Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

"Impossible to anticipate the spur for rebellion. In Lebanon, it was a tax on the use of WhatsApp; in Chile, it was the rise in subway fares; in Ecuador and in Haiti, it was the cut in fuel subsidies. Each of these conjunctures brought people to the streets and then, as these people flooded the streets, more and more joined them. They did not come for WhatsApp or for subway tokens. They came because they are frustrated, angry that history seems to disregard them as it consistently favours the ruling class." There is something that's ours on the streets and we're going to take it back

We went to Iraq in 2003 and we "liberated" it from a brutal dictator. In fact we had tried to "liberate" Iraq before that, in 1991. 16 years later   " protests earlier this month were brutally put down by security forces, leaving nearly 150 people dead," reported the BBC. You see, there is no hope. These "backward people" even after helping them with training an army and security forces, they failed in front of the "Islamic State" and now they are killing their own people.

A very popular Algerian singer and political activist. She has been living in Prague since 2015. I don't think the word "monarchy" in the lyrics is meant to describe Algeria as a country ruled by a royal family.  This Arab woman needs, "empowerment," doesn't she?

لَذَّةُ القَلَق The Pleasure of Distress

Trial of Uribe, former president of Colombia  (2002-2010) Uribe was given a platform by the London School of Economics in 2011 . I remember the day quite well. I saw not more than 20 people protesting his visit in front of the main building (the Old Building). Some, if not most of them, were not from the School. Some were from Colombia Solidarity Campaign and others from Venezuela Solidarity Campaign. Uribe's complicity with the paramiliatries and Colombian state terror, including the killing of trade unions and journalists, was known and made public long before 2011. Between 2000 and 2010 Colombia accounted for 63.12% of trade unionists murdered globally , according to the International Union Confederation.

As expected a couple of people will be blamed for the crime. "The murderers will be brought to justice," as Essex police said. Follow the news and you will see that no outcry will be made compared to a violent attack on a London Bridge or in Manchester. Others will also blame the people who allowed themselves to be smuggled/killed. 39 people found dead in lorry container "The possibility of feats of extravagant and unrestrained violence at and beyond the border [have historically] contrasted with the constraints of rational management of violence within the borders of nation-states.’ To put it simply, violence at the border serves a purpose, and so does the shock it provokes. It obscures the violence of the internal social arrangements of modern nations, which fight to preserve the privilege of the few over the many. "The rational management of violence within the nation-state," Caygill continues, "was only possible when potential and actual violen...

In 1998 the Wall Street Journal ran an editorial that said that the IMF ‘has not been fighting financial fires but dousing them with gasoline’. The IMF pours the first tranche of gasoline. Vijay Prashad has an update The IMF does not fight financial fires but douses them with gasoline

I recommend Revolution Without Revolutionaries (Chapter 1) and  

A major improvement in workers' conditions Qatar dismantles kafala system of modern slavery Meanwhile, in a "democracy" it took a union more than a year to reach a collective bargaining agreement .

"One of the most indebted countries in the world, Lebanon is struggling to find fresh sources of funding as the foreign inflows on which it has traditionally relied have dried up. Promises of assistance from Saudi Arabia and Qatar, Lebanon’s former benefactors, have largely failed to arrive. The government needs to cut spending, raise taxes and fight corruption to unlock some $11 billion in international aid pledges made at a Paris donor conference in 2018." How Lebanon's Unrest is Both New and More of the Same (Click on Free and continue to website)

The UK universities benefiting from opioid money "Philanthropy" as a facade

What is it? The Advertising Standard Authority (ASA) said the Missguided advert featured "highly sexualised" images and "objectified women", while it told Boohoo to make sure its advertising was "socially responsible". The BBC's research found that on a typical UK High Street fashion retailer's website, 8% of women's modelling images were "racy", compared with 16% for online-only sites. Missguided said: "Our website reflects what appeals to the young women who love to buy from us - sassy, empowered, unafraid of what others think." In a world, "a free market," where almost everything is commodified, who has a monoply on definitions? Is sexualising and commodification of the body confined to fashion advertisement? Is it not one of the values that distinguishes "us," the "liberated", from the Other, but unites us with a commodified/sexualised Colombian or a Japanese?

Here is one of the reasons I once criticised/mocked the American historian Timothy Snyder when he boasted of "the rule of law." He doesn't contextualise that law in class, race and capitalist relations where "big thieves hang small ones."  Jailed for Life for Stealing a $159 Jacket? And 3,200 more serving Life Without Parole

"The women were demanding an end to the indefinite detention of asylum seekers, minors, pregnant women, and survivors of torture, rape and trafficking, a practice that is sanctioned in no European country apart from the UK; in the US, it was introduced under the post-9/11 Patriot Act and signed into law under President Obama. The political philosopher Howard Caygill goes so far as to argue that violence at the borders of the modern nation-state has been the chief means by which modernity has contained and denied the violence of its own civility: ‘The possibility of feats of extravagant and unrestrained violence at and beyond the border [have historically] contrasted with the constraints of rational management of violence within the borders of nation-states.’ To put it simply, violence at the border serves a purpose, and so does the shock it provokes. It obscures the violence of the internal social arrangements of modern nations, which fight to preserve the privilege of the f...

s  North  China  Campaign  of  1860  was  not  unex- pected;  most  immediately,  it  followed,  and  was  partly  inspired  by,  wars  in Algeria  and  India  in  the  preceding  decades.  Yet,  there  might  seem  to  be a  contradiction  between  the  liberal  character  of  the  leaders  of  the  cam- pai gn  and  the ir  T ali ban -li k e  dem oli tio n  of  the  pal ac es  and  gar den s  a t Y uanmingyuan.  Ringmar ,  how eve r ,  disputes  tha t  a  contradiction  exis ts . Liberalism  in  the  mid-19th  century  championed  free  exchange.  When  the liberal ’  free-market  policies  met  with  resistance,  s...

Can Violence Ever Be Legitimate?

"Big issues transcend Brexit." Indeed. I remember when in late 2018 I asked someone who works in Parliament: with or without Brexit, will there be an end to obscene inequality, exploitation, austerity, tuition fees, support of dictators...? He replied: "No," with a strange look at me as if I had asked him questions that either he never heard of or they were irrelevant. Ken Loach

ore corporate management models, they increasingly use and exploit cheap faculty labor ... Students increasingly fare no better in sharing the status of a sub ‐ altern class beholden to neoliberal policies and values’ (Giroux, 2014, p. 20). The implications of this go far beyond the university itself, resulting in what Giroux, one of the leading writers on this topic, has called ‘the near‐death of the university as a democratic public sphere’ (p. 16). In these assessments, neoliberalism, in its impact on Higher Education, is associated with a range of other terms or ‘discourses’: The ascendancy of neoliberalism and the associated discourses of ‘new public management’, during the 1980s and 1990s, has produced a fundamental shift in the way universities and other institu ‐ tions of higher education have defined and justified their institutional existence. The traditional professional culture of open intellectual enquiry and debate has been replaced with an ...

"A Quiet Revolution" by Leila Ahmed I personally disagree with the word veil and hijab because they are not specific. They both mean a cover, but they don't specify what is covered. "Hijāb" in Arabic means "to cover"/"to hide". "Headscarf" is a more accurate term.