Mick Hartley

Trite sentimentality

Teenage Swedish eco-activist Greta Thunberg seems to command an almost universal level of adoration from the press, and from politicians who fall over themselves to meet her. A thankfully rather more sceptical approach is taken by Paulina Neuding at Quillette:

When Greta Thunberg was 11 years old, she went two months without eating. At least, that is what a recent family memoir asks us to believe. Her heart rate and blood pressure showed signs of starvation, and she stopped speaking to anyone but her parents and younger sister, Beata. After years of depression, eating disorders, and anxiety attacks, she was eventually diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, high-functioning autism, and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD). She also suffers from selective mutism, a disorder related to severe anxiety which can render her unable to speak to anyone outside her closest family. When she wants to tell a climate researcher that she is planning a school strike to save the environment, she speaks through her father.

Scenes from the Heart (“Scener ur hjärtat,” 2018) recounts the events that led to Greta Thunberg’s now-famous “school strike for climate,” during which hundreds of thousands of children cut classes for a day to protest government inaction over climate change. Thunberg now strikes every Friday and spent three weeks sitting outside the Swedish Parliament at the beginning of the school year. Scenes from the Heart is written by her family—her mother, father, sister Beata, and herself—and the story is narrated by Greta’s mother, the opera soprano Malena Ernman, who was a celebrity in Europe long before her daughter’s rise to fame. Although the book is only available in Swedish for the time being, it is already being translated into numerous languages—a development that reflects the global fascination with Thunberg’s eccentric campaign. Their memoir tells the story of “a family in crisis and a planet in crisis,” and while these two narratives might appear to be entirely unrelated, Ernman and her co-authors insist they are inextricably linked. The oppression of women, minorities, and people with disabilities, we are told, is a product of the same root cause as climate change: our unsustainable way of life. The family’s private crisis and the global climate crisis, the authors implausibly argue, are simply symptoms of the same systemic disorder.

Then there's her sister....

It's all very odd. She's met the Pope, been named by Time Magazine as one of their 100 most influential people for 2019, and been compared to Jesus. There is a cult-like feel to this whole business, which - without wishing to denigrate the girl, or her message - does feel decidedly unhealthy. Jesus? More like Joan of Arc.

I do not wish to suggest that 16 year olds are necessarily too young to understand the consequences of their actions, nor that the challenges Thunberg faces make her unsuitable to take a stand on political issues, or even to lead a global movement. No one who has heard her address world leaders in impeccable English can doubt that she is intelligent and extraordinarily capable on some level. Her mother stresses that her daughter has never felt better than during her campaign to address the existential challenge posed by our changing climate, and Thunberg herself says working for the climate has helped her recover. For someone coping with the unhappiness caused by her various debilitating conditions, this is no small thing. But adults have a moral obligation to remain adults when dealing with children in the public square and not to allow themselves to get carried away by the trite sentimentality of messianic or revolutionary dreams.

Lady with the Goose

Photographer Cristina Mittermeier - featured in the Somerset House Sony exhibition. "I photographed this Lisu woman from one of the Tibetan minorities in China, as she took her pet goose for a walk in a street market in the southwestern corner of China."

[Photo: Cristina Mittermeier]

Somerset House

With black screens.

From the other side the screens display exhortatory and inspiring messages about global warming and the like, as part of Earth Day Season 2019. I think I prefer this way round.

I was there for the 2019 Sony World Photography Awards Exhibition. You can't go wrong with photos printed out with such size and quality. A standout was Nadav Kander, recipient of the Outstanding Contribution to Photography accolade this year. I've featured him a couple of times - on the Yangtze, and the Thames Estuary.

Jesus, a Palestinian?

Why, wondered Eric V. Copage in an op-ed in the NYT, is Jesus always depicted as fair-skinned, with blue eyes? He was, after all, "most likely a Palestinian man with dark skin". Congresswoman Ilhan Omar shared the article, with the message, “Don’t they (Christians) know Jesus was a Palestinian?” 

