Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

  “The essential dominance of a particular class in society is maintained not only, although if necessary, by power, and not only, although always, by property. It is maintained also and inevitably by a lived culture: that saturation of habit, of experience, of outlook.”          Raymond Williams He made his mission to reclaim culture from the literary elite

A lot of propaganda have been pouring, hailing women in high position from Christine Lagarde of the IMF to Angela Merkel of Germany. All in the belief that capitalist power relations, inequality, exploitation, the profit motive, imperialism, etc. can be done away with if more women led governments and other positions of power.  Leaving her support of  Israel and the suppression of BDS aside, as a woman who headed a rich capitalist country for 16 years she  has done almost nothing to address the gender pay gap, one of the worst in Europe.  Women made between 19% less in wages than men in 2019, compared to 20% in 2018. It was 21% in 2020 according to this website .  It was still higher than the European Union average. Or has she ever questioned, for example, the pay gap between a nurse and a footballer?

The starting-point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is 'knowing thyself' as a product of the historical process to date, which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory. Therefore,   it is imperative at the outset to compile such an inventory."          Antonio Gramsci,  Prison Notebooks, Volume 2: 1930-1932

And this is only one example. It is a con more than a scandal. It is a smokescreen, a cover, employed by a an imperialist state as an ideological tool: “we are good people and we show compassion.”  It is a deception. British aid is a scandal Related Aid in the case of Palestine

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Somebody Blew Up America?

Very interesting and useful approach. Why did Islamist movements begin to genuinely challenge their political establishments only after the 1970s?  Why do we see such a great variety in the socio-economic policies and programs among different Islamist governments and movements?  Why have Islamist movements become more successful in industrializing countries?  why is it the small industrialist and not the Islamist businessman that is at the heart of the rise of Islamism?  Uktu Balaban discusses  the case of Turkey

A collection of articles

“ Subsidizing Apartheid : How the Canada Revenue Agency Contributes to Palestinian Dispossession”

Europe’s reputation as a cosmopolitan haven has been exposed as a mirage Related A bigger picture was captured by Peter Gowan more than 20 years ago: “The cosmopolitan project for unifying humanity through the agency of the dominant capitalist states—on the normative basis that we are all individual global citizens with liberal rights—will not work: it is more likely to plunge the planet into increasingly divisive turmoil.” The New Liberal Cosmopolitanism

“Britain is at least 90,000 truck drivers short.” “Logistics UK, the trade body for hauliers, said Britain had a chronic driver shortage for many years, but the problem was now acute. Many cite similar tales of poor working conditions for quitting but other reasons include poor wages compounded by a tax reform, known as IR35, that prevented most drivers from operating as limited companies, resulting in a significant cut to take-home pay.” “Add to that Brexit. For truckers, that meant endless paperwork, including customs procedures they were never trained for and queues at the border. Other issues included the need to take UK driving exams that many truckers did not have the language skills for, along with a more hostile attitude to foreigners in Britain. For the EU drivers that have left but still have the right to return and live in the UK, the prospects of higher pay that some UK companies are now offering was not enough. Many said they had already found work elsewhere on higher wage...

A review by Priya Satia

 In Islamic philosophy failing to question authority is an intellectual sin

“ The Costs of War Project is analytically conservative. Unlike several nongovernmental surveys over the years, it does not conduct epidemiological studies to determine the true lethality of the war – such as deaths from war-shattered public health systems, lack of access to clean water, war-prompted displacement, and other indirect but real consequences of conflict. Instead, the project only counts  direct  death. The authors acknowledge the shortcomings of this approach.” Over 900,000 People Dead, a ‘Vast Undercount,’ and $8 Trillion Looted 

A good report by Anand Gopal

An interview with Ussama Makdisi

The Telegraph calls it an invasion , the BBC calls it a coup . A 20-years war, an election organised under occupation and during bloodshed, with a president elected by 923,000 votes out of 9.7 million registered votes out of a population of 30 million. No, it is not a coup. The Taliban were overthrown by a US-led invasion and then Taliban won that war. There was no government or Afghan army to speak of. It was a regime kept alive by the American forces ruling over about 30% of the population. But those who always scream about fair and democratic elections, do not care about facts. Ironically, the BBC is one of the proponents of ‘Fact-check’. 

“The very idea of more humane war may seem a contradiction in terms. The US’s conflicts abroad remain brutal and deadly, but what’s frightening about them is not just the violence they inflict. This new kind of American war is revealing that the most elemental face of war is not death. Instead, it is control by domination and surveillance. Humanitarian and military lawyers bickered around how much wartime humanity was going to be enough. They tacitly agreed not to fight over the war itself. The campaign to seek more humane war did not challenge the enterprise of war itself. Through the presidencies of Bush, Obama and Trump, the US could take strides to keep its wars humane. But it did so while entrenching its globalised militarism, as one anti-war candidate then another became an endless-war president. And now one more, alas, seems a prisoner of the script.” Note that Samuel Moyn uses the term terrorism to refer to terrorism carried out by non-state agents, but he never applies the te...

From a response by Edward Said and Oleg Grabar to Bernard Lewis : Then there is the meaning of  thawra , the common modern Arabic term for revolution, and Lewis’s description of it. His discussion of  thawra inc identally is one of two occasions in an enormous article in which Lewis reveals that he is writing not just as a defender of Orientalism, but as someone I had criticized in two of my books. His declaration of interest, as so often, is extremely discreet. With bogus learning, Lewis parades meanings of  thawra  acquired from a superifical survey of sources. His Orientalist account of the word has very little to do with what it means in contemporary usage; thus his method of proceeding is peculiar to a field that studiously places a greater value on what European scholars thought and said than on what users of a language thought and said. One of his examples is that  thawra  is associated with the act of rising up, after which Lewis affixes to “rising ...

Can inequality be blamed on the Agricultural Revolution? Related Against the Grain