Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

I would use the word "Russian imperialism" cautiously, though. The rest stands accurate in my view. Richard Seymour in 2015: An unabashed mobilisation of ancient colonial binaries, with Russian imperialism cast as the guardian of secular, modern, liberal civilization against a barbarian ISIS. Its author has stated the upshot of this perspective quite explicitly : "kill them all". Or, to put it another way, exterminate the brutes. One is reminded of peak Hitchens, and of the traditions of imperialist apologia that he more or less deliberately evoked. And one is impressed by how deep this goes in parts of the left. Of course, Russian imperialism is not defending secular liberalism; that's not how imperialism works. And its targets are demonstrably much broader than ISIS. Of course, the Assad dictatorship is much more steeped in blood than ISIS at this point. The colonial unconscious, even if it has no history, should be placed in historical context. In the afterma...

The British colonisers caused the Bengal famine Related The trouble with the Engenglish is that their hiss hiss history happened overseas, so they dodo don’t know what it means. —Whisky Sisodia, in Salman Rushdie,  The Satanic Verses

Imperial Encore  a text that should be on the reading list of anyone interested in colonialism, material culture as a tool of empire and attempts to extend imperialism through the use of soft power. Review of  Imperial Encore: The Cultural Project of the Late British Empire

A new book by Caroline Elkins. A review “ With its enormous breadth and ambition, it amounts to something approaching a one-volume history of imperial Britain’s use of force, torture, and deceit around the world. As devastating as the details of these tactics are, even more damning is Elkins’s account of what she argues has been the persistent and perverse misuse of law to cast a veneer of justice and respectability over the remorseless exploitation of others. “As its title suggests, Elkins’s book argues that violence was not just an incidental feature of the British Empire, not simply its midwife, so to speak. Rather, it was foundational to the system itself, a fact borne out in considerable detail.” But Elkins’s “most original argument lies not in the violence itself but rather in London’s use and abuse of the notion of the rule of law, much touted by Britain as an elevating feature of modern Western civilization and a pillar of democracy. “ Elkins convincingly demonstrates that duri...

Toppling George Washington and the myth of American democracy Related Winston Churchill and the use of chemical weapons Controversies of Churchill's career 

"[L]ike many other brutal dictators all over the world, Franco partly owed his long, dark reign to powerful friends in Britain." Franco's Friends

"The Nazis used it, we use it"

Every word in this article could be mine. Violence: theirs and ours See also this letter by Vijay to a Syrian written in Sep 2013 "The light that shines alone in palaces, Steals away the people’s happiness. Feigns its strength from other’s weakness. That kind of system, Dawn without light, I refuse. I deny."

"Do not believe these croakers but give the lie to their dismal croaking by showing by our actions that the vigour and vitality of our race is unimpaired and that our determination is to uphold the Empire that we have inherited from our fathers as Englishment". In his view, the British would "continue to pursue that course marked out for us by an all-wise hand and carry out mission of bearing peace, civilisation and good government to the uttermost ends of the earth".  That man on the five-pounds note. Bath, England,  Speech of 26 July 1897

A book review Inglorious Empire: what the British did to India

The "British people" have accepted austerity imposed on them because of plunder carried out by the banks. Now "the British people" will have to pay £50+ billion because of a blunder by Cameron and his allies. "The British people", I am almost cetain, will accept this. Juncker, the European Commission president, adds insult to injury with a naive, poor reading of history by praising the criminal racist Churchill.  "We need to settle our affairs not with our hearts full of a feeling of hostility, but with the knowledge that the continent owes a lot to the UK. Without Churchill, we would not be here - we mustn't forget that, but we mustn't be naive."

"About 90,000 people have signed a petition calling for tallow to be removed from bank notes." (BBC website).  But Churchill should remain on the five-pound note and in Parliament Square! " I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion ." — Winston Churchill

"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 ...

A new YouGov poll  has found the British public are generally proud of the British Empire and its colonial past.

The Crimes of Winston Churchill