Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

“The regime’s endurance is not simply a result of its authoritarianism; its popularity runs much deeper than that. To understand it, we must grasp three major factors that most commentators and opposition politicians refuse to recognize.” On the Turkish elections

The key to China’s  development since 1949 lies in the vast countryside, but the country’s rulers are still reluctant to discuss the darker side of the land reform.

“ The key to understanding ‘what Putin really wants’ is not cherry-picking obscure phrases from his speeches and articles that fit observers’ preconceived biases, but rather conducting a systematic analysis of the structurally determined material interests, political organisation, and ideological legitimation of the social class he represents.” Related Political capitalism of the US

Saudi Arabia  was Canada’s  top customer for military goods after the  United States  in 2022

It is like that ‘motto’ we heard a few times after 9/11 2001: “We have to fight them there, so they don’t come here.” Paying Africa’s brutal militias to lock up migrants

How slavery changed the Guardian, Britain and the world

  Source: Le Monde Diplomatique

  من أول الروايات التي قرأتُها وأثرت في تفكيري كثيرا، خاصة أنني شخصيا تعرضتُ لبعض التعذيب بعد سنوات قليلة من قرائتها،  كانت رواية منيف "شرق المتوسط". للأسف لم أقرأ "مدن الملح" بعد. عبد الرحمان منيف

“Although the film cannot be simply categorised as working-class cinema - it is, after all, a commercial film intended primarily for a comparatively bourgeois international audience and international festivals - it is not bourgeois either. It clearly centres on the perspective of the urban, struggling poor, and it successfully imposes this viewpoint, rather than making a plea for it. The viewer is encouraged to empathise with Ali, but Ali is not rehabilitated for the bourgeois eye.” A man whose burning anger suggests little has changed for ordinary Tunisians

Algeria: Primary schools to teach English in 'overdue' move away from 'colonial' French French is on the verge of disappearing in Morocco “Algerian children will be left unable to academically master a single language due to the lack of provisions for this transition into English in schools.”  Moving from French to English won't resolve the country's problems

Accessing the full review requires a subscription – an institutional subscription, for example. Apart from what is available, I have added the following: A factor that Indyk omits is the disdain Kissinger repeatedly demonstrated for Arab leaders (“pathetic,” “wily,” “uncouth,” “quixotic,” and “machismo-driven,” which is rich coming from him) and peoples (“mad,” their “ways” a mystery, above all in the Persian Gulf, home to “eight million savages”). Indyk dismisses it as mere “frat-boy talk.” Decades ago, journalist Seymour Hersh instead insisted that the racism of Kissinger and his two closest and most hard-core anti-communist sidekicks, Haig and Helmut Sonnenfeldt, was as entrenched as Nixon’s. This was true whether they were assessing the intelligence of the African Americans then rising through the ranks of the State Department (“Do you think he’ll understand the cables?”) or hosting Organization of African Unity officials (“I wonder what the dining room is going to smell like”). T...

Yes, Arabs Read! But How Much?

Resistance Committees plot a way out of the war

Tech-mythologies

I think capitalism in Russia would be more accurate than Russian capitalism. “The narrative emphasising how the hybrid nature of the Russian state – neoliberal regulatory and statist interventionist – led it down the path to war in Ukraine, offers a fragmented (and misleading) explanation of reality. The problem is that the ideological and political features of the state are interpreted as exercised for purposes outside of capitalist accumulation – be it nationalism, patriarchy, racism, homophobia – conceived as separate systems of oppression from class.” On expropriation and social reproduction Related On the war and on internationalism The Development of Capitalism in Russia 

  الشاعر: محمد الصغير أولاد أحمد

Toward a clear vision of ‘Islamic’ art ‘Islamic’ culture: a groundless myth

Shalash the Iraqi

 I read his novel  ‘Banquet for Seaweed’ a few years ago in Arabic. I do not think it is translated to English. Author who shunned spotlight and for whom writing was truly its own reward

ربما لا نتفق مع بعض ما جاء في التحليل، ولكن يعطي المقال جردا عاما مفيدا لا نعثر عليه في وسائل الإعلام المهيمنة "ثورات مَنْسِيّة"