Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

It is the richest country by GDP, not in a state of war, with one of the "best" education system in the world,  47% of women at work, "the rule of law", an army of missionaries who have been "liberating women" in "backward" countries... Top 10 most dangerous countries for women

"India's Most Repressed Get Their Revenge" (?) Not yet.

Generally a good piece, but saying that the US "has destroyed Iraq, Libya and Syria" is not accurate from Roy. The US has contributed in the destruction of Libya and Syria. In both countries the main destruction has been carried out by local and regional forces. That also ignores the role of Russia. Literature provides shelter By Arundhati Roy

Anti-union harassment and victimization escalate at AB InBev Sonepat India

A historian asks: "Should Britain apologise for Amritsar massacre?" (the BBC Viewpoint) That is a dangerous question that might open a floodgate: Should Britain apologize for massacres against those who resisted or rose up against British rule: -the Mau Mau in Kenya) -the Zulu in South Africa -the Mahdists in Sudan -the Arabs in Iraq Should Britain apologize to -the Irish -the Bengalis (the engineered famine) - the Iraqis (1990 to the present) -the Greek resistance -the Palestinians (for her long support of Israel) -the Egyptians (for her long support of Mubarak and El-Sisi) -the Saudis (for her long support of the monarchy) -the Yemenis (for her supply of weapons to the Saudis) -'Third World' countries (for her IMF-backed restructural adjustment programme and its consequnces, debt enslavement, etc) ... I am sure I have missed a few more. The massacre in context

"We can only wonder what Marx might have thought or said to Jones. Four years earlier in the  Manifesto , he and Engels had considered Western imperialism as a progressive and beneficial force drawing underdeveloped societies into bourgeois civilization. He was now collaborating with someone who held the opposite opinion, a situation that pulled him toward what his Hegelian training would have recognized as a position of immanent criticism — that is, criticism that submits to and appropriates the very premises of a competing standpoint in order to transcend it dialectically." The evolution of Marx's thinking on colonialism Further reading Marxism Orientalism Cosmopolitanism by Gilbert Achcar

"The British curriculum dedicates plenty of attention to the violence of others - in Nazi Germany or during the American Civil War - and goes into great detail on a few events in medieval and pre-Victorian English history, like the Plague, the Great Fire of London, and the reign of Henry VIII. But a British school would not teach you anything about the brutality of British colonialism." It is time to teach colonial history in British schools

The rising tide

Independent India and the Secret US-UK Deal That Changed It All

The crimes of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and others have been explained and condemned by socialists. When will capitalism answer for its crimes?

I have just finished reading Late Victorian Holocausts El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World It is an execellent book .  Some passages in chapter 8 are not easy and require some scientific knowledge of the field, but most of the book is a very good read.

What I do worry about is the fact that writers have become so frightened of being political. The idea that writers are being reduced to creators of a product that is acceptable, that slips down your throat, which readers love and therefore can be bestsellers, that’s so dangerous. Today, for example in India, where majoritarianism is taking root – and by majoritarianism, I don’t just mean the government, I mean that individuals are being turned into micro-fascists by so many means. It is the mobs and vigilantes going and lynching people. So more than ever, the point of the writer is to be unpopular. The point of the writer is to say: “I denounce you even if I’m not in the majority.” "The point if the writer is to be unpopular"

Very good! "It is fair to say that what these essays achieve is the denigration of the very concept of agency, something at the very heart of the postcolonial project. In obscuring the effects of social circumstances, in denying — implicitly or explicitly — the role of structure, the theorists under consideration whisk away what makes political praxis distinctive as a volitional act. For what is political agency if not a form of practice aimed at the structures of power within which it is embedded? Whether it aims to reproduce them, as in ruling-class strategies, or seeks to transform and undermine them, as is the case with subaltern classes, political agency is defined by its relation to these fields of power. But with Spivak and, in particular, Guha, it seems that it is the simple exercise of will that enables the actions of their protagonists to serve as political agency — even those actions are an acquiescence to their subjugation. Our reading confirms the observation made

Reading about the horrors of the British rule/Raj in India, in Inglorious Empire , one cannot help but relate to such a conclusion made by "the doughty nationalist Lala Lajpat Raj:  'The British are not a spiritual people. They are either a fighting race or a commercial nation. It would be throwing pearls before swine to appeal to them in the name of higher morality or justice or on ethical grounds. They are a self-reliant people, who can appreciate self-respect and self-reliance even in their opponents.' The British tended to base their refusal to intervene in famines with adequate government measures on a combination of three sets of considerations: free trade principles (do not interfere with market forces), Malthusian doctrine (growth in population beyond the ability of the land to sustain it would inevitably lead to deaths) and financial prudence (don't spend money we haven't budgeted for). On these grounds, Britain had not intervened to save lives in Ire

The criminal Tony Blair has refused to personally apologise to the Libyan dissident Abdel Hakim Belhaj, who was tortured in a jail in Libya following a rendition operation mounted with the help of MI6 ... Compare that with this: "When Willy Brandt was chancellor of Germany, he sank to his knees at the Warsaw Ghetto in 1970 to apologize to Polish Jews for the Holocaust. There were hardly any Jews left in Poland, and Brandt, who as a socialist* [sic] was persecuted by the Nazis, was completely innocent of the crimes for which he was apologizing. But in doing so—with his historic kniefall von Warschau (Warsaw Genuflection), he was recongnizing the moral responsibility of the German people, whom he led as chancellor... Of course not everyone agrees that even atonement is due. Historian John Keay put it best: 'The conduct of states, as of individuals, can only assessed by the standards of their age, not by today's litigious criteria. Otherwise, we'd all be down on t

How women beedi workers set up Asia's largest housing cooperative

Which country works the longest hours ?

I think this is a very good interview. "And we get our delicate fiction and our sophisticated analysis of identity without mentioning caste, without mentioning Kashmir — the upholding of this nation as the land of Gandhi and yoga and nonviolence, when in fact there has not been a single day since August 15, 1947, when India was declared independent that the Indian Army has not been deployed “within its own borders, against its own people.” Whether it’s Kashmir, Manipur, Nagaland, Mizoram, Hyderabad, Punjab, Goa, Bastar, you know? It’s just a nation that is nailed together by military might, and we try to avoid thinking about it." Arundhati Roy on literature, India, Kashmir, violence, Ghandi, Dalits, resistance, Obama, Trump, and more

"Bew is entirely justified in arguing that many of the political stances associated with Blair have deep roots in the party’s tradition. But his belief that this tradition is something to be celebrated and preserved requires him to engage in suppression of inconvenient facts and mealy-mouthed equivocation about the crimes of British imperialism. Citizen Clem was intended to supply Labour’s Atlanticist right with historical ballast. A clear-eyed study of Attlee’s career is all the more important for the Corbynite left as an antidote to rosy-spectacled Labourist sentimentalism for him." Much to be modest about

Amartya Sen "On the issue of liberalisation and the opening up of economies, Amartya has been rather mainstream. He hasn't raised very deep questions about the whole process and of globalisation in general. He's more of a mainstream economist than many people realise." More substantial criticisms revolve round his role in the current globalisation debate. Richard Jolly, while being an enormous admirer, says: "On the issue of liberalisation and the opening up of economies, Amartya has been rather mainstream. He hasn't raised very deep questions about the whole process and of globalisation in general. He's more of a mainstream economist than many people realise." Food for thought