Mick Hartley

West African Masquerade

Phyllis Galembo's photographs "reflect the ritual adornment and spirituality of masquerade in Nigeria, Benin and Burkina Faso in West Africa. These portraits of masqueraders build on Galembo's work of the past twenty years photographing the rituals and religious culture in Nigeria, Brazil, Cuba, Jamaica and Haiti, as well as the homegrown custom of Halloween in the United States."

Akata Dance Masqueraders, Ogoja, Nigeria, 2004:

[Photo: Phyllis Galembo]

Galembo's home page is here.

[Via]

 

Planning for Collapse

Here's a piece in the Economist looking at what can or should be done in the face of an increasingly unstable North Korea:

[T]he Cheonan incident also comes at a time when influential voices in America, China and South Korea are starting to worry that none of the countries involved has a contingency plan to cope with an even more momentous event—such as a sudden collapse of the regime. Some outspoken Chinese scholars are raising that previously taboo idea in public, albeit with caveats. Zhu Feng, professor of the School of International Studies at Peking University, told a symposium in Seoul in April that, though Mr Kim appears in control for now, a combination of his poor health, soaring inflation and a succession crisis could finish off the regime. He stressed that the risks of such an eventuality were too great to ignore and that countries needed to prepare an “emergency plan”.

The governments themselves do not, at least publicly, rate the possibility of collapse very high. South Korean officials play it down, arguing that sometimes North Korea acts illogically for no apparent reason. The North Koreans, says Wi Sung-lac, the foreign ministry’s main representative in the six-party process, “sometimes build with one hand, demolish with the other. The currency-exchange reform and its aftermath have disillusioned people. But in talking about the nature of this regime, disillusion does not make much difference.”

China’s president, Hu Jintao, speaks of passing on the two countries’ friendship “from generation to generation”—which sounds a bit as if he were extending the hand of friendship to Mr Kim’s eventual heir. Meanwhile China continues to invest in mines in North Korea and a potentially valuable docking facility in Rajin-Sonbong that gives it its first access to the Sea of Japan. As Ms Glaser of the CSIS puts it, China still sees North Korea more as a strategic asset than a liability.

If China is wrong, however, and a meltdown does occur, the risks are enormous. North Korea’s GDP per head is about 6% that of South Korea’s, which is far lower than East Germany’s was compared with West Germany when the Berlin Wall collapsed. This means that unifying the two countries could be treacherous, with costs that the South Korean central bank has put as high as $900 billion over four decades. There could be arguments over which special forces—China’s or America’s—would secure the north’s nuclear weapons. And if a desperate North Korea started shooting missiles at its enemies in the region, how would America and China react?

It is for reasons like this that people are beginning to believe that it would be good for the countries involved to have talks at some level—albeit secret ones. Planning in advance should help to avoid potentially catastrophic misunderstandings. The outside world’s knowledge of the regime in Pyongyang is minimal and China may not want to offend an old ally. But sooner or later, Mr Kim will go, and that will mark a moment of immense tension in a country where his personality cult is about the only thing the people have left.

Ensley Steel

The Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Co.'s steel works at Ensley, Alabama, 1906:

[Photo: Shorpy/Detroit Publishing Company - cropped]

Full size here. 

The Ensley site was finally shut down in 1976. Here's what it looks like now (scroll down past the photos of the Muscoda Mines).

Ensley was also photographed by Bernd and Hilla Becher, the ground-breaking photographers of the typology of industrial buildings - here in 1982, for instance - though sadly there's nothing on the web remotely comparable to the quality of their work in print.

Lack of Outrage

It's interesting that of the five South Koreans interviewed here by the BBC about the repercussions of the Cheonan sinking, three were sceptical of the official conclusion that North Korea was responsible. Student Gyuhang Kim, for instance:

I and many others suspect the South Korean government of deliberately accusing North Korea, even of making up the proof.

