Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

"The prospect of such controversial measures being passed so urgently unleashed a wave of civil unrest with a 48-hour general strike by private and public sector unions bringing Greece to a standstill. Unionists said the measures were a “barbaric” eradication of hard-won rights and would be “the last nail in the coffin” for workers whose salaries have already been savaged by relentless rounds of gruelling austerity."

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?