Mick Hartley

The Laogai

From a review in the THES (subscriber only) of "The Great Wall of Confinement: The Chinese Prison Camp through Contemporary Fiction and Reportage":

Always in need of external enemies to deflect attention away from the misery it creates for its own people, the Communist Party of China never tires of portraying their country as a victim of imperialist aggression, Japan being a prime target. Yet even the large number of casualties suffered during the Japanese invasion of 1937-45 pales in comparison to the six to 10 million deaths caused by the communist regime, not including the many millions of deaths in labour camps and the 30 to 40 million deaths during the Great Leap Forward.

The Communist Party of China easily ranks as one of the most murderous regimes in history, but the published work on its labour camps is dwarfed by the vast, detailed and varied scholarship that has become available on the Soviet Union's gulag since 1991. Jean-Luc Domenach's monumental /L'Archipel Oublié/, published in 1992, remains unsurpassed and untranslated, its title still sadly apt in describing a state of voluntary amnesia among admirers of the so-called economic reforms introduced since Deng Xiaoping came to power - even as China is the only major world power to have entered the 21st century with a huge concentration camp system, that swallows up tens of thousands of its people without any legal recourse. [...]

Wisely departing from studies that rely on interviews with camp survivors or official statistics, the authors succeed in giving a human dimension to the /laogai/ by making critical use of a genre that has thrived since the death of Mao, namely prison literature. Many popular memoirs and novels, significant enough by the mid-1980s to be known as "prison wall literature", are specifically written on the post-Mao era, offering illuminating insights into the grim reality of everyday life in the /laogai/, a place that most visitors to glittering Shanghai would not even suspect existed. The torture of prisoners, for instance, had not abated in the 1990s. Many types of physical punishment go straight back to imperial practice from which communist rhetoric is so keen to distance itself - for instance, "hanging a chicken by its
feet", where an inmate's wrists are tied behind his back and support the full weight of the body as he is suspended from the rafters of a building, the arms being pulled out of the shoulder sockets. Modern technology, including the shock baton, is also popular, as most prisoners go through one form of torture or another.

(Thanks Anthony)

Dr Wank Explains

An interesting article in the Times, on the possibility of a link between the chlamydia virus and schizophrenia. Remember when schizophrenia was a sort of existential scream of anguish against the hypocrisies of the bourgeois family? Ha.

Chlamydia is already known to cause considerable human misery. Not only is one strain of the micro-organism responsible for Britain’s “epidemic” of sexually transmitted disease, but another variant can cause a serious respiratory-tract infection similar to Sars.

Now comes the surprising finding by a German research team that chlamydia may be linked with schizophrenia. Dr Rudolf Wank, an immunologist at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich, has reported recently that schizophrenic patients are much more likely to be infected with one or more variants of chlamydia. More importantly, he found that targeting the bug with specially treated immune cells improved the patients’ symptoms dramatically.

About 40 per cent of the 75 patients he studied were infected with chlamydia, compared with 6 per cent in the control group (ie, people who did not have schizophrenia). As Dr Wank explains: “Chlamydia comes in three varieties, two of which can cause a flu-like respiratory infection or pneumonia, while the third causes the sexually transmitted disease. The patients were much more likely to have one or more of these.” The team also found that the risk of developing schizophrenia rose dramatically for patients with a certain group of immune system genes.

Not Vietnam

Charles Krauthammer on why Iraq isn't Vietnam:

For all the Vietnam nostalgia at the Washington march, things are different today. In Vietnam it could never be plausibly argued that Ho Chi Minh was training commandos to bring down skyscrapers in New York. Today, however, Americans know that this is precisely what our jihadist enemies have pledged to do.

Moreover, Vietnam offered a seeming middle way between immediate withdrawal on the one hand and staying the course on the other: negotiations, which in the end did take place. Today there is no one to negotiate with, no middle ground, not even an apparent plausible compromise. The only choices are to succeed in establishing a self-sufficient, democratic Iraq or to call an abject retreat that not only gives Iraq over to the tender mercies of people who specialize in blowing up innocents but also makes it a base of operations for worldwide jihad.

The very fact that Cindy Sheehan and her WWP comrades are so enthusiastic for the latter outcome tells you how difficult it will be to turn widespread discontent about the war into a mainstream antiwar movement.

