Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Mechanisms of imperialism

I propose the following definition of the nation: it is an imagined political community-and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign. It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.... Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined.... Finally, [the nation] is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. Ultimately, it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willing to die for such limited imaginings. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities , pp. 25-6, Verso 2006 ed. No one can be a true nationalist who is incapable of feeling ‘ashamed’ if her s

Sadly, last Friday Mark Fisher took his own life "The first configuration is what I came to call the Vampires’ Castle. The Vampires’ Castle specialises in propagating guilt. It is driven by a  priest’s desire  to excommunicate and condemn, an  academic-pedant’s desire  to be the first to be seen to spot a mistake, and a  hipster’s desire  to be one of the in-crowd. The danger in attacking the Vampires’ Castle is that it can look as if – and it will do everything it can to reinforce this thought – that one is also attacking the struggles against racism, sexism, heterosexism. But, far from being the only legitimate expression of such struggles, the Vampires’ Castle is best understood as a bourgeois-liberal perversion and appropriation of the energy of these movements. The Vampires’ Castle was born the moment when the struggle  not  to be defined by identitarian categories became the quest to have ‘identities’ recognised by a bourgeois big Other. The privilege I certainly enjoy

This is a good long read.  I have a thought though on the last parargraph: the writer delves into what formed Fanon, especially the context of colonization and how it shaped the mind, pshycology and plight of the colonized. The author, I think, fails to use the same method when it comes to "Davos" and "Dabiq" or Globalisationa and the so-called Islamic State. Is not the latter a product of globalization (global capitalism and imperialism). Davos is the context, Dabiq was spawned by Davos like the violence directed by Algerians against the colonizers and the settlers was born in the context of colonisation. Is it not the context of global capitalism and its functions that creates wars, invasions, dictatorships, neoliberalism, power struggles, geopolitics, "civil wars", uneven-development, neofascism etc? Where Life is Seized

Capitalism and gay identity

"In the context of young parenthood, societies in Eastern Europe, in the Soviet era, were different from Western Europe in two important ways. Firstly, early parenthood in Eastern Europe does not carry the same social stigma that it tends to have in Western countries, as it was much more common. Secondly, Soviet countries had pro-natalist policies and tended to put greater investment into state resources available to families. This meant that relative to Western Europe, socio-economic differences, usually described as levels of inequality, were smaller and in particular young parents suffered fewer relative disadvanatges." The mother of all problems?

No Separate Queue for Cubans