Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

The strange story of how a legendary investigative journalist came to echo Assad's propaganda

"here’s what might surprise you, if you’ve read too much liberal academic bullshit about the “white working class". Opposition to Brexit, and the xenophobia that’s come with it, was strong in Durham. This was mainly white, working class people refusing to adopt the reactionary identity of the “white working class”, invented by liberal pundits in response to Trump." The labour movement and Brexit

An on-going Who picked up my tea? Background: a BBC report

Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman

Review of Geoffrey B. Robinson,  The Killing Season. A History of the Indonesian Massacres, 1965 – 66 (Princeton University Press, 2018)

"Technology development became less a story of collective flourishing than personal survival. Worse, as I learned, to call attention to any of this was to unintentionally cast oneself as an enemy of the market or an anti-technology curmudgeon." Survival of the richest Related Elysium

I have just finished reading Late Victorian Holocausts El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World It is an execellent book .  Some passages in chapter 8 are not easy and require some scientific knowledge of the field, but most of the book is a very good read.

A critique of solidarity

Educating Britain Suffragettes on the BBC:  Omission/filtering/sanitisation: It is scary to know that prominent Suffragettes were socialists. The BBC is celebrating 100 years since women over 30 and "who met minimum property qualifications" won the right to vote in Britain. I have gone through these three pieces and I have noticed deliberate ommision of what is an integral part of some prominent Suffragettes and the Suffragettes movement: socialism, communism, the Independent Labour Party.   Sylvia Pankhurst  is described as "a  vocal pacifist, anti-fascist and anti-colonialist activist."   In   this introduction (click "more"), and  this one ( recommended to teachers!) claims to be tracing "the history of women's movement in Britain" and "how women won the right to vote. Now, compare the above with Emily Davison   "was a  staunch feminist and passionate Christian , and considered that  socialism  was a moral an...

“This is the supposed ‘natural condition’ of mankind, in which everyone is at war with everyone else, much as Thomas Hobbes described in his ‘Leviathan’, during the middle of the seventeenth century. But the state of nature is not in fact a ‘natural’ condition; it is a historical conjuncture”  Notes on Syria and the Coming Global Thanatocracy

"Johnson’s command of detail when it comes to his projecting himself is unmatched. The would-be leader of the country’s independence revolution is a narcissus who sees no further than his own reflection. The shine is wearing off, however. Most papers declined to act as his mirror. Mogg "is an extraordinarily wealthy hedge fund speculator who has made tens of millions without the ability to sharpen a pencil let alone manufacture one." A halitosis of a rotting body politic

Learn the Danish values or ...

We know the American war crimes in Iraq, but We may never know if the British committed war crimes there Why? Because the British forces are (almost) perfect.  The last person in Britain to be prosecuted for crimes committed by forces under their command was in 1651 during the civil war.

Rodinson "mobilised Ouzegane’s point of being less concerned about whether Muslim dogmas were true or false, than with seeing Islam principally as a social and political instrument... Rodinson considered Islam as neither a good nor a bad ideology a priori, but rather insisted on the need to produce analyses of the religion that account for its social conditions in which it developed. As he wrote at the beginning of the his book  De Pythagore à Lénine , ‘the best way to comprehend nothing of a phenomenon is to isolate it, and to consider it, from either the interior or the exterior, as if it is the only one of its type." The Thinker and the Militant

Fly Emirates! Tortured, detained, disappeared: United Arab Emirates abuses rife in southern Yemen

Inglorious Empire -What the British Did to India  By Shashi Tharoor, Penguin 2017 Excerpts, part 3 of 3 "The historian Andrew Roberts rather breathtakingly claimed, given this background, that British rule 'the modernisation, development, protection, agrarian advance, linguistic unification and ultimately the democratisation of the subcontinent'." p. 175 "The construction of the Indian railways is often pointed to by apologists for Empire as one of the ways in which British colonialism benefited the subcontinent, ignoring the obvious fact that many countries also built railways without having to go to the trouble and expense of being colonised to do so... "In its very conception and construction, the Indian railway system was a big colonial scam. British shareholders made absurd amounts of money by investing in the railways, where the government guaranteed returns on capital for 5 per cent net per year, unavailable in any other safe investment."...

We are the good guys and Trump is the bad guy, they say. Yes, Trump is a mysogenist. But it was not him who perpetuated patriarchy, gender pay gap, violence against women, etc. Yes, he is anti-immigrants. But it was Obama who deported more people than any other president. Yes, he is a threat to international relations. But it was not him who invaded countries, fueling sectarianism, supported Israel, imposed IMF policies, established Guantanamo, carried out torture and rendition, created obscene inequality, mass incarceration in the US, supported the Egyptian military, and so and so forth. Trump is not an aberration; he is their product and now they disavow him. " The liberal establishment and their representatives are crying rivers of crocodile tears for the victims of Trump’s policies. In so doing, they hope to make political capital out of Trump’s crimes. But there is only one snag with their strategy: it rests on our memories being so short that we have forgotten all of...

Japan's demographic crisis No sex, please

Inglorious Empire -What the British Did to India By Shashi Tharoor (Penguin 2017) Excerpts, part 2 "The sight if Muslim and Hindu soldiers rebelling together in 1857 and fighting side by side, willing to rally under the command of each other and pledge joint allegiance to the enfeebled Mughal monarch, had alarmed the British, who did not take long to conclude that dividing the two groups and pitting them against one another was the most effective way to ensure the unchallenging continuance of Empire.", p. 101 The tendency to separate was apparent in British attitudes from the start. Indeed, it had been evidenced in the only already-white country the British colonized, Ireland; instead of assimilating the Irish into the British race, they were subjugated by their new overlords, intermarriage was forbidden (as was even learning the Irish language or adopting Irish modes of dress) and most Irish people were segregated 'beyond the pale'." p. 102 "Laws h...

Israel A liberal Israeli paper unlike any Western liberal one