Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Regaining imperial power and glory has already proven to be a treacherous escapist fantasy – devastating the Middle East and parts of Asia and Africa while bringing terrorism back to the streets of Europe and America – not to mention ushering Britain towards Brexit. We can no longer discount the “terrible probability” James Baldwin once described: that the winners of history, “struggling to hold on to what they have stolen from their captives, and unable to look into their mirror, will precipitate a chaos throughout the world which, if it does not bring life on this planet to an end, will bring about a racial war such as the world has never seen”.  How colonial violence came home

Justice 'Justice?' The colonel was astounded. 'What is justice?' 'Justice, sir –' 'That's not what justice is,' the colonel jeered, and began pounding the table again with his big fat hand. 'That's what Karl Marx is. I'll tell you what justice is. Justice is a knee in the gut from the floor on the chin at night sneaky with a knife brought up down on the magazine of a battleship sandbagged underhanded in the dark without a word of warning. Garrotting. That's what justice is when we've all got to be tough enough and rough enough to fight Billy Perolle. From the hip. Get it? — Joseph Heller, Catch-22

"The administration of President Hassan Rouhani, elected in 2013 and re-elected last summer,  has been rocked by repeated rounds of teachers’ demonstrations. Teachers in Iran have a long history of protest reaching back to at least 1961. Yet, in terms of geographical breadth, the current round of protests appears unprecedented in the Islamic Republic. The 2009 Green Movement, which constituted the largest popular demonstrations since the 1979 revolution, as well as an earlier wave of teachers’ demonstrations in the early 2000s, were largely restricted to Tehran and a handful of major cities.  Not so this time." Protesting Education in Iran

"The BBC has uncovered details of a secret deal that let hundreds of IS fighters and their families escape from Raqqa, under the gaze of the US and British-led coalition and Kurdish-led forces who control the city. A convoy included some of IS’s most notorious members and – despite reassurances – dozens of foreign fighters. Some of those have spread out across Syria, even making it as far as Turkey." The liberals and all the other hypocrites of different colours have always opposed, resented and despised me when I call the US and British regimes criminals.  Raqqa's dirty secret

" La force et le consentement sont les deux fondements de la conduite des Etats modernes, les deux piliers d’une hégémonie. Quand le consentement vient à manquer — comme ce fut par exemple le cas en 2011 dans le monde arabe —, les conditions sont réunies pour le renversement du pouvoir en place." Gramsci, une pensée devenue monde

"Today on the Western Front,” the German sociologist Max Weber wrote in September 1917, there “stands a dross of African and Asiatic savages and all the world’s rabble of thieves and lumpens.” Weber was referring to the millions of Indian, African, Arab, Chinese and Vietnamese soldiers and labourers, who were then fighting with British and French forces in Europe, as well as in several ancillary theatres of the  first world war . Faced with manpower shortages, British imperialists had recruited up to 1.4 million Indian soldiers. France enlisted nearly 500,000 troops from its colonies in Africa and Indochina. Nearly 400,000 African Americans were also inducted into US forces. The first world war’s truly unknown soldiers are these non-white combatants.   Ho Chi Minh, who spent much of the war in Europe, denounced what he saw as the press-ganging of subordinate peoples. Before the start of the Great War, Ho wrote, they were seen as “nothing but dirty Negroes … good for no more t

The complete writings of an Arab revolutionary