Blue Guitarists

I was going to offer some kind of defence of Alan Johnson's 'Hideously White' list of guitarists, but I see it's all been settled amicably. Still, it got me thinking.

I'm old enough to remember that whole 'Can Blue Men Sing the Whites' business, when blacks (American blacks) were supposed to have a special connection to The Blues, presumably from some race memory of picking all that cotton. Looking back you can see that it's more like, only blacks had (for a while) the moral authority to play the blues. I still have a bit of that: I never rated Clapton all that highly, and cling to the belief that there were loads of black guitarists who could have blown any of those white boys away. Buddy Guy, Albert Collins, Johnny 'Guitar' Watson, Albert King.... The best live guitar I ever saw was BB King back in the Seventies. No fancy fret work - just sheer almost unbearable emotion.

So....rock music (a white music) took up the electric guitar from the blues giants: Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker and the rest, via Clapton and Keith Richards (and Hendrix of course), and it became a defining feature of the music, reaching some kind of ghastly apotheosis in heavy metal's screaming volume-turned-to-11 solos. But black music went off in a different direction. Soul, funk, rap. Loads of guitars, but no guitar heroes. They were just part of the band, or, more likely, session musicians, part of the rhythm section. With, say, James Brown, the horns featured more than the guitars. I can name Maceo Parker on sax, but can't think of the name of any guitarists in his bands. Even the bass player ( Bootsy for instance, the funkiest man on the planet) or the drummer, featured more than the guitarists.

So really, it seems to me, if you wanted to come up with a list of electric guitar moments as a way of sticking two fingers up to some clerical buffoon, then you might well, if you're looking at recent music, come up with just such a 'hideously white' list as Alan's. But for me, I'd go back to the blues masters. That was as good as the electric guitar ever got.

AIDS Less Powerful?

Good news about AIDS doesn't come by very often, so this is worth noting, even though the findings are highly tentative:

The virus which causes Aids may be getting less powerful, researchers say. A team at the Institute of Tropical Medicine, in Antwerp, compared HIV-1 samples from 1986-89 and 2002-03.

They found the newer samples appeared not to multiply as well, and were more sensitive to drugs - some other studies argue they are becoming more resistant. [...]

Dr Marco Vitoria, an HIV expert at the World Health Organization, said other diseases - such as smallpox, TB and syphilis - had shown the same tendency to weaken over time.

"There is a natural trend to reach an 'equilibrium' between the agent and the host interests, in order to guarantee concomitant survival for a longer time," he said.

However, Dr Vitoria stressed that the latest findings should not lull people into a false sense of security.

"This kind of change cannot be adequately measured in years, but in generations," he told the BBC News website.

He also questioned whether it was possible to draw firm conclusions from such a small study.

A Foreign Invasion

But (moving on from the previous post), according to Amir Taheri, some Sunnis are backing away from the jihadists:

Most Iraqi politicians now expect the constitution to be approved; fears have faded that Sunni Arabs might manage to vote it down. The optimism rises from several developments.

First, as more and more Sunni Arabs read the proposed text, now widely distributed, they realize it is not as bad as some of their self-styled leaders claimed. The latest suicide-killer attacks have also come as a wake-up call to Sunnis not to let terrorists provoke a sectarian war.

A passionate plea for national unity came Sept. 16 from Sheik Mahmoud al-Sumaidaei, the spiritual leader of Sunni Arabs. Speaking at the Um al-Qura Mosque in Baghdad, al-Sumaidaei called for a national conference to find a common strategy against terror. "We don't need others to come across the border and kill us in the name of defending us," he said, a reference to Arab terrorists who have joined the insurgency under the banner of al Qaeda. "We reject the killing of any Iraqi."

Almost at the same time, a suicide-bomber, who turned out to be a Saudi, killed 12 worshippers at a mosque in Tuz Khormato, north of Baghdad. All those killed were Turcomans, proving al-Sumdaidaei's contention that the terrorists had embarked on a campaign of indiscriminate massacre.

The parading of captured Arab terrorists on TV has brought home another truth: The "insurgency" is mainly a foreign invasion by forces that wish to impose on Iraq a Taliban-style government. "The insurgency has nothing to do with Iraqis," says Adnan al-Dulaimi, a prominent Sunni Arab tribal chief and political leader. "[The terrorists] chased out of Afghanistan want to set up shop in Iraq."

