Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Capitalism and workers struggle in China

Institutionalised Racism: A Syllabus 

Ramachandra Guha is wrong. Gandhi went from a racist young man to a racist middle-aged man

The twentieth-century question is back. We saw it in the Arab uprisings from Tunisia to Algeria and Sudan, in Occupy, in Greece, in France, etc. And we see it now in the U.S. " The rebellion [in the U.S.] has accomplished more in two weeks than have decades of slow, incremental electoralism." —Ahmed Kanna

Which tactics are appropriate for today’s rebellions can only be determined by a strategic and organizational analysis along the lines [Marin Luther] King proposed, and not according to the moral judgment which he subordinated to that analysis. In fact, with news that Los Angeles is considering cuts in police department funding, Minneapolis city council members openly considering disbanding the police force, and curfews being lifted in several cities, there are good reasons to believe that the current riots are strategically effective. “No justice, no peace,” from King’s vantage point, means that there is no positive peace without justice. Therefore in the context of injustice, there can be no negative peace, in the sense that there must be tension, there must be a “disturbance of the peace” in order to have the presence of justice. Today, when protestors shout “no justice, no peace,” we should understand this as a political principle which takes primacy over the abstract conceptio

The question is: why have the British accepted statues of slave traders (and also killers for the Empire) for so long? Miseducation and ignorance, imperial pride, or indifference? Personally, I am against statues. I didn't like Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, for example, having one after his death. Hopefully, what is happening will provoke a dew British people to read the history of the British empire so they know theirs before poiting to Arab or Chinese histories and know that violence and plunder played a significant role in making "Great" Britain what it is today. After Colston, figures such as Drake and Peel could be next Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Scouts movement The history of British slave ownership has been buried Related The Blood Never Dried by John Newsinger Inglorious Empire by Shashi Tharoor

"The dark star behind Brexit, without which it cannot be understood, remains the British people’s unreconciled relationship with the experience of empire. The empire is a huge and complicated subject that, to our enduring collective detriment, is barely taught and is thus also barely known and absorbed into public discourse. This is partly why Sunday was probably the first time that most people outside Bristol will ever have heard of Colston." — Martin Kettle, the Guardian