Mick Hartley

Admirably with burning patriotism

An enigmatic headline at the Rodong Sinmun official North Korean news agency today: Rivers Bettered Vigorously. What can it mean?

Officials and workers across the country go out to administer land this year with the outset of another five-year plan. They improve the conditions of its rivers and streams admirably with burning patriotism to prevent them against flood damages and change their looks completely. Many units have already finished digging up the beds of the rivers according to the plan for the general mobilization for spring land management.

Mangyongdae and Ryokpho Districts and Kangdong County fulfilled their land administration plans.

Phihyon County excavated the beds of its two rivers at the same time. Nyongbyon County successfully dug up its river under the plan for the general mobilization for spring land administration.

Songchon County ceaselessly makes great efforts to better its river this year. It formulated a scientific plan for the project and made good preparations for it drawing on the successes and experiences it gained in the past. Consequently, it has carried out the project in a planned way.

Phyongwon County responsibly and successively ameliorated the upper course of the Pothong River. To this end it gave precedence to the relevant design and arranged for the riparian work to be done effectively by way of demonstration.

The officials and workers of Tokchon County try their hardest every day to manage its land.

Koksan County concentrated its labor on its riparian work and finished excavating the bed of its river within six days although it took it more than a fortnight in the past.

The officials and workers of Tonghungsan District, Hamhung City and Hongwon and Pukchong Counties dug out the beds of their rivers deep by dint of hard work.

Other cities, counties and districts also focus their energies on putting their rivers to rights excellently.

The Tokchon County officials and workers are damned with faint praise there - "try their hardest every day to manage its land".  Their regrettable incompetence is left unspoken...

Endangering young people

Scientific American, after its publication last month of an article supporting the inclusion of trans women - ie men - on women's sports teams, now joins the list of those weighing in against that Arkansas law banning the prescription of cross hormones or puberty-blockers to supposedly transgender youth under age 18. 

The state senate sponsor of the Arkansas bill, Alan Clark, has said that puberty blockers and hormone treatments are “at best experimental and at worst a serious threat to a child’s welfare.” But medical and scientific organizations say his claim is wrong. They include the American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association, the American Psychiatric Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (AACAP) and the Endocrine Society. These groups represent thousands of clinicians and researchers nationwide. Among them, the AACAP recently argued that “state-based legislation regarding the treatment of transgender youth that directly oppose the evidence-based care … is a serious concern” that endangers young people.

Experts say claims that gender-affirming medical treatments are experimental or risky are flawed on several levels. Puberty blockers—a class of drugs called GnRH agonists that dampen the effects of sex hormones—have been used safely for decades to delay puberty in children who start it too early. In transgender youth, the drugs are used to prevent the development of permanent sex characteristics such as breasts and voice changes at the onset of puberty—generally age nine or older. Gender-affirming hormones—testosterone or estrogen—are not usually given until a person is in their teens. These hormones promote the development of sex characteristics that are different from those of the sex that an individual was assigned at birth.

What is this "gender-affirming"? What does it mean? There's an assumption here that all cases of gender dysphoria are entirely genuine, and cannot be questioned. There just so happen to be these people whose "gender" supposedly differs from their "sex assigned at birth", and that's an unassailable fact. Any attempts to deny this or to prevent immediate and irreversible medical intervention therefore can only be wicked and regressive.

But these teens don't suddenly decide in a kind of social vacuum that they've got the wrong gender. It never used to happen on anything remotely like this scale. They're troubled adolescents, soaked in social media trends. It's an entirely responsible position therefore, pace the Keira Bell case here, to ensure that young people of that age shouldn't potentially ruin their lives in pursuit of a fad - in pursuit of this gender identity pseudo-science. 

The fact that so many organisations support serious medical intervention in support of "gender identity" shows how widely the nonsense has spread.