Really? Rabbi Abraham Cooper, of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, spoke to the Jerusalem Post:

“The claim that Jesus was a Palestinian is so bizarre that the question becomes what one gains by making that allegation,” Cooper told The Jerusalem Post. “For people who have no theological or historical rooting, the idea that Jesus was a Palestinian creates a new narrative for Palestinian history, which otherwise does not date back very far. If one can say that Jesus was Palestinian 2,000 years ago, then that means the Jews are occupying Palestinian land.”

Cooper said that for people who “don’t like Jews to begin with, it is a deadly combination of the Jews killed Jesus and now they are doing the same to his progeny,” he continued. “From a political and propaganda point of view, there is something to be gained.”

The myth that Jesus was a Palestinian dates back to the days of Yasser Arafat, when his trusted Christian-Palestinian adviser Hanan Ashrawi made the claim. Since then, the idea resurfaces now and again, according to Cooper.

“The absurdity of it is breathtaking,” Cooper said of Jesus being a Palestinian. “Jesus was born in Bethlehem, think about who is parents were – his mother, Mary, was betrothed to Joseph, a carpenter. In the Gospels, there is no mention of Palestine, only Judea, which is where Jews lived.”

Cooper said that if the Palestinians admit that Jesus was a Jew, then the idea that the Jews only arrived in Israel in 1948 and occupied Palestinian indigenous land becomes an absurdity.

He said Omar “knows this narrative is false but also that it has an inherent power to it,” said Cooper. “The ‘Benjamins,’ the big lie of dual loyalty, Jesus is a Palestinian - it is all rewriting history to plant in people’s minds that the Palestinian people go back thousands of years."

“She is a very clear person,” Cooper continued. “Ilhan Omar is a clever antisemite, so truth does not play much of a role anyway.”

He added that, “When an elected member of the US Congress retweets such a thing, that takes things to the next level.

An Italian Flâneur in New York

Italian-American photographer Martino Marangoni, from his new book Rebuilding My Days In New York 1959–2018:

[Photos © Martino Marangoni]

Not being fully veiled

Meanwhile, in Afghanistan:

One of four women who was recently subjected to a brutal public lashing by armed Taliban fighters in Afghanistan has spoken about her experience, amid an increase of violent punishments given to those violating its strict interpretation of religious law.

Aziza, who like many other Afghan women only uses one name, was rounded up by the Taliban’s shadow police for being out of her house without her husband and not being fully veiled. She was beaten so badly she lost consciousness.

A resident of Afghanistan’s Sancharak district in Sar-i-pul – a northern province, where the Taliban has tried to impose strict sharia laws and restrict women’s mobility – Aziza spoke to the Guardian after the flogging last month.

Aziza said she was arrested by armed Taliban fighters after they entered a local market. She was wearing a burqa without mesh covering her face.

“Women in our area have no identity and they are considered incomplete without men. Sometimes men are not available and many women died in the remote areas as they were unable to reach hospital,” she said.

Paying a severe price for government failures

Whether it was the local jihadist group the National Thowheeth Jama’ath, or - as now claimed - Islamic State, it's now clear enough that the Sri Lankan bombings were an Islamist inspired terrorist attack. The victims were, largely, Christians. So of course our sympathies must lie with the island's - um - Muslims. From Farah Mihlar in the Guardian:

As mass burials for some of the Christian worshippers killed in the Easter Sunday bombings take place today, claims that the attackers were local Islamic extremists have left Sri Lanka’s Muslims – who make up 10% of the population – devastated....

Yet again, Sri Lanka, especially its Christian minority, has paid a severe price for government failures. Muslims, already the target of hate campaigns, will no doubt face repercussions. Part of the tragedy is that since independence, Muslims have stayed away from violence, both during Sri Lanka’s civil war, and more recently, when they have been the target of religiously motivated attacks....

During the civil war of 1983 to 2009, Muslims paid the price for their non-violence and avoidance of Tamil militancy. In the conflict-affected north and east of Sri Lanka they were killed, ethnically cleansed, abducted and displaced from their homes. At the end of the armed conflict they became the “new enemy” to both Sinhalese and Tamils, seen as an obstacle to political autonomy by the latter. With evangelical Christian groups, they were targeted by Sinhalese Buddhist extremist groups (operating with tacit government support) in systematic and widescale violent attacks and hate campaigns on social media.

