Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

The Mythology Of Trump’s ‘Working Class’ Support

"There is no  document of civilization  which is not at the same time a  document of barbarism." — Walter Benjamin Colonial ruins are a fitting epitaph for the British empire

Bahrain's Uprising: Resistance and Repression in the Gulf "A very strong theme that emerges in the book is the internationalization of both repression and resistance. The book really stresses how the ambitions and foreign policy objectives of outside powers have shaped contentious politics in the country. Bahrain, trapped between the rivalry of Saudi Arabia and Iran, and geopolitically important for the US and UK, has only nominal sovereignty. Yet the role of non-state actors is explored and stressed too. Foreign companies and states, from Korea to France, benefit from selling weapons, spyware, and other products to Bahrain. Deterritorialized and despatialized, repression has become a big global business, and we are increasingly seeing the transnational repression of local protest, especially in the realm of surveillance technologies or the supply of arms and advice. Conversely, the same is true of oppositional movements and the human rights turn, where we see more and mor

On this day in history The May Fourth Movement was the first mass movement in modern Chinese history. It began with about 5,000 university students in Beijing protesting the Versailles Conference's decision to transfer former German concessions in China to Japan. Demonstrations and strikes spread, and a nationwide boycott of Japanese goods followed. The movement began a patriotic outburst of new urban intellectuals against foreign imperialists and warlords and is often cited as the seminal event that led to what?

texts " Einstein publicly stated reservations about the proposal to partition the  British Mandate of Palestine  into independent Arab and Jewish countries. In a 1938 speech, "Our Debt to Zionism", he said: "I should much rather see reasonable agreement with the Arabs on the basis of living together in peace than the creation of a Jewish state. My awareness of the essential nature of Judaism resists the idea of a Jewish state with borders, an army, and a measure of temporal power, no matter how modest. I am afraid of the inner damage Judaism will sustain—especially from the development of a narrow nationalism within our own ranks, against which we have already had to fight strongly, even without a Jewish state. ... If external necessity should after all compel us to assume this burden, let us bear it with tact and patience.".  His attitudes were nuanced: In his testimony before the  Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry  in January 1946 he stated that he wa

Explaining the last ten years: Keynes or Marx – who is right?

الإرهابي الصغير ذاك الذي أطلقوا عليه الرصاص لم يسقط منذ أول طلقة بل جثا على ركبتيه ونظر إليهم حيث كانوا يختبئون خلف أسلحتهم وربما كانوا يخشون أن يكشف وجوههم الملثمة وحين تلقف رشاشه كما يتلقف الأطفال ألعابهم كانت الرصاصة الأخيرة تستقر حذو فكرته الأخيرة لم تكن فكرة عن الجنة ولا عن الله ولا الملائكة بل عن صديقته الصغيرة عن رضابها وحلمتيها الرقيقتين ولحسن الحظ أنهم أخطؤوا التصويب ذلك أن صورتها لم تكن في رأسه بل بين يديه وحين ارتطم وجهه بالأسفلت الساخن مررها بين فكيه وبينما كان يمضغها بهدوء لذيذ كانوا يفككون قنبلته الصغيرة تلك التي لم يسعفه الوقت لتفجيرها محمد مثلوثي، تونس

Financial terrorism on Greece goes on "Voters across  Europe  have got the message from the way Greece’s opposition to austerity was crushed - you can vote for whoever you like, but it won’t make any difference." Europe's liberal illusions shatter as Greek tragedy plays on

1.25 million people, including 300,000 children, are destitute in the UK

Jonathan Freedland's Plea

"An integral nationalism that never flinched in exterminating Armenians, expelling Greeks, deporting Kurds and torturing dissident Turks, and which still enjoys wide electoral support, is not a force to be taken lightly. The Turkish left, consistently among its victims, has shown most courage in confronting it. Politically speaking, the ‘generation of 78’ was cut down by the military coup of 1980, years of imprisonment, exile or death killing off any chance of a revival of popular attraction or activism on the same scale. But when the worst of the repression lifted, it was this levy that produced a critical culture without equal in any European country of the same period: monographs, novels, films, journals, publishing houses that have given Istanbul in many respects a livelier radical milieu than London, Paris or Berlin." After Kamel

A dissident philosopher protests Sacked workers in Saudi Arabia set fire to buses in protest over unpaid salaries

Poland's Abortion Wars

Labour anti-Semitism crisis escalates as Jeremy Corbyn admits to sharing Hitler’s vegetarian belief The "Antisemitism" Panic How Israel lobby manufactured UK Labour Party’s anti-Semitism crisis

The future of our earth looks bleak, capitalism will be established in space in the near future. So will tax havens! " To evangelists of asteroid mining , the heavens are not just a frontier but a vast and resource-rich place teeming with opportunity. According to NASA, there are potentially 100,000 near-Earth objects — including asteroids and comets — in the neighborhood of our planet. Some of these NEOs, as they’re called, are small. Others are substantial and potentially packed full of water and various important minerals, such as nickel, cobalt, and iron. One day, advocates believe, those objects will be tapped by variations on the equipment used in the coal mines of Kentucky or in the diamond mines of Africa. And for immense gain: According to industry experts, the contents of a single asteroid could be worth trillions of dollars."

Everything Must Change: South Africa’s Fork in the Road See also Marikana massacre: the untold story of the strike leader who died for workers’ rights

Two amusing headlines by foreignpolicy.com,  Thursday, April 28 " U.S. servicemembers who were involved in the October 2015 strike on an MSF hospital in Afghanistan will receive counseling and letters of reprimand..." " Despite a conflict in South Suden [sic] that has left 50,000 dead, Washington is still hesitating to impose sanctions and an arms embargo on the country..."

A good analysis, but with a utopia. "But for all the clarity of this historical continuity, it cannot deliver us from the particularities of the present. The most obvious difference between the pre- and postmodern circulation struggles is the contemporary primacy of the “race riot.” That term too easily forgets the great inversion that occurs sometime after the world wars. From the nineteenth century on, the racialized riots of the United States featured white mobs attacking not just African-American but famously Asian and Latin American groups — events among which the Zoot Suit Riots are only the best-known example. It’s not until the ‘60s that the phrase fastens its current meaning. There is something bizarre and perhaps obscene in the extent to which the political memory of “the sixties” is in the US dominated by the free speech and antiwar movements. This is not to diminish such projects, but rather to underscore the historical forgetting of the great rebellions of Watts, N

Britain Jeremy Hunt doesn’t understand junior doctors. He co-wrote a book on how to dismantle the NHS

The Iraq War Never Ended: An Interview with Anand Gopal