Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

How the Nazis bought the German people A new book

"Can We Understand Populism Without Calling it Fascism?"

Independent India and the Secret US-UK Deal That Changed It All

BBC's 'Lost Boys?' is a lazy reproduction of racist, culturally essentialist stereotypes approved by an 'insider' "The story of British Pakistani men"

The U.S military budget in 2017 was more than $600 billion. That's more than the budgets of the next 13 countries put together. Trump has requested an increase of $54 billion for this  year budget.  That is almost the entire military budget of Russia. "No one is gonna mess with us, folks, no one."  —Donald Trump

These Muslims are causing us so much pain . When is it gonna end?

Boris and the burka: taking cue from the EU

"With the fall of the U.S.S.R. and the rise of the U.S. to unparalleled power, Amin wrote of the ‘empire of chaos’, of a new era that would result in great inequality, precarious labour, the destruction of agriculture and the dangers of political religion. What Amin tracked in 1992 would become clear two decades later, when he revisited these same themes in  The Implosion of Contemporary Capitalism  (2013). Monopoly firms had sucked the life out of the system, turning businesspeople into ‘waged servants’ and journalists into the ‘media clergy’. An unsustainable world system, with finance in dominance and people whipping from one precarious job to another, seemed to threaten the future of humanity. He surveyed the world and found no real alternative to the monopoly-dominated system that—like a vampire—sucked the blood out of the world. This did not mean that history was to drive humanity over the precipice. Other choices lay before us." Death of a Marxist

"There is a basic level of ignorance in British society - partly wilful ignorance, partly genuine misinformation, partly flat-out denial - about how the Israeli state actually came to be. There seems to be in Britain - in TV commentators, in mainstream academics, in ordinary public opinion - a deep reluctance to acknowledge how, in 1948, three-quarters of a million Palestinian Arabs were forcibly evicted, with British backing, off their own land. To recognise this as racist, in the words of the IHRA code, would be "anti-semitic". A large part of the mainstream media anger towards the Labour Party for refusing the "internationally recognised" code is an establishment anger against a political party for refusing to accept the post-war narrative - a narrative, moreover, which has been successfully disseminated and internalised among many people in the UK since 1948. This is the scale of the British Labour Party's problem - if it is to go through with this, it...

"More than seven years after the beginning of the popular uprising in Syria, which increasingly turned into an international war, the causes of this eruption are often forgotten. When they are discussed, the vast majority of authors reduce the uprising to a struggle against authoritarianism while neglecting its socio-economic roots almost entirely." Syria: the social origins of the uprising

"The Corbyn incident suggests that to be complicit in the violence of the Israeli occupation – as western governments are – is acceptable, but to show solidarity with the Palestinian cause is to court condemnation." Another exercise in hypocrisy

 "the militants of political Islam are not truly interested in discussing the dogmas that form religion. The ritual assertion of membership in the community is their exclusive preoccupation. Such a vision of the reality of the modern world is not only distressing because of the immense emptiness of thought that it conceals, but it also justifies imperialism’s strategy of substituting a so-called conflict of cultures for the one between imperialist centers and dominated peripheries. The exclusive emphasis on culture allows political Islam to eliminate from every sphere of life the real social confrontations between the popular classes and the globalized capitalist system that oppresses and exploits them. The militants of political Islam have no real presence in the areas where actual social conflicts take place and their leaders repeat incessantly that such conflicts are unimportant. Islamists are only present in these areas to open schools and health clinics. But these are nothi...

The crimes of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and others have been explained and condemned by socialists. When will capitalism answer for its crimes?

الأمة والدولة والطبقات في الوطن العربي سمير أمين

Sexuality and Solitude Foucault and Sennet, 1981

"Today the concentration and centralization of capital is manifested in the growth of international monopoly capital. Capital is more and more mobile (along with technology), as the giant firms become increasingly globalized and financialized. Nevertheless, nation-state divisions remain intact with governments promoting the interests of “their” corporations over those of other countries, along with restrictions on the mobility of labor.  The result is a system of unequal exchange, in which the difference in the wages between labor forces in different nations is greater than the difference between their productivities. This creates a system of “imperial rents” accruing to the global corporations in the center—referred to less directly in mainstream economic circles as the “global labor arbitrage.” (An analogous process affects natural resources, drawn from the global South.) All of this points to the superexploitation of labor in the periphery, which receives in wages less than th...

"Invoking collective ownership of former colonial property for individual gain is not an isolated incident in Algeria. The widespread occupation of colonial-era properties and refusal to pay state rent in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, in addition to more recent examples -- including SIFFAN, UNIAL, and several cases of former colonial agricultural land claimed by tribes in the High Plains  -- underscore a consistently held perception of colonial-era property. When Algerians invoke the colonial period to justify access to land and properties whose value has exponentially increased as Algeria has become increasingly embedded in the international economy, they are not mnemonically reciting tropes and slogans of the past, as French president Emmanuel Macron seemed to have hinted during a recent visit to Algiers.  Rather, they are making a very clear set of claims based on collective memory. They are invoking colonialism in order to appropriate and claim the spoils of the Algerian wa...

"Visitors to ramallah these days are often struck by its boom-town appearance. There are large-scale construction projects underway, a proliferation of hotels and nightclubs, Mexican restaurants, luxury cars, cappuccino prices on par with London or Brooklyn—jarringly at odds with prevailing notions of Palestinian life under the shadow of Israeli occupation. Arafat’s hilltop compound, reduced to rubble by Israeli shelling and bulldozers in 2002, has been rebuilt at vast expense and now houses his pharaonic tomb. The city’s ‘diplomatic quarter’ of al-Masyoun boasts quasi-embassies from the  OECD  countries, as if it were the capital of a real nation-state, while international dance and theatre companies regularly perform at its state-of-the-art Culture Palace. For some, Ramallah is Palestine’s Green Zone, as isolated from the rest of the Occupied Territories as the notorious  US  headquarters in Baghdad. It represents an enclave cosmopolitanism, a ‘Bantustan sublime’....

"It is notable and important that anti-Muslim Western propaganda and Pan-Islamic narratives of history resemble one another. They both rely on the civilisational narrative of history and a geopolitical division of the world into discrete ahistorical entities such as black Africa, the Muslim world, Asia and the West." What is the Muslim World? The idea of "a Muslim world' is both modern and misleading

"The biggest provider for these activities was the Cayman Islands," a British Overseas Territory. Tax haven link to rainforest destruction and illegal fishing