Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

In a country that wants to bring "freedom" and "democracy" to others

Britain has gone to huge trouble to humiliate itself

Migration "The metaphor of Fortress Europe thus represents a highly sophisticated construction—far more so than the fortified continent of World War Two. Its lines of fortification are mobile and teem with electronic surveillance devices, reinforcing an arsenal of repression centred round the weapons of bureaucracy and fear. Its walls are semi-permeable, designed not simply to exclude but to filter entrance in a highly restrictive way, constantly fabricating and modifying systems of hierarchical categorization, of which the distinction between ‘refugees’—acceptable, but only in limited numbers—and ‘economic migrants’, illegitimate and thus illegalized, is only one example. It operates by establishing compacts with other states or agencies, outsourcing functions of coercion, detention, surveillance and control." — Stathis Kouvelakis

Union-busting at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology

" There is a striking discrepancy between the lack of feeling aroused by the deaths of tens of thousands of human beings—in their majority anonymous, unrecorded by the authorities and denied the dignity of a proper burial—with that excited by, say, the 1,000 lives lost in the crossing from East to West Germany during the Cold War. There is one obvious explanation: an African, an Arab or an Afghani who drowns in the Mediterranean, in flight from war, oppression or extreme poverty, is not seen as a human being in the same way as the Germans who were trying to flee ‘communism’ and were hailed as martyrs for liberty." — Stathis Kouvelakis Europe's Iron Curtain

From the archive Dedicated democracy

Inglorious Empire by Shashi Tharoor Excerpts - Part 1