Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Labour's manifesto

Looking at West Bank map , one should observe how cancer has been eating out Palestinian land and their livelihood and stripping them of their dignity, emprisoning a whole people for decades in the biggest prison in the world and kills those who resist with impunity. It is not only about the pace of the spread of this cancer; it is its unstoppable speead and effectiveness. A pace accelerated by an international favourable environment, especially in the core imperialist states led by a gangster and a normalisation pursued by some Arab regimes.

Europe's coloniality persists after the fall of empire

Film review: Black 47 I recall what Shashi Thahroor said abour famines in India. Since the British left India in 1947, there has been no famine. "As a result of what one can only call the British Colonial Holocaust, thanks to economic policies ruthlessly enforced by Britain, between 30 and 35 million Indians needlessly died of starvation during the Raj. Millions of tonnes of wheat were exported from India to Britain even as famine raged. When relief camps were set up, the inhabitants were barely fed and nearly all died. "It is striking that the last large-scale famine to take place in India was under British rule; none has taken place since, because Indian democracy has been more responsive to the needs of drought-affected and poverty-stricken Indian than the British rulers ever were."  Inglorious Empire, 2017, p. 150

China's internal colony

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch

The economics of modern imperialism It would better to speak of the political economy of modern imperialism.

"A tiny bit of advice to Evo Morales' critics on the far left: always remember that he was removed by a police/military operation orchestrated by Washington NOT because of the mistakes but because of all the good things that were done and making Bolivia a country where the majority of citizens won political representation for the first time! Bolivia became sovereign and broke off relations with Israel (together with Venezuela) after one of the numerous massacres in Gaza. This is something that neither Turkey nor Egypt could do. Worth a thought. With mass mobilisations against the regime-change and the sovereign Bolivian parliament refusing to recognise the new President, the US victory might not last too long." —Tariq Ali, 16 November 2019 I hope so.

Libya through Italian eyes

Former President of Ecuador Raphael Correa:  "Clearly what happened in Bolivia was a coup." I am puzzeled though when he said there was no corruption in the United States or that he loved the the U.S. What does loving an imperialist and very unequal country mean? A country that is rife with  justice at home and it is policing global injustice!

"A coup is a curious thing. Those who make the coup never admit that they have made the coup. They claim that they are restoring democracy or that they are taking extraordinary means to establish the conditions – eventually – for democracy. This is precisely why the definition of the events are so fraught. But all coups are not the same. There are at least two types of military coups – the  General’s Coup  and the  Colonel’s Coup ." "Bolivia does not exist"

My own experience confirms this.  I recall what a new colleague of mine, a white British man, told me about "human rights" in 2011. “It’s hard not to feel like the government is doing it deliberately, not just to create a hostile environment for people who are here ‘illegally’ but [also] to make it more difficult for people supporting them … and I think everyone anticipates that at some point there will be legislation deliberately aimed at the organisations that support, for example, undocumented people, to make it more difficult for them to be accommodated and to make it more difficult for people to get advice.” How UK immigration system is geared to reject Related: G4S in Qatar and the UAE

"Operation Northmoor was set up by the government in 2014 and looked into 52 alleged illegal killings. Its closure was announced by the government before Royal Military Police detectives even had a chance to interview the key Afghan witnesses." This is very interesting. Language and selectivity by a corporate machine are two of the tools that reflect power relations within an imperialist state (e.g. PR) and in its relation to other states. The BBC article doen't even allude that the British regime and the military were in Afghanistan and Iraq as an ally with the American-led mission to fight "the terrorists" and "liberate" the people (in Afghanistan, especially women). What happened after that and the chaos left until the present day was not the responsibility of the coalition forces. "We did our bit." The "illegal killings" or "war crimes" must have occured in "very hard conditions" and "highly ...

Sanctions work : One day, "the revolutionary American regime" will be boasting: "we instigated a revolution in Iran to protect our interests, Israel's interests, and Saudi ones, and helped give freedom to the Iranians," the way it has helped the Venezuelans, the Hondurans, the Iraqis, the Afghanis and others.

When a senior editor of a right-wing magazine argues for "taxing the better off" and "more public provision", it says something about the unease of the (international) ruling class. Counting the cost of neoliberalism in Chile

Why the Corporate Media Won't Call It a Coup 

Capital is Dead

The German film-maker Thomas Heise sets out to challenge the official script of events. He recalls that when the demonstrators, overshadowed by Tiananmen Square, shouted “we are one people”, they were speaking not to West Germans — as was later claimed — but to police surrounding the demonstration. “This is the reality they want to suppress”, he says, “this moment in time when ordinary people put themselves on the line to speak about themselves. We’re not meant to remember that. We celebrate the Wall falling but not the fact that a sovereign people took it upon itself to fill a power gap. Nor how, following that, it was more about annexation than reunification. Law and order was re-established by destroying utopia. The Federal Republic could not allow a sovereign people to exist in a part of Germany because it would not have itself survived. The Wall was opened to prevent revolution.” The myth of German reunification

Free yourselves from the indoctrination presented to you as innate knowledge. My generation lived through war and fascism. Through this experience, we reached the conclusion that there should never be war again. My generation experienced fascism, which at first we accepted. We didn’t know about what was going on in the concentration camps — there were no Jews in my Pomeranian village, and we didn’t know what was happening to Jewish people. These were all realizations that I had to come to later. It was then that I came to the conclusion that this fascism — which was, of course, also an outgrowth from humanity — had an economic base supporting it. Where did the cannons come from, who built the bombers, who desired this? And who is alive today and profiting from war? Where do new developments come from? Anyone sitting in their car today with their sat nav should be aware that this is a by-product of the production of weapons for war. So, the only advice I can give is to critica...

Coca-Cola workers in Haiti, Indonesia, Ireland and the US