Sowing Ruin in Iraq

Fascinating article by Fouad Ajami from the WSJ (via lgf), on Arab silence to the chaos that Zarqawi and his jihadists are inflicting on Iraq:

Zarqawi's war, it has to be conceded, is not his alone; he kills and maims, he labels the Shiites rafida (rejecters of Islam), he charges them with treason as "collaborators of the occupiers and the crusaders," but he can be forgiven the sense that he is a holy warrior on behalf of a wider Arab world that has averted its gaze from his crimes, that has given him its silent approval. He and the band of killers arrayed around him must know the meaning of this great Arab silence. [...]

It was the luck of the imperial draw that the American project in Iraq came to the rescue of the Shiites--and of the Kurds. We may not fully appreciate the historical change we unleashed on the Arab world, but we have given liberty to the stepchildren of the Arab world. We have overturned an edifice of material and moral power that dates back centuries. The Arabs railing against U.S. imperialism and arrogance in Iraq will never let us in on the real sources of their resentments. In the way of "modern" men and women with some familiarity with the doctrines of political correctness, they can't tell us that they are aggrieved that we have given a measure of self-worth to the seminarians of Najaf and the highlanders of Kurdistan. But that is precisely what gnaws at them.

An edifice of Arab nationalism built by strange bedfellows--the Sunni political and bureaucratic elites, and the Christian Arab pundits who abetted them in the idle hope that they would be spared the wrath of the street and of the mob--was overturned in Iraq. And America, at times ambivalent about its mission, brought along with its military gear a suspicion of the Shiites, a belief that the Iraqi Shiites were an extension of Iran, a community destined to build a sister-republic of the Iranian theocracy. Washington has its cadre of Arabists reared on Arab nationalist historiography. This camp had a seat at the table, but the very scale of what was at play in Iraq, and the redemptionism at the heart of George Bush's ideology, dwarfed them.

For the Arab enemies of this project of rescue, this new war in Iraq was a replay of an old drama: the fall of Baghdad to the Mongols in 1258. In the received history, the great city of learning, the capital of the Abbasid Caliphate, had fallen to savages, and an age of greatness had drawn to a close. In the legend of that tale, the Mongols sacked the metropolis, put its people to the sword, dumped the books of its libraries in the Tigris. That river, chroniclers insist, flowed, alternately, with the blood of the victims and the ink of the books. It is a tale of betrayal, the selective history maintains. A minister of the caliph, a Shiite by the name of Ibn Alqami, opened the gates of Baghdad to the Mongols. History never rests here, and telescopes easily: In his call for a new holy war against the Shiites, Zarqawi dredges up that history, dismisses the Shiite-led government as "the government of Ibn Alqami's descendants." Zarqawi knows the power of this symbolism, and its dark appeal to Sunni Arabs within Iraq.

Zarqawi's jihadists have sown ruin in Iraq, but they are strangers to that country, and they have needed the harbor given them in the Sunni triangle and the indulgence of the old Baathists. For the diehards, Iraq is now a "stolen country" delivered into the hands of subject communities unfit to rule. Though a decided minority, the Sunni Arabs have a majoritarian mindset and a conviction that political dominion is their birthright. Instead of encouraging a break with the old Manichaean ideologies, the Arab world beyond Iraq feeds this deep-seated sense of historical entitlement."

French Anti-Terrorism

From the Scotsman:

Security is to be tightened in France after allegations that a group of nine suspected Islamic militants arrested on Monday had been plotting a terrorist attack on a high-profile target in Paris.

The seven men and two women, who had been under observation by anti-terrorist investigators for two years, are suspected of planning an attack on the Metro, a Paris airport or the headquarters of the DST, the French domestic intelligence agency.

It is not clear if police were acting on intelligence of an imminent threat to national security when they carried out the arrests, but the interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, warned yesterday that the risk of a terrorist attack was currently "at a very high level".

Mr Sarkozy used the news of the arrests to unveil a new anti-terror plan in which he pledged to increase the number of CCTV cameras on the streets, in airports, at train stations and near shops and banks.

