Mick Hartley

Intermission

Off for a week. Back Saturday June 2nd.

I Want To Be Evil

Eartha Kitt was such a unique performer - such a one-off - that she often seemed to be in danger of becoming a caricature of herself. My main early memory of her is Just an Old Fashioned Girl, which to be honest I always found a bit too mannered. She is very much an acquired taste.

OK, this is mannered too, but it's fun and witty, and she performs it so beautifully. From her 1953 album That Bad Eartha.

Quite a career:

Kitt's unique style was enhanced as she became fluent in French during her years performing in Europe. She spoke four languages (she is thought to have learnt German and Dutch from her step father, English from her mother, and French from the European cabaret circuit) and sang in eleven, which she effortlessly demonstrated in many of the live recordings of her cabaret performances.

She could dance too.

And we mustn't forget "The White House Incident":

In January 1968, during Lyndon B. Johnson's administration, Kitt encountered a substantial professional setback after she made anti-war statements during a White House luncheon. Kitt was asked by Lady Bird Johnson about the Vietnam War. She replied: "You send the best of this country off to be shot and maimed. No wonder the kids rebel and take pot." During a question and answer session, Kitt stated:

"The children of America are not rebelling for no reason. They are not hippies for no reason at all. We don't have what we have on Sunset Blvd. for no reason. They are rebelling against something. There are so many things burning the people of this country, particularly mothers. They feel they are going to raise sons – and I know what it's like, and you have children of your own, Mrs. Johnson – we raise children and send them to war."

Her remarks reportedly caused Mrs. Johnson to burst into tears and led to a derailment in Kitt's career.

Following the incident, Kitt found herself unemployable, so she devoted her energies to performances in Europe and Asia. It is said that Kitt's career in the United States was ended following her comments about the Vietnam War, after which she was branded "a sadistic nymphomaniac" by the CIA.

"Evil", then, but not quite in the way she intended.

We are all slaves to the Jews here

Further to those antisemitic cartoons from a Turkish newspaper, here's Turkish political commentator Hüseyin Güneş with the same message:

"Here, in Turkey, there are about thirty thousand [Jews]. In Iran too, there are about thirty thousand Jews. But we are all slaves to the Jews here. We work for them. They control us economically.  […]

"During World War I, the Jews who were born here or who settled here left Turkey and fought against the Ottoman Empire. Even in Gallipoli, the Jews fought with the English against the Turkish soldiers. Many Turks were martyred by them. The Jews fought us. You know that they have been traitors throughout history."

Into something very different

Labour MP Ian Austin sums up exactly why Jeremy Corbyn should never have been elected to the leadership of the Labour Party:

The fact is that Labour has never in its history had a leadership as far to the left as this one. Never. And whilst Marxism has always been an important strand of thought for some in the party, previous Labour chancellors would never have said they were working to “overthrow capitalism” as John McDonnell did or when asked to name the “most significant” influences on his thought, reply: “The fundamental Marxist writers of Marx, Lenin and Trotsky, basically.”  [...]

Previous Labour leaders fought the hard-left. Neil Kinnock battled to expel Militant, Jeremy Corbyn campaigned against their exclusion, was the “provisional convenor” of the “Defeat the Witch Hunt” campaign and said: “If expulsions are in order for Militant, they should apply to us, too”.

It’s the same story abroad. No previous Labour leadership would have supported totalitarian dictatorships in Cuba or Venezuela, echoed the Russian dictatorship’s line on Ukraine or have taken money from the Iranian dictatorship’s official state broadcaster.

No previous Labour Leader would have repeated Kremlin conspiracy theories when Russia was trying to kill people on the streets of the UK

No previous Labour leader would have defended a grotesque racist caricature or failed to deal properly with the anti-semitism crisis.

No previous Labour leadership would have invited "friends" from Hamas and Hezbollah to an event in Parliament, praised as a “very honoured citizen” someone like Raed Salah who had been found by a British court judge to have used the antisemitic “blood libel”, or defended someone like Stephen Sizer, a vicar disciplined by the Church of England which said he spread ideas which were ‘clearly anti-Semitic’.

And no previous Labour leader would have chaired the so-called Stop the War coalition which actually praised what it said was the “internationalism and solidarity” of ISIS, and compared it to the International Brigades, supported what it called the Iraqi “struggle” against British troops “by any means necessary”, said that it stood with Saddam Hussein, compared Assad to Churchill, and promoted or provided a platform for Assad apologists.

