Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Cambridge University Press accused of "selling its soul" over Chinese censorship Update CUP reverses the censorship move

Should Washington and Jefferson monuments come down? Yes, and should also Churchill, Havelock, "Clive of India", Thatcher statues and a few others 

Rape By the Syrian playwright Saadallah Wannous

How the elite is created Malala Yousafzai to study politics, philosophy and economics (PPE) at Oxford University. One day, she will probably join the elite of Afghanistan. What is PPE?

In the-called  "communist" countries, Women Had Better Sex ( The New York Times )

"At the start of the 18th century, India’s share of the global economy was 23 percent – the size of all of Europe combined. By the end of nearly 200 years of British rule, first under the proto-multinational corporation East India Company and then, after 1858, direct governance by the British crown, India’s share had dropped to just over 3 per cent, following the deliberate destruction of thriving local industries by the British. Perhaps most shocking is the section detailing the 30-35 million Indians who needlessly died in the series of famines under the British Raj, the most recent of which was the 1943-4 Bengal Famine. Tharoor calls these ‘British colonial holocausts’, comparing them to the 25 million people who perished in Stalin’s collectivisation drive and political purges." Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India

Lenin's eco-warriors    ( The New York Times )

Like the carving of the Arab countries, here is another criminal legacy of the British Empire: "British judge Cyril Radcliffe was brought in to draw up the border between India and Pakistan. It meant cutting two of India's most powerful and populous provinces in half; Punjab and Bengal. Radcliffe had never been to India before and never returned. This rushed partition would have repercussions for decades to come." The Partition of India and Pakistan

Long live the middle class! " only 25 black Caribbean students entering medicine or dentistry courses in 2014-15." UK higher education: class and race

This is an interesting discovery. I have never heard of Leonardo Padura before. His words in this interview are of a very intelligent man, especially what he says about Stalinism and socialism . An interview with the Cuban novelist Leonardo Padura

"Robin Yassin-Kassab examines the axis of useful idiocy that responds to the rise of torch wielding fascism in the U.S. with whatabout-Hillaryisms, that defends British chauvinism as a tactic to combat globalism, and that defends the genocidal Syrian Regime as a hedge against 'Zio-Wahhabi' imperialism. "It isn’t surprising that the right sees every Syrian refugee as a potential terorist when the left has spent years  opining that the Syrian revolution is run by al-Qaida (or American imperialism, or Zionism). These beasts feed each other. The greatest threats today are rising authoritarianism, whether it calls itself leftist or rightist, and the preference for ideology over human reality, for simplistic conspiracism over complicated facts. This is going to get a lot more messy. We need answers to the politics of austerity and the undoubted tensions of a globalised and increasingly technologised economy. Nostalgia for the social compositions of earlier decades, and the...

A book review Good Communist Homes

We crossed a bridge and it trembled

A revolt of the well-off — not a 'terror campaign'

From the archive Celebrity culture: The Clooneys and human rights

Adolph Reed: "[Identity] politics is not an alternative to class politics; it is a class politics, the politics of the left-wing of neoliberalism. It is the expression and active agency of a political order and moral economy in which capitalist market forces are treated as unassailable nature. An integral element of that moral economy is displacement of the critique of the invidious outcomes produced by capitalist class power onto equally naturalized categories of ascript ive identity that sort us into groups supposedly defined by what we essentially are rather than what we do. As I have argued, following Walter Michaels and others, within that moral economy a society in which 1% of the population controlled 90% of the resources could be just, provided that roughly 12% of the 1% were black, 12% were Latino, 50% were women, and whatever the appropriate proportions were LGBT people. It would be tough to imagine a normative ideal that expresses more unambiguously the social po...

How Global Entertainment Killed Culture  From Notes on the Death of Culture by Mario Vargas Llosa Llosa is one of Latin America's best novelists, who moved from the left to become an advocate and enforcer of neoliberal policies in Peru.

"Identitarian politics" The incident of the decade: a Canadian jouralist saw "religious women with headgear" shopping for lingerie and did a report on it.

US higher education The Fruits of Commodification

This is an excellent dissection You are the product