Quoi? This is clearly a pretext by Sarkozy to bring in more big-brother style intrusion: as any fule kno, the French, not having any troops in Iraq, are immune from these attacks.

Like A Rolling Stone

It's one of the great rock music stories - almost like a founding myth: Dylan's astonishing transformation over a few short years in the mid-Sixties from nothing, via protest singer and voice-of-a-generation, to electric shaman making a kind of music that no one had ever heard before. Scorsese's "No Direction Home" reinforces the point. And nothing symbolises the key transformation better than the concerts where he played a first half acoustic, then came out in the second half with his band to boos and the infamous "Judas" cry, and blasted them all into silence. It was history in the making.

Not surprisingly, most of those who recalled the concerts on the BBC website have put themselves on the right side of history, and remember being bowled over by it all. Well, someone must have been doing the booing, but you can hardly blame people for the way their memories kind of play tricks. It'd be like admitting to condemning Picasso when he first started exhibiting all that Cubist stuff: of course you liked it, it just took a while to adjust to it, that's all.

Rock music fans, and rock critics especially, have always been highly sensitive to the idea of "getting it". Some people got Bowie when he first appeared; some didn't. Some people got the Pistols, or Devo, or the Cure, or whatever: others, the terminally unhip, didn't. Much of the dynamic of rock music has been driven by the need to carve out a new style where only the few understood, after the old styles became too popular. A familiar refrain about the music is that it's now dead because there just aren't the rebels out there any more, fire in their bellies, willing to trash the old and usher in the new. If you can't have permanent revolution in the streets, then at least you should be able to get it over the speakers. And then there's all this stuff about selling out, and authenticity. Funny how much of it goes back to Dylan - originally castigated as a sell-out, and then triumphantly turning the tables so that he comes to represent the original lone genius following his muse against the small-minded tyranny of expectation.

I can't help thinking that's part of the reason why "Like A Rolling Stone" is always voted Dylan's greatest song, and the no. 1 rock song of all time: because it's a blast at the unhip, at those who don't get it, at the inauthentic. Say you love "Like A Rolling Stone" and you're there, on the right side, laughing at those poor fools who don't understand.

And nobody has ever taught you how to live on the street And now you find out you're gonna have to get used to it

Yeah, that's telling 'em! All of us rock music lovers, we know all about living on the streets! Don't we?

Personally Scorsese's film made me feel less sympathetic to Dylan-the-visionary, and more to his critics. I'm not belittling his achievement: I still think his albums "Bringing It All Back Home", "Highway 61 Revisited", and "Blonde on Blonde" are works of genius, but from the snatches of concert we saw when he was being booed for introducing this stuff, his singing was more like sneering. Not one live version, for me, came near to the recorded versions I'm familiar with. After acoustic stuff like Mr Tambourine Man or Desolation Row, I can understand why people might have been less than thrilled to listen to a full decibel Like A Rolling Stone where they couldn't understand a word he was singing but got the general feeling that he was mocking - and maybe it was them, the poor earnest saps in the audience, that his contempt was aimed at. The guy was on an amphetamine-fueled ego-trip. And that Newport Folk Festival business - well, it was a folk festival, wasn't it? It was fairly insensitive of him, to put it mildly, to turn up and play his new stuff at full volume. Of course a massive self-belief pulled him through and made him what he was, but to get there he had to be a bastard at times.

Still, a great way to spend a few hours. Some of the interviews were wonderful. Difficult not to warm to Dave Van Ronk (who died a couple of years back), and Al Kooper was great. Dylan himself though? I don't know. He didn't say all that much, but it was good to see him saying anything at all.

Industrial Ruins

Wonderful photographs (via Metafilter) of old industrial landscapes, by German photographer Harald Finster. Some of my favourites, after a brief look around, here, here, here, here, here, or, in colour, here. But really, if you like this kind of stuff, you can't lose.

Of course (I say of course here to indicate my familiarity with this field....oh yes!) the doyens of this type of industrial photography are husband and wife Bernd and Hilla Becher (examples here and here, but I can't find much on-line). Their books of photographs are published by MIT, and don't come cheap. I'd recommend their "Blast Furnaces" (no really) - absolutely stunning, though I suppose it's something of a minority taste. Maybe you need to have been brought up in an industrial area (for me, Sheffield) to go for this kind of thing.