Ensuring the lab leak theory is properly investigated

The February report from the World Health Organisation dismissed the chances of a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology as the origin of the Covid-19 pandemic as "extremely unlikely". Which, as it happens, was very much in line with what the Chinese authorities wanted them to say. But, as Ian Birrell tells us, although the story may be officially over there are still groups doing the kind of research that the WHO should have been pursuing:

Feng Zijian played a central role in the World Health Organisation’s inquiry into the origins of Covid-19. The Chinese epidemiologist was one of the team leaders who briefed diplomats on the findings, which fell suspiciously in line with Beijing’s version of events. Feng explained how the carefully vetted team had concluded that the virus was most likely to be a natural disease that spilled over from bats to humans, although it could have been imported on frozen food. The chance of a leak from a Chinese laboratory was dismissed as “extremely unlikely”.

The Chinese-controlled results sparked global accusations of a whitewash and further corroded confidence in the WHO. Few experts give much credibility to claims the pandemic was imported on a packet of chilled pork or slab of frozen pangolin sold at a market. And demands are growing for the leak hypothesis to be taken more seriously. Wuhan, after all, is the major research centre for bat coronaviruses in Asia, where there are secretive labs, known biosafety concerns and high-risk experiments being conducted.

It has now emerged that Feng, deputy head of China’s Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and an expert on emergency health responses, performed an even more sinister role as the pandemic played out. He was one of four names copied on a CDC memo sent out in February 2020 ordering China’s scientists not to share any data, documents or specimens relating to the epidemic and to “prioritise the interests of the country”. The memo warned that anyone violating the request would be “dealt with severely in accordance with discipline, laws and regulations” — a threat to be taken seriously in a country ruled by fear.

The document, originally obtained by Associated Press last year among a cache labelled “not to be made public”, was a key plank in President Xi Jinping’s campaign to regain control of the pandemic narrative by silencing dissenting scientific voices and shutting down internal debate. It was sent out following the publication of report by two Chinese scientists which concluded “the coronavirus probably originated from a laboratory”, as well as a series of investigations by local media and citizen reporters into pandemic failings. The scientific report was swiftly withdrawn and journalists jailed on grounds such as “picking quarrels and provoking trouble”.

This nugget about Dr Feng’s disturbing dual role — as a voice of the WHO study into pandemic origins while also party to a Communist dictatorship’s clampdown on unfettered scientific discussion — was dug out by an Indian architect and film-maker, who shared it earlier this month on social media under his moniker ‘The Seeker’. “I know how to use a search engine,” he told me.

Last year, he made an even more significant discovery: a thesis that discussed how three miners died of a mysterious respiratory disease, eerily similar to Covid 19, they caught while clearing out bat droppings in a cave network in Yunnan, southern China. The trio were infected in an abandoned copper mine where scientists from Wuhan Institute of Virology sampled RaTG13, the closest known relative of Sars-Cov-2.

We heard about this mysterious affair last summer, thanks to a Sunday Times Insight investigation, but the story went cold - due no doubt to Chinese efforts to quash any further digging. But it's not forgotten:

‘The Seeker’ is a member of Drastic, an informal guerilla group of internet sleuths, scientists and data experts who have spent the past year scouring a multitude of digital sources for such vital pieces of evidence. Some members have expertise in areas such as microbiology, genetics and virology. Others are data specialists, engineers or simply obsessed with discovering the truth about the origin of this wretched pandemic. Some hide their identities; others are open. They have been accused of hacking and fiercely deny it. Occasionally they hurtle down blind alleys.

Yet there is no doubt their collective efforts — and some of the illuminating evidence they have uncovered — have been crucial in challenging both China and the scientific establishment to ensure the lab leak theory is properly investigated. 

So the truth may yet emerge, despite Chinese obfuscation:

Drastic’s members have also found evidence of virus databases being deleted, anomalies in scientific papers and published statements, details of pathogenic experiments on humanised mice with modified coronaviruses, scrubbed lab website pages, even details about patents for bat breeding cages at Wuhan Institute of Virology.

There is still no conclusive explanation for the origin of this devastating pandemic. But science, like journalism, should always follow the trail of evidence to wherever it leads. This crucial issue was clouded by Donald Trump’s aggressive intervention on the subject, since his toxicity made it easier for experts to dismiss concerns of a lab leak as a conspiracy theory; it enabled respected scientific journals to close down debate and for reporters to ignore glaring conflicts of interest among key figures.

Yet the significance of these sleuths goes beyond even the task of unravelling the origins of a new virus that has killed almost 3 million people worldwide and raising uncomfortable questions over closed minds, let alone posing the question of whether scientists themselves might have accidentally sparked this global disaster. Ultimately, their digging is a reminder that in the digital age even the most powerful states, even an Orwellian dictatorship such as China under Xi Jinping, cannot erase everything from the past and hide all truths, however hard it tries.

Seeds and Feeds

Back to North Carolina with Marion Post Wolcott - November 1939. "General store. Zebulon, Wake County, North Carolina."

[Photo: Shorpy/Marion Post Wolcott for the Farm Security Administration]

Dark vision

Some Don McCullin, on the occasion of an exhibition at Tate Liverpool - when it reopens, that is.

“Fishermen playing during their lunch break, Scarborough, Yorkshire 1967” © Don McCullin

“Protester, Cuban Missile Crisis, Whitehall, London 1962 ” © Don McCullin

"Liverpool 8", 1963 © Don McCullin

“Liverpool” © Don McCullin

"Consett, Co, Durham", 1976 © Don McCullin

"Early Shift, West Hartlepool Steelworks", 1963 © Don McCullin

Compare and contrast that last image with the bottom one here of the same steelworks, taken by Colin Jones in 1963.

McCullin is famously averse to digital photography, developing all his prints in the old way - in the dark room:

McCullin is a skilled printer and all the black and white photographs of this retrospective were printed by him. The dark tonality of the printing is part of their expressive force. “Darkness, to me, is energy. When I energize my prints in the darkroom, I inject more and more darkness into them,” he says. “But I don’t consider it to be darkness. I consider it to be strength.” 

Suicide by diplomacy

The extraordinary case of Iranian diplomat Assadollah Assadi, the Iranian spy chief who was sentenced to 20 years in jail by an Antwerp court in February for a thwarted bomb attack in Paris, has received surprisingly little media coverage. It wasn't just the horrors of the attack itself, which was aimed at a rally of opposition activists attended by British and American dignitaries but was foiled on the day by Belgian police, believed to be acting on a Mossad tip off: the case also revealed the extent of the Iranian spy network in Europe:

A treasure trove of documents seized by German police and obtained by the JC reveals the extent to which Tehran’s spies have infiltrated Europe.

The documents were found in a hire car used as a mobile intelligence station by Assadollah Assadi, an Iranian spy chief who in February was sentenced to 20 years in prison for masterminding a failed bomb attack in Paris in 2018.

The material discloses a sophisticated network of regime agents that stretches across at least 22 cities all over the continent, along with plans for terror attacks using explosives, acid and toxic pathogenic substances.

But no one seems to care. Jake Wallis Simons in the Spectator:

On a sweltering day in July 2018, German police pulled over a scarlet Ford S-Max hire car that was travelling at speed towards Austria. The driver, Assadollah Assadi, the third secretary to the Iranian embassy in Vienna, was arrested at gunpoint and taken into custody.

Although unusual, there was a good reason for detaining the diplomat: Assadi had used his immunity to smuggle a bomb on a commercial airliner from Tehran to Austria, intending to carry out what would have been one of Europe’s worst atrocities in recent years.

Once in Vienna, he had handed the device — codenamed the ‘Playstation’ — to two married Belgian-Iranian agents, Amir Saadouni and Nasimeh Naami, and instructed them to blow up an anti-regime event in Paris, which was to be attended by dignitaries including Rudy Giuliani and former environment secretary Theresa Villiers.

The plot was thwarted on the day of the attack after a tip-off from Mossad, saving hundreds of lives. Assadi was arrested the following day while pursuing diplomatic refuge in Austria. But as we reported in this week’s Jewish Chronicle, the treasure trove of evidence inside the vehicle should have set off alarm bells in European corridors of power — alarm bells that should be sounding especially loudly today.

The car was effectively being used as a mobile intelligence station to run agents. It contained handwritten records of trips to 289 locations in 22 cities across Europe as well as notes on bomb handling and ideas for attacks using acid and toxic pathogenic substances. Also discovered were receipts for expense reimbursements and salary payments to spies, details of computers issued to them, numerous mobile phones and GPS devices, and more than €30,000 (£26,000) in cash. In short, it revealed an Iranian espionage network in Europe that was startling in both its scale and scope.

'The plot may have been a wake-up call, but the Europeans tend to wake up from time to time, then fall asleep again’

When seen in the light of the political context at the time, the arrest seemed almost ironic. Not eight weeks previously, Donald Trump had pulled America out of the nuclear deal with Iran, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), reimposing ‘maximum pressure’ sanctions on the theocracy. The Europeans were appalled.

One of Washington’s main reasons for leaving the deal, signed by the Obama administration in 2015, was that lifting sanctions allowed Tehran to fund extensive terror networks, proxy militia and missile emplacements overseas. But even while investigators were poring over the material found inside Assadi’s scarlet Ford S-Max, policymakers in Europe’s capitals were busy designing a mechanism to allow Iran to continue to trade behind the backs of the Americans. The system, known as ‘Instex’, was launched five months later, in an attempt to neuter the deterrent from Washington.

This bizarre state of affairs cannot be overemphasised. Exhibit A: Tehran activates its extensive spy network in an attempt to blow up hundreds of civilians on the streets of Paris. Exhibit B: the Europeans try to undermine American pressure on the theocracy, shovelling more money into its maw. A cynic might call it suicide by diplomacy.

This week, history is repeating itself. Eight weeks ago, an Antwerp court sentenced Assadi and his three co-conspirators to between 15 and 20 years in prison. This was the first conviction of an Iranian official for terrorism offences since the 1979 Islamic revolution. Yet this week, the European powers pressed ahead with direct negotiations with Tehran in Vienna, aimed at expunging all trace of the Trump years and restoring the nuclear deal. By all accounts, progress was swift: a few days of discussions resulted in a ‘roadmap’ that could lead to a new agreement in as little as two months.

The Ayatollahs have never been in any doubt that the Europeans are in the palms of their hands. The only sanctions insisted on by Europe last week were symbolic restrictions on a small number of Iranian officials, a gesture of solidarity for dual nationals held hostage in Iranian prisons. Aside from this, there was simply no disguising the enthusiasm for welcoming the malignant theocracy back into the fold.

The difference now is that Biden is in the White House, and seems determined to once again offer the hand of friendship - so cruelly snatched away by that nasty Trump - to the theocracy in Tehran. Europe, naturally, welcomes such progressive statesmanship. Israel - no so much.

Israel, as the single country most threatened by Tehran (intelligence sources estimate that 80 per cent of threats against the Jewish state emanate from the theocracy) does not, shall we say, buy into the transatlantic policy of appeasement. Last week, Benjamin Netanyahu made his position clear ahead of a visit to Jerusalem by the new US secretary of defence, General Lloyd Austin, a visit designed to calm Israeli nerves over the impending nuclear deal. ‘These type of deals with extremist regimes are worth nothing,’ he said. ‘A deal with Iran that threatens us with annihilation will not obligate us.’

Speaking on Holocaust Remembrance Day, he added: ‘Only one thing will obligate us: to prevent those who wish to destroy us from carrying out their plans.’ On Sunday, an unexplained ‘incident’ occurred at Iran’s nuclear facility in Natanz — which had just started using more advanced centrifuges — taking out its electrical distribution grid.

In sharp contrast with Israel, whatever the opposite of retaliation is, Europe is following that policy. In the somnambulant haze that hangs in the continent’s corridors of power, even a fully armed bomb, built in Tehran and on its way to delivery to a rally of thousands of people in central Paris, is not enough to raise serious hesitations abut the intentions of the Iranian regime. The planned attack in the heart of France was generally viewed, amazingly enough, as an internal Iranian issue. The security services uprooted the spy network, then returned to business as usual. As one source familiar with the matter told me: ‘The plot may have been a wake-up call, but the Europeans tend to wake up from time to time, then fall asleep again.’ And this time, Europe and America are in lockstep. One can only hope that they are not sleepwalking to their own destruction.

Accused of desecrating the holy text

Meanwhile, in Pakistan:

Two Christian women face allegations of blasphemy, a charge that carries a potential death penalty, after Muslim staff at a hospital accused them of removing a sticker carrying a verse from the Quran from a colleague’s locker.

Police in the eastern city of Faisalabad had to rescue the pair as a riot broke out at the hospital. Muslim medical staff staged a demonstration demanding legal action against the women.

A mob at the scene was stirred by Islamist activists calling for the pair to be hanged. It was reported that Maryam Lal, a nurse, was stabbed as she fled.

The women have been held in custody, accused of insulting Islam. The incident again exposes Pakistan’s draconian blasphemy laws.

The case has shown how a misunderstanding can escalate into a capital crime. Lal told police that she and Newsh Urooj, a medical student, were asked to tidy the locker of the hospital’s head nurse, a Muslim. They scratched off the sticker with a pen. When they returned the next day they were accused of desecrating the holy text.

Activists from the Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP) party, which campaigns for those accused of blasphemy to be put to death, fuelled the protests.

“After Friday prayers, a mob gathered and tried to kill them both,” Rana Atta, the police deputy superintendent, said. “We arrived at the scene and saved them. The investigation is going on. Both the girls are safe now and sent to jail for 15 days’ judicial remand.”

Human rights groups have been outraged by the accusations. “This is a false allegation and minorities feel more insecure in Pakistan than ever,” Lala Robin, a local activist, said. “This is a campaign by the TLP to serve their politics. The Christian nurses in Faisalabad live in a state of fear.”

Blasphemy is considered so serious in Pakistan that parents have murdered their own children accused of the crime. The law is open to flagrant abuse, however, with allegations used to smear rivals.

Although there's a death penalty for blasphemy, the real danger - as we see here - is that the women will be slaughtered by the mob. The killers will then be lauded as heroes.

Runt's Pool Parlor

Marion Post Wolcott - November 1939. "Runt's pool parlor with poster advertising Tobacco Ball in window. Zebulon, Wake County, North Carolina."

[Photo: Shorpy/Marion Post Wolcott]

For the shorter player.

A flagrant outrage

Talking of sissy porn, here's more reaction to the inclusion of trans woman Torrey Peters' book Detransition, Baby in the longlist for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2021. I wrote about it last month, quoting Genevieve Gluck's conclusion that the book was "riddled with misogyny from start to finish". At Amazon, where they make a big deal of the Women's Prize for Fiction thing, there are an astonishing 627 ratings, most of which are five star gushes. The odd one star review...

The trans heroine sees a woman pushed into a bush by her boyfriend and decides that to feel feminine one must desire to be abused by men. When her boyfriend hits her for the first time she is turned on and considers this a validation of her Femininity. For the author women are defined as women by male violence inacted upon them. The author clearly fetishises this male violence against women. (and the is no attempt to distinguishes between consensual BDSM and non consensual abuse - it all equally validating to her) The character's masochism is explicitly expressed as not being about trying to survive misogyny, but about hoping to experience it as a form of validation of being a woman.

...is largely ignored and overwhelmed by the raves.

From A Blog of One's Own, (with reference to The Masker, an earlier Peters' novella):

The Masker isn’t a one-off: there’s a genre. It’s called “sissy porn,” and “forced feminisation” is a popular trope among aficionados. It is a manifestation of a phenomenon known as autogynephilia: a tendency in some heterosexual males to be aroused by the thought or image of themselves as women. The existence of the phenomenon is contested in some quarters, but Peters writes a convincing fictional first-person account of it, and evidently expects that account to find a market. The prevalence of sissy porn online bears out that expectation.

In this novella, Peters explicitly eroticises violence against women. The fictional narrator is a masochist for whom dressing as a woman and being treated as female is the ultimate sexually arousing debasement; and for whom “treated as female” means “violently abused.” The single most chilling line in this extract, to my mind, is “meek as an abused woman.” The narrator is luxuriating in his own fearful, humiliated capitulation.  [...]

A transwoman who has previously published misogynist and abusive pornography which treats femaleness as inherently degrading has been shortlisted for a prestigious prize for women’s fiction, and that fact has been triumphantly reported in the national press.

This, to my mind, is blatant power play. Women have been abused, bullied, no-platformed, hounded out of their jobs, threatened and in some cases physically assaulted for putting forward civilised measured arguments against self-identification, and for explaining patiently and politely why biological sex sometimes matters, and even for writing accurately on the relevant law. Most of the mainstream feminist organisations and too many prominent individual women have capitulated and are obediently trashing women’s protections and reciting the mantra “trans women are women.”

This outrage – and others like it – feels like part of a victory parade: the more flagrant the outrage that we can be terrorised into ignoring, the more complete – meek as abused women – our capitulation.

On Hackney Marshes

Good to see the old Sunday football back in action:

The reversal of victimhood

Actor and campaigner Rose McGowan was a victim of sexual predator Harvey Weinstein, but she was soon made to realise that the real victims - always the victims, much more so than women (though of course at the same time they are women) - are trans women.

Genevieve Gluck at the Glinner Update:

In 2018, Me Too campaigner Rose McGowan was at a Barnes and Noble bookshop in New York promoting her memoir Brave, which details the sexual abuse she suffered at the hands of movie mogul Harvey Weinstein. During a question and answer session, as Rose was discussing her grief and recovery, a trans-identified male heckled her from the crowd, saying, “We get raped more often. We go through domestic violence more often. Trans women are in men’s prisons, and what have you done for them?”

The viral video depicts a trans-identifying male with hair dyed pink, wearing a pale pink hoodie, standing among a crowd of seated patrons — who observe stoically — yelling, “This is genocide! This is the AIDs crisis all over again! This is white cis feminism!” an outburst prompted by an interview with RuPaul in 2017 wherein McGowan said that trans-identified males experience life differently from women. The heckler is peacefully removed while chanting, “White cis feminism!” in an apparent attempt to rouse the audience. For their part, the men in the crowd stare at the interloper in shocked silence, and several women laugh.

After the removal of the heckler, urged on by supportive cheers, McGowan rises and shouts, “I do not subscribe to your language!” and proceeds to condemn the use of demeaning labels. A woman in the crowd responds, “We’re so grateful,” and a man offers, “We love you.” These moments of consolation would later be edited out of most of the video clips uploaded to social media and thereby scrubbed from public consciousness.

Rather than taking her side, the version of events put forward by the media was that McGowan launched into a transphobic tirade. In particular, the US Women’s March organization denounced her within the day. Women’s March stated that “denying trans women’s identities is never okay,” in a tweet that also linked to trans activist Katelyn Burns’ interview with the agitator, a trans-identified male named Andi Dier. Dier claimed that those who identify as trans women are more oppressed than women, saying “When someone pulls down her pants and sees a v-gina, she won't be murdered for it. That is not something she fears. That's why she's cis.” The headline for the interview, “Rose McGowan Broke Down in a Transphobic Rage”, intentionally depicted McGowan as hysterical.

The bookshop audience’s instinctive support for McGowan gave way to a long line of commentators condemning McGowan and offering support for Andi Dier. The headline of an article for Slate read, “Rose McGowan’s Anti-Trans Bias Weakens Her Feminism,” and several other major media outlets joined in, including The Independent and Variety. As a result of the corresponding backlash, McGowan cancelled the rest of her book tour, stating that “every person sitting frozen in their chairs” had “a weakness called complicity.” In a video published by PinkNews the following year, McGowan issued an apology, stating: “I didn’t have the correct language… had I said ‘cis women’... now I understand that that’s what I should have said.”

