Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

In the ‘New World’ “deliberate genocidal bursts were more common among British than Spanish or Portuguese settlers. In both cases, we find that the stronger the democracy among the perpetrators, the greater the genocide.” The organic nationalists such the young Austrians argued for an organic conception of the people and state. Conflict – be it conflict of interet or class conflict – was to be transcended, for the people are indivisible and united.  Thus “late-nineteenth-century minorities in the East came under increasing pressure, leading through induced to coerced assimilation and thence to coerced emigration. Jews took the brunt of the pressure “During the nineteenth century, every Ottoman Turkish defeat in Europe resulted in mass flight and many killings of Muslims.” Settlers and Their Victims I note two persistent features of the colonial dark side. First, the settlers often enjoyed de facto local self-rule—whatever the constitution said. For the period, these were distinctly...

The geography of death in Aleppo (2) The protests and grassroots movement in Aleppo Aleppans organized their first protest on March 25, 2011, just a few days after the initial demonstrations in Damascus and Dara’a. Aleppo shopkeepers organized two successful general strikes in June.30 June 30 became known as the “Volcano of Aleppo,” and protests took to the streets in at least ten different locations. A few weeks later, on August 17, protesters reached Saadallah al-Jabiri Square, Aleppo’s Tahrir Square, in large numbers for the first time. The largest protest to date, however, was during the burial of Aleppo’s Mufti, Ibrahim al-Salqini, on September 6, 2011, when protesters marched in the Old City and chanted “Better death than humiliation!” At that point, protests, many of which were spontaneous, were organized on a daily basis at Aleppo University. Lawyers and the Bar Association issued a statement to denounce the violence of the regime, and held a protest at the Palace of Justice th...

Europe’s Twentieth Century

"In East-Central Europe, and especially in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, an anti-immigrant left has formed that is conscious and proud of how it departs from received images (allegedly received from the West) of the left as the defender of marginalized peoples and cultures. In attacking the “multiculturalism” that liberal elites have championed, this anti-multicultural left positions itself as the defender of the hard-working nation against dangerous outsiders, both rich and poor. [T]he anti-multicultural left accepts, once again, the terms set by that liberalism which it sees as its chief competitor. The central principle of liberalism is the principle of separation—the insistence on looking only at one sphere of social reality at a time, and on looking at entities within these spheres as separate entities pursuing separate interests. The anti-multicultural left likewise takes each aspect of the system separately, rejecting out of hand internationalist talk of interconnecti...

AS:  I take your point, and clearly Europe to did see, as you call it, a great ‘sorting-out’, but of course that term as you’re using it describes a set of  different processes – or, I should say, historical events and catastrophes – ranging from the Final Solution, the extermination of European jewry to the ethnic cleansing that took place at the very end of and in the aftermath of the Second World War. But what all these events share is that they’re are not a sorting-out of primordial identities so much as they are political events, driven by war, state interests, racial ideology, etc. And so to bring the conversation back to the Middle East, I think there is, unfortunately, a danger in the West’s conversation about sectarian warfare, to treat these identities as if they were primordial and as if this conflict that we’ve been seeing in Iraq and Syria is somehow natural, this sorting-out is a natural process, when in fact Syrian and Iraqi Sunni and Shia Muslims and Christia...