Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

A review of A Hitch in Time Related Hitchens when he was good

A very short introduction Related British atrocities in Kenya

“ The oil world I inhabited brought together geopolitics and the everyday. It was material and dirty, and bloody and wracked by wars, coups d’état and revolutions. It was a world wrought by political struggle on the streets and at the diplomatic table. Corporations, universities and security apparatuses all had a finger in the pie. And along with the people who worked the oilfields and filled the streets during demonstrations they changed the world in perceptible ways, sometimes suddenly and monumentally, as when Middle East and Latin American leaders negotiated better oil deals for their countries; sometimes gradually, through a series of unintended consequences.” A review of Disorder : Hard Times in the 21st Century by Helen Thompson Laleh Khalili’s critique highlights good missing points in Thompsons’ book. However, Khalili never mentions capital and profit and their role in shaping geopolitics. We blitzed it Related Carbon Democracy

It all happened in, you know, “other places.”  So it doesn’t count.

Class and the Parable of an Environmental Victory

" The Saur Revolution had been based on a coup led by young officers. But Afghanistan had a conscript army, with men from every corner of the country, mostly from the families of small peasants and sharecroppers. Those soldiers followed orders, but they had not been politically convinced. There had been no urban uprisings and no peasant war for land. In that sense, the Saur Revolution was a top-down coup with little rural support. The idea that Communism or socialism required a dictatorship by a minority was widely accepted among radicals in the 1960s and 1970s. Karmal had learned his politics in prison in Kabul, Taraki had learned his in Bombay, and Amin had spent years in New York. The Afghan Communists were simply doing what the Left globally knew had to be done if they really wanted to change the world. Their tragedy is, in an acute and terrible form, the same one replicated elsewhere ." Related The West's favourite Afghan

“Toward the end of 1951, Secretary of State Dean Acheson formed a special committee on the Arab world under the chairmanship of Kermit Roosevelt, from the newly established CIA. The committee suggested the need for “an Arab leader who would have more power in his hands than any other Arab leader ever had before, ‘power to make an unpopular decision’ … one who deeply desires to have power, and who desires to have it primarily for the mere sake of power.” This recommendation was made more explicit in a British Foreign Office minute on December 3, 1951, which described the joint American-British view as follows: “the only sort of Government with which we can hope to get an accommodation is a frankly authoritarian government … both ruthless and efficient … We need another Mustafa Kemal [the Turkish officer who led a modernizing coup in 1921, and assumed the title Atatürk, the father of the Turks], to secularize and Westernize his country … Even though Egyptians are not Turks, and men like