We are well aware of the anti-North Korean sentiment of the government and do not trust the official report at all.

The mark "number 1" on the front part of the torpedo cannot survive such a blow. Some news sites doubting the reliability of the proof have been shut down for no reason and we suspect government censorship.

I also think the government is ruining years of hard work of former presidents, especially Kim Dae-jung, who have worked so hard to take a first step towards reunification.

Not only has President Lee Myung-bak destroyed years of efforts for reunification but he is also endangering South Korea's economy and civilians by risking a war with the North - the prelude to a nuclear or third world war.

Rumours are spreading about the cause of the sinking of the ship - such as a possible mistake with an American submarine during a joint exercise, which was covered up by the South Korean government in order to discredit North Korea. 

Conspiracy theories are to be expected, no doubt - but from 60% of the population? It all rather ties in with this pre-Cheonan article on the general apathy in South Korea about the issue of North Korean atrocities, with a former inmate of the gulag system like Kang Cheol-hwan, author of The Aquariums of Pyongyang, reporting that many of the South Koreans he spoke to refused to believe such prison camps existed.

Now here's B.R.Myers (via), on South Korea's collective shrug:

Up until the late 1980s, right-wing governments resorted to North Korea scares so often that many people now refuse to believe any stories about the regime, no matter how overwhelming the evidence. If President Lee thought he could allay doubts with an especially thorough investigation into the sinking, he was mistaken. Left-wing newspapers now accuse him of postponing the announcement of the investigation’s results to exert maximum influence on next week’s regional elections.

It would be unfair to characterize these skeptics as pro-Pyongyang, but there is more sympathy for North Korea here than foreigners commonly realize. As a university student in West Berlin in the 1980s, I had a hard time finding even a Marxist with anything nice to say about East Germany. In South Korea, however, the North’s human rights abuses are routinely shrugged off with reference to its supposedly superior nationalist credentials. One often hears, for example, the mistaken claim that Mr. Kim’s father, Kim Il-sung, purged his republic of former Japanese collaborators, in alleged contrast to the morally tainted South....

South Korean nationalism is something quite different from the patriotism toward the state that Americans feel. Identification with the Korean race is strong, while that with the Republic of Korea is weak. (Kim Jong-il has a distinct advantage here: his subjects are more likely to equate their state with the race itself.) Thus few South Koreans feel personally affected by the torpedo attack.

Besides, Koreans in both the North and the South tend to cherish the myth that of all peoples in the world, they are the least inclined to premeditated evil. The sinking of the Cheonan is widely viewed here as an almost spontaneous byproduct of inter-Korean tension — a regrettable aberration that should not be made too much of. The left attributes the recent increase of tension to President Lee’s rejection of his predecessors’ accommodationist Sunshine Policy. Yet even the conservative news media talk of the attack in terms of an “error” that the North should own up to, not a cold-blooded act. Students in my classes tend to refer to the sinking as an “accident.”

This urge to give the North Koreans the benefit of the doubt is in marked contrast to the public fury that erupted after the killings of two South Korean schoolgirls by an American military vehicle in 2002; it was widely claimed that the Yankees murdered them callously. During the street protests against American beef imports in the wake of a mad cow disease scare in 2008, posters of a child-poisoning Uncle Sam were all the rage. It is illuminating to compare those two anti-American frenzies with the small and geriatric protests against Pyongyang that have taken place in Seoul in recent weeks.