Research I conducted across Sri Lanka from 2016 to 2018 showed rising distrust of Muslims: fears of a Muslim takeover through economic dominance and a high birth rate, often expressed through racial slurs, were part of popular discourse. Muslim civil society and religious leaders responded to these attacks by attempting to reduce the exclusivity of Islamic identity that had developed in the 1990s, opening mosques to non-Muslims and spearheading reconciliation. Clear and strong messages were sent through mosque networks aimed at preventing young Muslims from retaliating to attacks.

Claims of jihadist extremism within Sri Lanka’s Muslim community have occasionally been made, but at times as part of hate campaigns, which has made it difficult for community leaders to take them seriously. When they more recently realised the danger, they warned the police and called for arrests but no action was taken....

All the fault of the government, then.

More on the same lines from Alan Keenan, a Sri Lanka Senior Analyst with the International Crisis Group:

Speaking to LBC presenter Eddie Mair, he said the attacks may also feed into anti-Muslim sentiment that has been building in Sri Lanka recently.

Mr Keenan said: "This sentiment has been developing over the last five years, cultivated by radical militant groups of Buddhist including some monks.

"That has led already to major rioting last year and rioting in 2014, where Muslim shops, homes and mosques were burned out and a few people died in each incident.

"This will be seen as evidence that the fears and warnings of Muslim extremism, that these groups have been saying which previously had no evidence to back them up, are in fact true.

"That's a very dangerous development and I'm afraid that if strong action isn't taken and the right messages aren't sent by government leaders and religious leaders of all groups, there's a real possibility of further violence."  [...]

"One of the striking things of the past few years has been solidarity between evangelicals Christians in Sri Lanka and Muslims, precisely because both have been targeted by violent attacks in the name of defending Buddhism.

"What these attacks will do to that relationship is also a big question."

Well yes, but it was a Muslim-inspired act that has now jeopardised that relationship. Not something that should be held against the Muslim community of Sri Lanka in general, of course - but not something that should be quietly ignored either.

Minneapolis 1905

Looking across the Mississippi. "St. Anthony's Falls and flour mills at Minneapolis." Panorama made from three 8x10 glass negatives from the Detroit Publishing Company,  at Shorpy:

[Photo: Shorpy/Detroit Publishing Company]

As ever, click to view the full-size original.

Update: also, a second panorama, to the right of this one.

Bracing for the worst

The situation in North Korea is looking increasingly grim, as sanctions bite after the failure of the Hanoi Trump summit. 

Desperate to escape the hunger and squalor at home, more North Koreans are prepared to risk the crossing into China. As a deterrent, barbed-wire fences and state-of-the-art surveillance cameras have recently been installed along the border, even as locals still labour with ox carts, and draw water from wells by hand. 

When Kim visited an airbase last week to observe the launch of a new tactical weapon, the soldiers looked alarmingly malnourished. Radio Free Asia reported that North Korean soldiers and even pilots eat meat "only on national holidays," while subsisting on corn other days.

Several rallies have been held across the country touting the revival of the "juche" or self-reliance doctrine of the nation founder as international sanctions bite.

"The purpose was to warn North Koreans to brace for the worst," a researcher with a state-run think tank here said. "North Korea hopes to ride out the storm until the end of this year."

There's also a marked increase in official efforts to root out South Korean media:

North Korean authorities are focusing all of their efforts on ensuring people do not watch South Korean dramas or movies to the extent that sources in North Korea say ordinary North Koreans invite great dangers on themselves if they do so.

“Two men in their 20s who live in Yonpung-dong, Hyesan, were watching a South Korean drama during the daytime on their computer when Group 109 agents raided their home,” a Ryanggang Province-based source told Daily NK.

