Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

“In my opinion, nothing has contributed so much to the corruption of the original idea of Socialism as the belief that Russia is a Socialist country.” —George Orwell, Preface to the Ukrainian edition of Animal Farm George Orwell

A new history of revolution

“Several decades after its exhaustion, the communist experience does not need to be defended, idealized, or demonized. It deserves to be critically understood as a whole, as a dialectical totality shaped by internal tensions and contradictions, presenting multiple dimensions in a vast spectrum of shades, from redemptive élans to totalitarian violence, from participatory democracy and collective deliberation to blind oppression and mass extermination, from the most utopian imagination to the most bureaucratic domination — sometimes shifting from one to the other in a short span of time. Like many other “isms” of our political and philosophical lexicon, communism is a polysemic and ultimately “ambiguous” word...” Coming to terms with communist history

A reading of Vasily Grossman’s two novels

Anti-communism without communism, demonising the Left and appeasing the far-right. The End of Anti-Fascism Related European identity and the paradox of anti-communism Instructions not to use anti-capitalist materials in schools

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

The End of Anti-Fascism Related: The New Anti-Communism: Rereading the Twentieth-Century

Orwell's 1984 : why it still matters

Enzo Traverso says, "the Stalinist legacy, made up of a mountain of ruins and dead, did not erase the origins of communism in the tradition of the Enlightenment and eighteenth-century rationalist humanism. 
By contrast,  "[N]ationalism and imperialism, Pan-Germanism and the idea of `living space', `redemptive' anti-Semitism and racism, eugenics and extermination of the `lower races', hatred of the left and charismatic dictatorship are tendencies that had appeared, in more or less developed forms, from the end of the nineteenth century on. Nazism did not create them, it simply radicalized them. 
If Nazism achieved a fusion of three different struggles - a colonial assault on the Slavic world, a political struggle against communism and the Soviet Union, and a racial fight against the Jews - into a unique war of conquest and extermination, this means that its model could not be Bolshevism. It would be more relevant and coherent to find its `model' in the col...

Reading Hannah Arendt Is Not Enough

Liberal Totalitarianism

Against "totalitarianism": a conversation with Enzo Traverso

"Under the relentless thrust of accelerating over-population and increasing over-organization, and by means of ever more effective methods of mind-manipulation, the democracies will change their nature; the quaint old forms—elections, parliaments, Supreme Courts and all the rest—will remain. The underlying substance will be a new kind of non-violent totalitarianism. All the traditional names, all the hallowed slogans will remain exactly what they were in the good old days. Democracy and freedom will be the theme of every broadcast and editorial—but Democracy and freedom in a strictly Pickwickian sense. Meanwhile the ruling oligarchy and its highly trained elite of soldiers, policemen, thought-manufacturers and mind-manipulators will quietly run the show as they see fit." Aldous Huxley,  Brave New World Revisited , published 1958

Orwell and the language of dystopia