Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

What the Economist doesn't tell you

Brexit "More ugly historical ironies may yet waylay Britain on its treacherous road to Brexit. But it is safe to say that a long-cossetted British ruling class has finally come to the end of itself as it was." "The British ruling class amd Brexit"

"Tolerance"? To explore ... Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire

What kind of political discourse, with what social and po­ litical effects, is contemporary tolerance talk in the United States? What readings of the discourses of liberalism, colonialism, and impe­rialism circulating through Western democracies can analytical scru­ tiny of this talk provide? The following chapters aim to track the so­ cial and political work of tolerance discourse by comprehending how this discourse constructs and positions liberal and nonliberal subjects, cultures, and regimes; how it figures conflict, stratification, and dif­ ference; how it operates normatively; and how its normativity is ren­dered oblique almost to the point of invisibility. Part of the project of this book, then, is to analyze tolerance, espe­ cially in its recently resurgent form, as a strand of depoliticization in liberal democracies. Depoliticization involves construing inequality, subordination, marginalization, and social conflict, which all require political analysis and

The political economy of oil, empire, Saudi Arabia, "Jihad", global forces of capital, "Islam", "democracy", etc. Some interesting stuff here. I don't think though that the figure regarding the numbers of the Iraqi deaths due to sactions is accurate. Recent studies have the put the number of deaths around 200,000. I also think that Mitchell should have put both words Islam and democracy in inverted commas. "McJihad: Islam and Empire"

"Scholars schooled in the Western canon, but who are ideologically and methodologically anti-imperialist, often struggle with Conrad’s beautiful writing yet horribly racist views. Conrad was honest about the colonial brutalities he witnessed, but his admiration for empire is hardly hidden. Several European writers suffer such ambivalence. George Orwell’s Burmese Days, or his essay “Shooting an Elephant,” are examples: the reality of imperialism is dirty, possibly immoral, but the work must be done and empire must be defended. E. M Forster’s Passage to India and Rudyard Kipling’s Kim can also be mined for such ambiguities and complexities. But isn’t it time to stop feeling ambivalent about empire? Why are we again and again attracted to this ambivalence when the proof of empire’s destructive and dehumanizing power is all around us?" Empire and ambivalence

The Contradictions of Joseph Conrad

Imperialist feminism and liberalism

"Anglo-Saxon anthropologists who with good reason translated moral idea into social fact, reserved ‘culture’ for primitive societies and ‘civilization’ for modern societies. So there is a good deal of  interference on the line and fog on the road. Let us try a clarification."   Civilisation, a Grammar

Sheldon Wolin and Inverted Totalitarianism

Immigration will remain a toxic issue until Britain faces up to its colonial past

A book review The H-Word by Perry Anderson

Richard Seymour : "A few things to bear in mind. First, this bombing in Syria is not a departure from the existing policy. That is because the policy is the one left by the Obama administration, which included a number of lines of escalation and expansion within the terms of the existing strategy: medium footprint, bombing & auxiliary forces. The only major difference is that Trump has relaxed the political oversight exercised by the Obama administration on the military's actions: hence, the major bloodshed in Mosul and Raqqa recently. He has expanded the war along lines indicated by his predecessor, in Somalia and Yemen, and has changed the rules of engagement so that parts of these countries are deemed 'war zones' which can be targeted under the laws of war. Second, this bombing in Syria is not worse than the bombings in Mosul or Raqqa in terms of its death toll. The major significance is that, by punishing Assad, it is a slap in the face to Russia. But thi

"Brexit reinforces Britain's imperial amnesia"

"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

" At its inception, aerial bombardment was a weapon of empire deployed to subdue colonial populations. Soon, during the Second World War, civilians in Europe and Japan came into the bomber’s crosshairs, and ever since non-combatant targets have been at the heart of military strategy. It was a seismic shift in the relations of power: as the state justified the mass murder of civilians, individual combatants, flying high above their victims, were distanced from the act of killing as never before. The ascendance of drones as an instrument of military power is the latest stage in this cruel evolution, which has led to a perpetual low-intensity war on the global scene. As the technology enabling it spreads through the world, the borders of the conflict will grow in proportion." The militarization of everything

" No one would accuse this incumbent of want of humane feeling: tears for the death of schoolchildren in New England have moved the nation, and appeals for gun control converted not a few. If a great many more children, most without even schools, have died at his own hands in Ghazni or Waziristan, that is no reason for loss of presidential sleep. Predators are more accurate than automatic rifles, and the Pentagon can always express an occasional regret. The logic of empire, not the unction of the ruler, sets the moral standard." — Perry Anderson, "Predator drone: American foreign policy under Obama"

"Prospective imperialists can turn to his  authorized biographer  Niall Ferguson for answers. Harvard’s specialist in restoring the devil’s reputation — having done so previously for the  House of Rothschild  and the  British  and  American  empires —  argues  that if we weigh the good (the United States winning the Cold War) against the bad (the “loss of life in strategically marginal countries”), Kissinger comes out a hero. Fortunately, those of us unwilling to perform that calculus have Greg Grandin’s  Kissinger’s Shadow: The Long Reach of America’s Most Controversial Statesman .  The book avoids the trap of simply enumerating Kissinger’s crimes and actually takes its subject’s worldview seriously. Since the actual trial of Kissinger will never happen and the intellectual trial has  already  taken place, Grandin follows a different path: he traces how Kissinger’s ideas have come to dominate American foreign policy over the past fifty years. Using Kissinger as his protagon

The following questions were asked in 1978: "With what moral right can the rulers of a nation speak of human rights when within it the millionaire and the beggar coexist, the Indian is exterminated, the black man is discriminated against, women are prostituted and large masses of Chicano, Puerto Ricans and Latin Americans are scorned, exploited and humiliated?  How can this be done by the rulers of a nation where the Mafia, gambling and child prostitution predominate, where the CIA organizes subversion and universal esp ionage plans and where the Pentagon creates neutron bombs capable of preserving material assets while exterminating human beings, in an empire that supports reaction and counterrevolution throughout the world, that protects and encourages the exploitation by monopolies of the wealth and human resources on all continents, unequal trade, a protectionist policy, an incredible squandering of natural resources and a system of hunger for the world?  How can this be don

The Liberal Defense of Murder