Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Crimes abroad...crimes at home, too On Thursday 4 February 2016 the [British] Government unveiled the privatisation of its final stake in Royal Mail, bringing the curtain down on five centuries of state ownership. Also ' Is there no limit to what this Government will privatise? ': UK plasma supplier sold to US private equity firm Bain Capital

Figures of the Other: Brother, Neighbour, Stranger, Enemy "Christianity preaches the love of the neighbour, yet ultimately reduces him to a repetition of the  self. Modern democracy rests on fraternity, but all too often distorts it into inconsistent ideolo gies of identity, which pave the way for more or less explicit forms of racism. The battle for the  emancipation of woman runs itself the risk of succumbing to a global dispositif of sameness  dominated by Capital and its ruthless values. Faced with unprecedented social, economical,  and political crises, we are today increasingly urged to treat any kind of otherness that chal lenges our fragile egos as an enemy."

For someone who has recently been in Saigon, this gives me a chill in the spine. 1965-1975:  Another Vietnam Unseen images of the war from the winning side

Asylum claims are not the cause of the UK’s  record immigration

Vicious union-busting at Moroccan fish canner DOHA

The Tunisian Uprising and Beyond "In focusing his work on the technologies through which subject populations were ‘incorporated into – and not excluded from – the arena of colonial power,’ Mamdani substantiates his notion of the bifurcated state as a mode of governance. Bringing this analysis to its logical conclusion, he argues that ‘no reform of contemporary civil society institutions can by itself unravel’ such power. Rather, to redress the legacies (both material and epistemological) of the bifurcated colonial state would ‘require nothing less than dismantling that form of power.’ As attested to by past and ongoing forms of revolutionary mobilisation by those who have bee n treated as second-class citizens, many Tunisians have reached a similar conclusion."

"Over its modern history, the West has not permitted any Arab liberal [and democratic] experiment to succeed, since, to start with, it has not allowed an Arab bourgeoisie to grow independent of its control. This is the reason why the West has always sought the explicit alliance of patriarchal and theocratic societies which vehemently oppose secularism." — Ghālī Shukrī, Diktātoriyat al-takhalluf al-'arabī , Cairo, 1994.