Nazi Sheikhs

After Hitchens' take on Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Tariq Ramadan, here's a lengthy interview at Guernica with author Paul Berman, covering Hirsi Ali, Ramadan, Sheikh Qarawadi, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood Hassan al-Banna, and Nazi ally Palestinian Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini:

[T]he whole political project that comes out of him [the Mufti] and out of al-Banna has victimized the Palestinians by instructing the Palestinians that they are in a supernatural struggle against demonic enemies. If you think that you are in a struggle with human beings and recognize that while you have needs other people also have needs, then you’re in a political situation. And the natural thing to do when you’re in a political situation is to strike a compromise. But this has not been the line that has come out of the Mufti and al-Banna. The line has been that it’s a religious struggle of Islam trying to prevent satanic Jews from exterminating Islam and that the only way to deal with it is to exterminate the supernaturally evil Jews. So the struggle is a religious and supernatural struggle. It becomes impossible to compromise, and becomes possible to think one’s own suicide might be an appropriate response because we’re in the realm of the eternal and the supernatural. So it prevents people from being able to make compromises and leads them to think that murder and suicide are principles that must never be yielded. The Hamas charter is the perfect example. It begins with a little quotation from the Koran, a quotation from al-Banna calling for the elimination or obliteration of Israel (it’s translated in different ways) then it goes on to cite the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which is a fundamentally Nazi document, then in Article 7 it draws a quotation from one of the scriptural traditions which would seem to call for extermination of the Jews.

As always with Berman, the whole piece is worth reading.

Syria and the Jews

"The front pages of Syria's largest newspapers, state-controlled of course, always had a story inciting hate against Israel, whether there was actual news to report on or not. I remember the day that the Hurva Synagogue was re-dedicated in the Jewish Quarter of the old city of Jerusalem, a day dubbed by the Syrian press as a "day of rage," portraying the re-dedication as one more step to destroying the Al-Aqsa Mosque. Nowhere was it ever mentioned that the synagogue was twice destroyed in over 200 years by Arabs and that it was in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City. My Arabic tutor, brilliant and politically savvy, yet a very traditional Sunni, was the most outraged out of anyone I had met. He spent an entire lesson, two-and-a-half hours, lecturing me on the Torah and the Talmud, which he claimed to have read, and outlined the Elders' of Zion plot to control the world and dominate the Arabs. In one sentence he both denied the Holocaust and affirmed it in order to use it to compare Palestinian suffering.

From An American Jew in Damascus (via Michael J Totten). Also posted at Solomonia.

Ida Red

A while back we had Spade Cooley, self-proclaimed King of Western Swing. Now here's the real deal - Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys, from 1951:

No great shakes to look at, but those boys sure could play...

Animals of London

Red cow:

Brown elephant:

The elephant, by City Hall, is part of Elephant Parade 2010. The Red Cow's by Borough Market.
 

A Pavement Somewhere in Russia

I love the jaunty Chaplinesque walk of the man here (via):



....and his just-in-time reactions.

Hitchens on Hirsi Ali and Tariq Ramadan

Another Hitchens link - and why not? This time, with the publication of Paul Berman's "Flight of the Intellectuals", and Ayaan Hirsi Ali's "Nomad", he compares reactions to Hirsi Ali and to Tariq Ramadan, the subject of Berman's book:

“Look here upon this picture, and on this …” In the left frame, a privileged young Swiss-Egyptian academic, whose father and grandfather were pillars of the Muslim Brotherhood and who has expressed strong sympathy for the jihadist preachings—and social and moral precepts—of Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, purveyor of fatwas and self-described “Mufti of martyrdom operations.” In the right frame, a young woman from Somalia who has endured genital mutilation and forced marriage, made her escape to Europe, spoken out for the rights of women, seen a colleague of hers murdered for the same advocacy, abandoned religion for the values of the European enlightenment, and now conducts her life under permanent police protection.

Which of these two individuals garners the most respectful attention from our liberal intellectuals?  [...]

“Look here upon this picture, and on this …” Which one needs police protection and which one is the darling of the PEN petitioners and the liberal academy? Which one is opposed to theocracy—the original form of totalitarianism—and which one is a stealth apologist for it? Most of all, perhaps, which one deserves the vague yet never quite neutral title of “fundamentalist”? The answers to these questions will help us to understand the impasse of cultural masochism to which we have brought ourselves, and perhaps also point the way out of it.