Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

  Who inspired whom?

“ At an almost planetary scale, and for some years now – certainly ever since what was called ‘the Arab Spring’ – we are in a world awash with struggles, or, more precisely, with mass mobilisations and assemblies. I propose that the general conjuncture is marked, subjectively, by what I would term ‘movementism’, namely the widely shared conviction that significant popular assemblies will undoubtedly achieve a change in the situation. We see this from Hong Kong to Algiers, Iran to France, Egypt to California, Mali to Brazil, India to Poland, as well as in many other places and countries. One may revolt against the actions of the Chinese government in Hong Kong, against the power grab by military cliques in Algiers, against the stranglehold of the religious hierarchy in Iran, against personal despotism in Egypt, against the manoeuvres of nationalist and racial reaction in California, against the actions of the French Army in Mali, against neofascism in Brazil, against the persecution of

  The vaccine pioneer the world forgot

 A general strike in context

 Washington’s Bullets: A History of the CIA, Coups and Assassinations

India, the EU, the US, Canada and the UK are among the countries which have reserved the most doses of the vaccine, according to the latest data. It would be insane if the vaccines were to be put under a democratic health organisation that distributes the doses worldwide according to those who need them first, i.e. the frontline workers, the aged and the vulnerables. But we live in a world of nation states, capitalist competition and profit and intellectual property. And that’s the ‘rational’ and ‘natural’ order of things.

 The Living Mahabharata

  The Great Lockdown hits the Third World hard

"It is not just that this statue [of Robert Clive ] stands as a daily challenge to every British person whose grandparents came from the former colonies. Perhaps more damagingly still, its presence outside the Foreign Office encourages dangerous neo-imperial fantasies among the descendants of the colonisers. In Britain, study of the empire is still largely absent from the history curriculum. This still tends to go from the Tudors to the Nazis, Henry to Hitler, with a brief visit to William Wilberforce and Florence Nightingale along the way. We are thus given the impression that the British were always on the side of the angels. We remain almost entirely ignorant about the long history of atrocities and exploitation that accompanied the building of our colonial system. Now, more than ever, we badly need to understand what is common knowledge elsewhere: that for much of history we were an aggressively  racist and  expansionist force  responsible for violence, injustice and war c

Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire

Covid Trials at an International Court? Seriously? Bush and Blair destroyed a whole country with hundereds of thousands of people killed a consequence of sanctions, war and civil war aince 1990... and we did not see any trial. Trump will stand trial for mismanagement? I don't think so. Americans will wait for the next election, the big ritual, as a solution. In Yemen the Saudi monarchy, a Western friend, has played a significant role in the biggest humanitarian crisis propably since the Korean war. Will we see Mohamed Bin Salman and Co. at international court? After the lockdown, we need a reckoning

Ignored Plight of Dalit Muslims

What the world can learn from Kerala

Protecting the rich, exposing the poor to humanitarian and economic disaster

Note that the word "democracy" is not even put in inverted commas because it is a given. "The rape of India's soul"

History of the British Empire How Britain's opium trade impoverished Indians A new research

Capitalism's violence The profoundest moments of iniquity are not performed by psychopaths, but by ordinary people as they come to accept the premises of the existing order.  "Within neoliberalism’s vision of a prosperous global village, what remains unsaid is the desire for homogeneity, an compulsion to remake the ‘Other’ in ‘our’ image, whereby the space of ‘the peculiar’, ‘the exotic’, ‘the bizarre’ is repeatedly (re)produced through the relation of the ban in order to create a world with a single trajectory. Blaming ‘others’ for neoliberalism’s failures and for its violence consequently becomes a primary mechanism in the articulation of power.  Although violence is of course fragmented by variations and irregularities as part of its complex and unfolding nature, within the current moment of neoliberalism, violence is all too frequently imbued within the chaotic landscapes of globalized capitalism. In the case of Operation

Bringing Gender to the Forefront of the Trade Union Movement

Essays by Arundhati Roy

How Britain tried to erase India's third gender