Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

 لتتعفن في الجحيم

The 1936 revolt Related A radical analysis by Ghassan Kanafani

Racial/Sexual Terror and US Empire

The right is creating its own new stories. Because culture war is not about winning a debate about what constitutes England through factual disputes about its character, its statues, its football team or its history of empire. It is not a peripheral indulgence, or a mere confection. Culture war is an aggressive political act with the purpose of creating new dividing lines and therefore new and bigger electoral majorities. It aims to create its own truth, and its own England, through what Nietzsche called a “mobile army of metaphors” The right is winning

This looks like a must-read book. “Islamic movements emerged as Saudi cities turned into sprawling suburbs, with massive highways, single family houses, and shopping malls. I ask: is there a link? My colleagues often see the rise of Islamic movements in sync with religious doctrines or geopolitical changes. I put the cursor elsewhere: I look at activism and space. I ask: what in sprawling suburbs favors the emergence of Islamic activism? What in the suburban graveyard of clerics prompts new forms of religious engagement?” Everyday activism in Saudi Arabia

Millions at grave risk

 

The best article I have read so far  about the current situation in Cuba. “When the Cuban government responded with violence to the claims of the people whose interests they are supposed to defend, it acted like any other government anywhere in the world, rather than following the socialist character that once defined the revolution. For some, this is a difficult truth to accept.” “I year for more solidarity from the global left” Related My diary of a visit to Cuba

Note: I am not doing justice to Mbembe’s arguments in the book by my selection. A full read of the text is recommended. Under what practical conditions is the power to kill, to let live, or to expose to death exercised?  Under the guise of war, resistance, or the war on terror?  Politics ... is doubly defined as a project of autonomy and as the reaching of agreement within a collective through communication and recognition. This, we are told, is what differentiates it from war... Within this paradigm, reason is the truth of the subject, and politics is the exercise of reason in the public sphere. Sovereignty is therefore defined as a twofold process of self-institution and self-limitation (fixing one’s own limits for oneself ). My concern is those figures of sovereignty whose central project is not the struggle for autonomy but the generalized instrumentalization of human existence and the material destruction of human bodies and populations.  Contemporary experiences of ...

Published in June 2018. It is against amnesia and absolving this or that government. How we all colluded in Fortress Europe Related In reality, “there is a  striking discrepancy between the lack  of feeling aroused  by the deaths of tens of thousands of human beings—in their majority anonymous, unrecorded by the authorities and denied the dignity of a proper burial—with that excited by, say, the 1,000 lives lost in the crossing from East to West Germany during the Cold War. There is one obvious explanation: an African, an Arab or an Afghani who drowns in the Mediterranean, in flight from war, oppression or extreme poverty, is not seen as a human being in the same way as the Germans who were trying to flee ‘communism’ and were hailed as martyrs for liberty. In that sense, the border regime is an extension of the history of colonialism and domination that Europe and the West have exercised over the rest of the world, and to which ‘the construction  of Europe’ now adds ...

The EU top court vs. Far-right 1-0 The EU’s top court has ruled that employers can in principle ban Muslim women   from wearing a headscarf or any other visible religious or political symbol.

The Society of Enmity The contemporary era is, undeniably, one of separation, hate move- ments, hostility, and, above all, struggle against an enemy. Consequently, liberal democracies—already considerably leached by the forces of capital, technology, and militarism—are now being sucked into a colossal process of inversion. Yesterday, “Negro” and “Jew” were the favored names for such objects. Today, Negroes and Jews are known by other names: Islam, the Muslim, the Arab, the foreigner, the immigrant, the refugee, the intruder, to mention only a few. The desire for an enemy, the desire for apartheid (for separation and enclaving), the fantasy of extermination—all today occupy the space of this enchanted circle... This also means accepting that there is nothing common to be shared between us and them. The anxiety of annihilation thus goes to the core of contemporary projects of separation. As it happens, the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories serves as a laboratory for a number ...

Close ranks, build an alternative

In the postcolony, wherein a particular form of power rages, wherein the dominant and the subjugated are specifically linked in one and the same bundle of desire, enthusiasm for the end is often expressed in the language of the religious. One reason why is that the postcolony is a relatively specific form of capture and emasculation of the desire for revolt and the will to struggle.  The enthusiasm for origins thrives by provoking an affect of fear of encountering the other—an encounter that is not always material but is certainly always phantasmatic, and in general traumatic. Indeed, many are concerned that they have preferred others over themselves for a long time. They deem that the matter can no longer be to prefer such others to ourselves. Everything is now about preferring ourselves to others, who, in any case, are scarcely worthy of us, and last, it is about making our object choices settle on those who are like us. The era is therefore one of strong narcissistic bonds. In t...

The migrants hunger-strike for legal status

Democracy The idea according to which life in a democracy is fundamentally peaceful, policed, and violence-free (including in the form of war and devastation) does not stand up to the slightest scrutiny.  From their origins, modern democracies have always evinced their tolerance for a certain political violence, including illegal forms of it. They have integrated forms of brutality into their culture, forms borne by a range of private institutions acting on top of the state, whether irregular forces, militias, or other paramilitary or corporatist formations. In eighteenth-century England, plantation owners in the West Indies amassed the money to enable the financing of a nascent culture of taste, art galleries, and cafés—places par excellence of learning civility.  The “civilization of mores” was also made possible thanks to the new forms of wealth accumulation and consumption inaugurated by the colonial adventure... the capacity to create unequal exchange relations became a d...

The Other and the Ordeal of the World Can the Other, in light of all that is happening, still be regarded as my fellow creature? The Other’s burden having become too overwhelming, would it not be better for my life to stop being linked to its presence, as much as its to mine? Why must I, despite all opposition, nonetheless look after the other, stand as close as possible to his life if, in return, his only aim is my ruin? If, ultimately, humanity exists only through being in and of the world, can we found a relation with others based on the reciprocal recognition of our common vulnerability and finitude? In a world characterized more than ever by an unequal redistribu- tion of capacities for mobility, and in which the only chance of survival, for many, is to move and to keep on moving, the brutality of borders is now a fundamental given of our time. Today we see the principle of equality being undone by the laws of autochthony and common origin, as well as by divisions within citizensh...

Amina Wadud: “Inequality between men and women is contrary to Islam”

  “Why, it was like reading about France and the French, before the ever memorable and blessed Revolution, which swept a thousand years of such villainy away in one swift tidal wave of blood – a settlement of that hoary debt in proportion of half a drop of blood for each hogshead of it that had been pressed by slow tortures out of that people in the weary stretch of ten centuries of wrong and shame and misery the like of which was not to be mated but in hell. There were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would be remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the ax compared with lifelong death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery co...

“ [W]hat is needed is political discussion, revolutionary ideological rearmament, accountability and workers’ democracy.” I don’t think that would be enough. How to feed the people and providing them with a decent standard of leaving is tied up with how developed and productive the economy is and what class re-alignment is possible. In the current circumstances as in the previous decades Cuba as an isolated island with limited resources, lack of technological means and embargo is unable to provide for the majority of its people.