Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Conflicts and commons in the politics of truth Related Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation

Orwell's 1984 : why it still matters

"In practicing social civility, you keep silent about things you know clearly but which you should not say and do not say." — Richard Sennett Some of the consequences of the above: - self- censorship (especially in "democracies") - you shouldn't say things which make people uncomfortable - you might affect the business you are tied to - fear, repression of free expression - persistence of "do-not-judge-me" armour

"I despair at the way American and British movie-makers feel they have every right to play fast and loose with the facts, yet have the arrogance to imply that their version is as good as the truth. Continental film-makers are on the whole far more scrupulous. People are more likely to want [made to want] to see something they think is very close to the truth, so they can feel they are learning as well as being entertained. In a post-literate society, the moving image is king, and most people’s knowledge of history is regrettably based more on cinematic fiction than archival fact. The real problem is that the needs of history and the needs of the movie industry are fundamentally incompatible. Even movies ostensibly showing corruption and criminality in the heart of the CIA and the Pentagon have to end on a nationalistic note, with a tiny group of clean, upstanding American liberals saving democracy." "The greatest war movie ever, and the ones I can't bear...

The West has become a vast moral project, an intimidating claim to write and speak for the world, and an unending politicisation of power. Becoming Western has meant becoming transformed according to these things, albeit in a variety of historical circumstances and with varying degrees of thoroughness. For conscripts of Western civilization this transformation implies that some desires have been forcibly eliminated—even violently—and others put in their place. The modern state, invented in Europe, is the universal condition of that transformation—and of its 'higher truth'. — Talal Asad, Conscripts of Western Civilization , 1992, quoted in Joseph Massad's Islam in Liberalism, 2015, pp. 251-2