“The men removed the memory stick from the computer and stashed it somewhere when they heard knocking on the door, but the Group 109 agents found the stick and arrested them on the spot. After discovering that the memory stick contained South Korean movies, dramas, and music, the agents took the two men to a local police station and interrogated them.”

Group 109 is a joint task force between local police agencies and the Ministry of State Security (MSS) aimed at suppressing the viewing and distribution of foreign movies on compact discs and flash drives. The group has recently planted agents and even created fabricated reports to catch what it deems “criminals.”

North Korean distributors of CDs or USBs with South Korean dramas can face execution. Viewers of such content generally take part in a public trial and are sent to correctional facilities. Minors are sent to “enlightenment centers” for up to six months to one year for ideological re-training.

“Relatives of the two men arrested by Group 109 sold their cell phones and prepared money to bail them out, but money alone will not likely get the men out of jail,” a separate source in Ryanggang Province added. In other words, the two men will face punishment regardless of their family’s attempts to bribe officials for leniency.

“Crackdowns on viewing or distributing South Korean dramas are nonstop these days,” she said. “Group 109 agents are actively conducting raids, but the agents themselves take the South Korean movies and dramas they’ve confiscated back home and even give them to their kids.”

Also carrots

Kuwaiti academic and therapist Dr. Mariam Al-Sohel has discovered a cure for homosexuality, based on the "Prophetic medicine" of the Prophet Muhammad. Without getting too technical, it involves the use of suppositories that kill off the anal worms which feed on semen.

How does that work?

The sexual urge develops when a person is sexually attacked, and afterwards it persists because there is an anal worm that feeds on semen.... 

So what I did was to produce suppositories which are to be used by certain people at a certain time, and it cures those urges by exterminating the worm that feeds on sperm.

There's also some dietary advice to complement the suppositories, which involves eating plenty of bitter foods and root vegetables, the consumption of which, she says, increases masculinity in men. It's all part of a comprehensive physical, psychological, spiritual, and religious program.

Suppositories are available for homosexuals of either sex - made, helpfully, in different colours. Apart from that, they're the same in every respect.

But...why on earth would female homosexuals need anal sperm-exterminating suppositories? Alas, this point was not clarified for us...

Grandma Divers

Jeju is an island off the southern tip of South Korea, where a tradition of free diving for sea-food delicacies is maintained by the Haenyeo women, or the ‘women of the sea’:

The Haenyeo tradition can be traced back to 434 A.D., but it was around the 17th century that the diving was gradually taken over by women, shaping the semi-matriarchal structure of the island. Many families are supported by income brought in by this lucrative fishing industry; men run the household and women provide for the family. The occupation is passed on early from generation to generation, and women are initiated into the culture at a young age. Centuries of accumulated knowledge and understanding of marine life are embedded in the craft—so much so that it is now part of UNESCO’s List of Intangible Cultural Heritage.

The Haenyeo are cause for inspiration in our ecologically uncertain times. The sustainable fishing practice revolves around a respect for the ocean and desire for harmonious co-existence with its rich sealife. Diving without oxygen tanks and hi-tech scuba equipment, the Haenyeo have developed their own methods for navigating the depths of the sea, which includes a breathing technique that allows them to hold their breath underwater for up to two minutes. Physically demanding and dangerous, free-diving is not for the faint of heart. Occupational hazards include facing brutal weather conditions to collect seaweed, abalone, conch and more—all year round.

Young women nowadays, unsurprisingly, are not so keen on taking up such a risky and arduous trade. It's mainly left to the old women - here photographed by Alain Schroeder:

Soon Hwa Kim, 71 years old, comes from Myeonsu-dong village. She has been diving 60 years. She has one son and daughter, but she did not encourage her daughter to follow her path because the work is too hard. She has just put on her homemade weight belt and is preparing to dive despite heavy rain. © Alain Schroeder

Anja Son, 76 years old, comes from Myeonsu-dong village. She puts her gloves on and then her hood. She has been diving for 40 years, but has never encouraged any of her children to become free-divers, as it is a difficult and dangerous profession for little gain. In fact, like most Haenyeo, she must supplement her income with other work: predominantly farming. © Alain Schroeder

