Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Immigration will remain a toxic issue until Britain faces up to its colonial past

Yemen's disaster

مصر: لماذا لم تنتفض الجماهير ضد ارتفاع الأسعار؟

Supposedly the 4th economy in the world... Where is Save the Children? Oh, they are helping the Yemeni children!

China encircles the world with one belt, one road strategy

Another crime by that man on the five-pound note How Churchill broke the Greek resistance

"The psalm is a song of being forsaken. The feeling of being forsaken, an “immense and aching solitude” as William Styron put it, even amid crowds, even among friends, even when no real-world abandonment has taken place, is common in depression. (Styron began to experience melancholic depression late in life, after developing an intolerance of alcohol. But his description, in  The Confessions of Nat Turner , of the hero's feeling of abandonment by his God in the aftermath of his failed uprising, suggests that he might have known this all along.) But if the song is also a dream, we might ask what sort of wish-fulfilment that could be. What sort of satisfaction there is to be had, or avoided, in abandonment. And whether idealisation can also be a defence against consummation." The Night Season

" A funny thing happened on the tube. Two young, fairly affluent looking racists on the Victoria Line started hassling three teenage hijabis, calling them "smelly foreigners". It didn't seem, from what I heard, to be a focused anti-Muslim thing. It was about getting a sadistic kick out of baiting them, and enjoying their outraged responses. A woman was trying to talk the girls down -- because, though plainly not intimidated, they were obviously distressed -- saying "ignore them ", and telling the young men to "grow up". When they resumed their 'banter' about having to share a tube with a bunch of "foreigners", an elderly black man sitting near them said, "who the fuck are you calling a foreigner?" Which was a good point: their actions were bewilderingly self-endangering, and they didn't look the least bit up to defending themselves. This guy was ready to get up and lamp them. I blurted out something like, "j...

Young white men [and women] are being radicalized

A colleague  of mine at Oxford was asked to see an undergraduate who was falling behind in her work. The student – a Muslim – explained that she had been suffering from depression and was being treated for it by her GP. My colleague believed the student’s explanation placed her under an obligation to ask the student whether she was being radicalised. A young colleague, an Arab, told me that when he tried to book a room for a seminar, he was informed that this was no longer permitted on security grounds: he had to get a ‘senior’ academic to confirm the real purpose of the meeting. Another young colleague was told that she had to carry out a security ‘risk assessment’ for a feminist seminar she was convening; she refused, and was repeatedly pressured to comply. A librarian was asked for a reference by another university: ‘Are you completely satisfied,’ they wanted to know, ‘that the applicant is not involved in “extremism” (being vocal or active opposition to fundamental Bri...

"One can disagree with, say, historian Orlando Figes’s conclusions without querying the seriousness of his research, but his assertion in  A People’s Tragedy  that “hatred and indifference to human suffering were to varying degrees ingrained in the minds of all the Bolshevik leaders” is simply absurd (and his disapproving fascination with their leather jackets curious). In Russia, Virginia Woolf wrote in  Orlando , “sentences are often left unfinished from doubt as how to best end them”. Of course this is a literary flourish, a common and unsustainable romanticised Russian essentialism. But even so, the formulation feels prophetic for this particular Russian story. Chernyshevsky’s dots describe the revolution itself. Pravda’s blank hole contains tactics. Unsayables are by no means all there is to this strange story, but they are central to it." Why does the Russian Revolution matter? See also this in the New York Times

The Violent American Century

The Arctic as it is known today is almost certainly gone by 2040 .  The capitalist mode of production will liberate it from ice. The good news is that " an ice-free Arctic ocean promises a shortcut for shipping between the Pacific coast of Asia and the Atlantic coasts of Europe and the Americas, and the possibility of prospecting for perhaps a fifth of the planet’s undiscovered supplies of oil and natural gas."

In this new Gilded Age, robber barons are no longer the villains

The Red Army was "the main engine of Nazism’s destruction,"  writes British historian and journalist Max Hastings in "Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945." The Soviet Union paid the harshest price: though the numbers are not exact, an estimated 26 million Soviet citizens died during World War II, including as many as 11 million soldiers. At the same time, the Germans  suffered three-quarters of their wartime losses  fighting the Red Army. "It was the Western Allies’ extreme good fortune that the Russians, and not themselves, paid almost the entire ‘butcher’s bill’ for [defeating Nazi Germany], accepting 95 per cent of the military casualties of the three major powers of the Grand Alliance," writes Hastings. Don't forget how the Soviet Union saved the world from Hitler (the Washington Post) Yes, that happened despite Stalin's crimes and blunders.

نعوم تشومسكي في نظرة سوريا

Hong Kong by J. A. (FT)

"American ignorance of Vietnamese history, culture and politics helped draw the United States into a war and a country that it did not comprehend. This pattern of ignorance arguably continues today, both in terms of what Americans continue to ignore about Vietnam and what Americans refuse to know about the Middle East. Literature plays an important role as a corrective to this ignorance."   — Viet Thanh Nguyen, the author of The Sympathizer The great Vietnam war novel was not written by an American  (NYT)

Tunisia "Protests in  Kasserine  last year and in  Kef and Tataouine  last month — driven by socioeconomic marginalization in Tunisia’s long-suffering interior — underscore that no post-revolutionary government has substantially mitigated grievances that provoked Tunisia’s 2011 revolution. Upcoming local elections will gauge the cost of Ennahda’s strategy. The stakes are high, and socioeconomic conditions worsening. The Tunisian government’s ability to deliver on revolutionary promises nationally and locally carries with it the fate of the Arab world’s best democratic experiment." Why do Tunisia's Islamists support an unpopular law

An interesting take, but I don't agree with the one-sided prospect. North Korea: a story of isolation