It turns out, though, that this Andi Dier - this trans hero - has a long and deeply troubling history of preying on teenage girls, and involvement in so-called sissy pornography (basically, the fetishisation of being humiliated as a woman) - as Gluck exhaustively demonstrates.

Her conclusion to the whole sordid episode:

Rose McGowan was responsible for bringing to light systemic sexual abuse in Hollywood, and in particular for emboldening victims of film producer Harvey Weinstein. Despite this, she was publicly shamed for defending herself against verbal harassment, her book tour was cancelled, and worst of all, a man with a rape fetish who is clearly engaging in predatory behaviour was defended by a major women’s organisation ahead of her. A reversal achieved simply through gender ideology, which grants any male who claims a female identity the authority to speak over women. 

The manipulation of language at the core of gender ideology is essential to its capacity for silencing victims. It is impossible to defend women’s rights if we cannot define women. It is impossible to fight against sexism if we cannot say that sex is real. We certainly cannot protect children from male sexual abusers if we are too afraid of appearing cruel to predators to name them as the men they are.

As for Rose McGowan. She provided two lessons as to the systemic nature of male power.

She was silenced by an abusive, predatory man and his enablers in the media. They said, “it must never happen again”.

And then, almost immediately, it happened again.

Thinker of the Fatherland

Religiously motivated violence? Ah yes - that'd be the Jews:

The Netherlands’ foremost philosopher called the dispersal of Jews in the Diaspora a “blessing” because it prevented them from achieving the power they have in Israel today that has resulted in “religiously motivated violence.”

Hans Achterhuis, the first recipient of the prestigious and royally recognized title of “thinker of the Fatherland,” made the remarks in an interview on the role of religion in the modern state for Trouw, which the paper published on Thursday, Israel’s national Holocaust memorial day.

“As terrible as the story of the Jews has been, it was still in a certain sense a blessing that they were dispersed in the Diaspora. They had no power and therefore no possibility of exercising religiously motivated violence. And one sees how it can go wrong if that power does exist, in the State of Israel,” Achterhuis said.

His comment provoked outrage by Jewish community representatives and Israel’s ambassador to the Netherlands, Naor Gilon, who wrote on Twitter: “Shameful article in @Trouw on the day we remember the 6 million #Jews murdered in #Europe. History taught us that having a Jewish state – #Israel is the only way to survive #NeverAgain.”

Ah, where would we be without philosophers?

Streets of Glasgow

After last week's look at the deserted streets of Glasgow in lockdown, here's photographer Zeno Watson on the same beat - with the city just coming back to life again:

[Photos © Zeno Watson]

Watson is interviewed at Flashbak.

We Will Go to Mt Paektu

In North Korea there is no culture outside Kim worship, pt. 73 -

National Pencil Drawing, Calligraphy Festival Opens:

A national pencil and calligraphy festival opened with due ceremony at the Okryu Exhibition Hall on April 8 in celebration of the birth anniversary of President Kim Il Sung.

Seen at the festival venue is an art work depicting tender-hearted President Kim Il Sung and Chairman Kim Jong Il seeing the calligraphy skill of a schoolgirl.

Such calligraphic works as "The People Are God" and "Fork to Mangyongdae" dealing with the exploits of the President arouse yearning and reverence for the President.

A pencil drawing "We Will Go to Mt Paektu" and others depicting the working people and youth and students visiting the revolutionary battle sites in the area of Mt Paektu give fine ideological and artistic representation of our people's will to brilliantly carry forward and develop down through generations the revolutionary cause of Juche.

Displayed at the venue were also the works showing with powerful and refined technique the spirit of the Korean people who turned out in the struggle for implementing the decisions of the 8th Congress of the Workers' Party of Korea (WPK) and the 2nd Plenary Meeting of the 8th WPK Central Committee.

Corner grocery

Marion Post Wolcott - September 1941. "Grocery store on main street of Ranchester in the Big Horn Mountains, Wyoming."

[Photo: Shorpy/Marion Post Wolcott for the Farm Security Administration]