Oksun Kim, 80 years old, comes from Myeonsu-dong village. She adjusts her vintage oval mask. The problem with the old-fashioned masks that they insist on using, is that they cover the nose, preventing the Haenyeo from equalizing their ears, which leads to ear barotrauma, hearing loss and migraines. The Haenyeo also regularly suffer from decompression illness, blackouts, and hypothermia. © Alain Schroeder

Wonja Kang, 83 years old comes from Myeonsu-dong village. There is no retirement age for Haenyeo. The vast majority of active Haenyeo are over the age of fifty, with many over eighty. © Alain Schroeder

Hyunsuk Oh, 65 from Seongson, shows off a giant abalone, the most precious catch this morning that she brought back in the special pouch that all Haenyeo carry in case of this rare find. While small abalone are abundant and sell well locally, larger specimens are harder to dislodge from the rocks, which often 10 meters down and require the strongest Haenyeo to hold their breath for upwards of two minutes. However, the effort will be well-rewarded, as this delicacy will likely find its way to an upscale neighborhood in Seoul, where diners are willing to spend 50,000 won (about $50) for a mouthful. © Alain Schroeder

Soon Hwa Kim, 71 years old, comes from Myeonsu-dong village. She has been diving for 60 years, catching marine delicacies such as rockfish, sea cucumber, octopus and sea urchin. She pours fresh water over and inside her wetsuit to remove it. © Alain Schroeder

Soon-ja Hong of Seongsan comes out of the water holding an octopus. She explains that she and her fellow Haenyeo set traps to catch octopuses which come in a variety of shapes and sizes. Today she was lucky to catch this large specimen. Now 69, she is at the peak of her career, it has taken Soon-ja many years to build up her endurance and fine-tune the hunting techniques that enable her to dive most efficiently. But even the most experienced divers must follow the strict rules imposed by the fishing cooperatives, including diving cycles that allow the women to work seven days on and eight days off in order to recuperate. © Alain Schroeder

Red white and green

Hackney blossom:

 

North Carolina 1939

Marion Post Wolcott.

November 1939. "Cafe next to tobacco warehouse. Mebane, Orange County, North Carolina."

November 1939. "Tobacco warehouse during auction sales in Oxford, Granville County, North Carolina."

November 1939. "Lunch stand and tobacco inside entrance to warehouse at end of auction sale. Durham, North Carolina."
[Photos: Shorpy/Marion Post Wolcott]

Jewish Harbin

The northern Chinese city of Harbin is best known outside China for its annual Ice Festival - Harbin International Ice and Snow Sculpture Festival. It's the world's largest, and regularly features in photo galleries. I've even featured it myself.

Amazingly, the city has a Jewish history. It was, indeed, largely founded by Jewish refugees from Tsarist Russia, as a key link in the Trans-Siberian railway. Dara Horn in Tablet has the full story.

At its peak, Harbin’s Jewish community numbered around 20,000. The “Old” Synagogue was built in 1909, and by 1921 there was enough demand for a “New” Synagogue a few blocks away, as well as a kosher slaughterer, ritual bath, and matzo bakery, not to mention a Jewish elementary and secondary school, a hospital, a charity kitchen, a free loan association, an old-age home, multiple magazines and newspapers, performances of Jewish music and theater, and Zionist clubs that were the center of many young people’s lives. Harbin hosted major international Zionist conferences that drew Jews from all over Asia. Zionist parades were held in the streets.

You already know this story has to end badly. Like almost every place Jews have ever lived, Harbin was great for the Jews until it wasn’t—but in Harbin, the usual centuries-long rise and fall was condensed into something like 30 years. The flood of refugees from the 1917 Russian Revolution included many non-Jewish “White” (anti-Communist) Russians, whose virulent anti-Semitism was soon institutionalized in a fascist party that burned the Old Synagogue in 1931. That was also the year the Japanese occupied Manchuria, noticed rich Jews there, and decided they wanted their money. Conveniently, White Russian thugs were ready to help....

Pink windscreen

Under the cherry tree: