mechan...

 

"Over the past thirty years [add nine years since these words were written], capitalist realism has successfully installed a 'business ontology' in which it is simply obvious that everything in society, including healthcare and education, should be run as a business. As any number of radical theorists from Brecht through to Foucault and Badiou have maintained, emancipatory politics must always destroy the appearance of a 'natural order', must reveal what is presented as necessary and inevitable to be a mere contingency, just as it must make what was previously deemed to be impossible seem attainable. It is worth recalling that what is currently called realistic was itself once 'impossible': the slew of privatizations that took place since the 1980s would have been unthinkable only a decade earlier, and the current political-economic landscape (with unions in abeyance, utilities and railways denationalized) could scarcely have been ...

" The most cherished myths of American culture tell us that, while war is terrible,  our  wars are noble, fought only under duress, and in the service of freedom, human rights, and democracy. If we fail in our ventures, as we did in Vietnam and Iraq and probably will in Afghanistan and Syria, that failure was not in our intentions, which were righteous, but merely in our execution. Our worst sins, in these myths, are not ambition, cruelty, or greed, but hubris and lack of foresight. Against such myths, which can be found articulated in the latest Hollywood movies, in the editorial pages of  The New York Times , in Brookings Institution essays, and in Amazon’s “Hot New Releases in World War II History,” Brecht’s ideological critique, which is founded in its own mythology of good and evil, can do little or nothing. Indeed, it’s not clear what one can do about such myths at all, since the power they have is precisely that which deforms and obscures reality into something co...

"A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us."  — W. H. Auden   Some of the books I have read and I recommend: Before Homosexuality in the Arab-Islamic World, 1500-1800 by Khaled El-Rouayheb Brutal Friendship - The West and the Arab Elite by Saïd K. Aburish Capitalism and Class in the Gulf Arab States by Adam Hanieh Islam in Liberalism by Joseph Massad Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence by Karen Armstrong What is Islam? by Shahab Ahmed Desiring Arabs by Joseph Massad Egypt: Spies, Soldiers and Statesmen by Hazem Kandil Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher Inside the Brotherhood by Hazem Kandil, 2015 Debt, The IMF, and The world Bank, Éric Toussaint and Damien Millet, 2010 Man's Fate (or La Condition Humaine) by Andre Malraux 1984 by George Orwell Animal Farm by George Orwell Three Penny Opera by Bertolt Brecht The Autumn of the Patriarch by G. G. Marquez The Slave Trade by Hugh...