Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

 Islands of deterrence

 The riots are the death spasms of a broken Britain Related Unrest in Northern Ireland

  The real link between racism and class

Beaud and Noiriel have no problem with the concept of race. They merely feel that it must remain in its proper place and be dealt with only as a  “variable or special case, understood as part of a broader scientific problem”  (p. 192). We are in complete disagreement with this, but we do agree with the authors when they assert that there is no such thing as pure racism, independent of inter-class domination. But this is also true of class relations, which never exclude racial or gender domination, which inclines us to  “conceive both the irreducibility of the racial question and its inextricable link with relations of class and gender.” Now while race and class are closely associated, the injustices and wrongs suffered by racial minorities can nonetheless not be reduced to class relations, to capitalist domination. To reduce everything to class locks us into an interpretive framework which is both Eurocentric and economistic (precisely the one used in Race et science...

 Killer Prince

“In the past, identification with the pharaohs – symbols of biblical and Quranic despotism – was always ambivalent. But now under Sisi it has been fully embraced: with armoured chariots, laser beams and fireworks. In the country with arguably the highest number of political prisoners and torture victims in the world, even the dead cannot be left undisturbed.” The Pharaoh is dead! Long live the Pharaoh!

  Who are the real anti-imperialists?

 Assad is preventing the return of refugees

Erased From History Related A poem

  From colonialism to Covid-19

 How Women Communists Challenged the Colonial Order

“ Not only did they inhabit the unseemly world of the nightlife district (stigmatised as a moral and literal stone’s throw away from Ezbekkiya’s red-light district), these women also came from poverty and were often uneducated - only learning to read in order to rehearse (and pioneer) Egyptian theatre - a far cry from bourgeois feminism.” Review of Midnight in Cairo: The Divas of Egypt’s Roaring '20s

  A policeman measures the distance between a woman's knee and the bottom of her bathing suit. Washington DC, 1922. Library of Congress, USA. Think of France banning burkini and the headscarf, for example. 

How Winston Churchill and the British government attacked the Greek Resistance and sowed the seeds of civil war

 A review “Whereas previous works sketched impressive if inevitably tendentious genealogies of the present – and were greatly aided in that effort by Curtis’s skill not just as a researcher but as an interviewer – the gain in affective texture in the new series is at the expense of its argument about how we got here. A dogged hostility to what he sees as the debilitating leftist academic narrative of neoliberalism (the ‘n-word’, as he dismissed it in a recent interview), and the effort to trace the mood rather than the origins or structure of our present, leaves an aesthetic of explanation without the required content or complexity – the capture of emotion without the current of history.” Dreamworlds of Catastrophe

Bezos could at least provide the Amazon drivers with hygienic bottles for free, couldn’t he? Alternatively, he could provide training on how to hold it for longer. In that way productivity increases. Drivers urinate in bottles

 Egypt’s Sisis threatens ‘instability that no one can imagine’ Related

“ The report minimises and at times denies the existence of institutional racism in Britain, despite the fact that, as the government now acknowledges, several witnesses  gave detailed evidence  of the forms of institutional and structural racism that they feel do operate within the UK. It was produced by a commission led by figures who had rejected the concept of institutional racism years before they began work. Arguably it has achieved exactly what the government wanted, adding credence to the false binary that underpins  their culture war agenda : that the nation faces a choice between addressing racial inequalities or class disadvantage.” A poisonous patronising report

 The controversy over left-wing populism

Wikipedia disputes the claim of the 100,000 deaths in the 10 years of the construction of the Canal. This site cites 120,000 deaths .   The Long Struggle Over the Suez