The truth is that Jeremy Corbyn and the hard left have taken over the Labour Party and want to turn it from a mainstream social democratic party into something very different.

The Perrys

Martin Parr's portrait of the Perry family - Grayson, Philippa and daughter Florence - London, 2012:

[Photo © Martin Parr / Magnum Photos / Rocket Gallery]

From a Parr gallery, announcing his show Only Human at the National Portrait Gallery next year.

I've spared you Dame Vivienne Westwood posing by a toilet.

A distinct and perpetual category of international refugee

Last week Terry Glavin wrote about Israel's moral  dilemma in dealing with the Hamas strategy of sending its young people on suicide missions on the border fence:

If Hamas persists in luring Palestinians to martyrdom at the Gaza fence, the IDF’s rules of engagement – first shoot to warn, then shoot to wound, then shoot to kill – become morally untenable. An abomination.

It is not right, or fair, but this is the dilemma, and it is Israel’s dilemma to resolve.

In response, his (Canadian) National Post colleague Barbara Kay took issue - especially with that word "abomination":

“Abomination” is not a word I would ever use for any engagement with enemy forces undertaken in a democratic nation whose military, made up of ordinary citizens, comes out of a culture in which respect for human life is legendary. As Col. Richard Kemp, former commander of British forces in Afghanistan, who has made a close study of IDF policies and techniques of asymmetric warfare, has said: “I have fought in combat zones around the world including Northern Ireland, Bosnia, Macedonia and Iraq. I was also present throughout the conflict in Gaza in 2014. Based on my experience and on my observations: the Israel Defense Force, the IDF, does more to safeguard the rights of civilians in a combat zone than any other army in the history of warfare.”

Illuminating the validity of Col. Kemp’s statement, the Monday edition of the Wall Street Journal published an op ed by Israeli Brig. Ronen Manelis, spokesman for the IDF, titled “The Truth about Hamas and Israel.” In it Manelis reveals the depths of Hamas cynicism. Hamas provided free transportation to the security fence for all Gazans, including women and children. They were paid $14 a head or $100 per family to attend. The injured received $500. That’s pretty abominable. So’s this: Hamas gave everyone with a video camera VIP access to “the show,” and free wifi too to make sure no injury went unrecorded (both real and fake: one video shows an “injured” victim borne away on a stretcher hopping off completely unscathed when presumably out of camera range.)

According to Manelis, the “protest” theme was a complete fabrication: “The IDF had precise intelligence that the violent riots were masking a plan of mass infiltration into Israel in order to carry out a massacre against Israeli civilians.” Hamas operatives were dressed as civilians. On Facebook Hamas had posted maps for operatives indicating the fastest route from the border to nearby Israeli homes, schools and daycare centres. That’s abominable....

But yeah, Hamas is winning the propaganda war, and the proof is that even a seasoned and objective journalist like Terry Glavin is so frustrated with the human cost of this reckless, feckless and essentially futile act of jihad, that he’s essentially asking Israel to find a way to stop it, as if there were some magical, casualty-free solution the IDF could employ, if only it chose to, in defending a border against a rabid mass of suicide-prone enemies.

And now Glavin replies in turn. It's not necessary to take sides in this - they're on the same side - to appreciate what he has to say:

There is something about Israel that seems to make people lose their damn minds....

It is a kind of craziness that is ubiquitous, too, within several United Nations’ agencies, most notably and paradoxically the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, but also in the very existence of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine. UNRWA sets the descendants of the Arabs tragically displaced by Israel’s war of national liberation 70 years ago into a distinct and perpetual category of international refugee, quite apart from the jurisdiction of the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. UNRWA’s entire raison d’etre gives every impression of being grounded in the delusion that the Jewish state of Israel is merely a temporary, racist, colonial settler state aberration which will one day just vanish, allowing the five million or so Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza to throng joyfully, at long last, through the streets of a Judenrein Tel Aviv...

Reunification is their number one goal

Rupert Wingfield-Hayes has put together a BBC piece - The King of Pyongyang - which is well worth a read, and provides a useful primer on North Korea in general, and on Kim Jong-un in particular. 

A snippet:

There is a widely held view that North Korea’s nuclear weapons are defensive - that the Kim dynasty watched the fall of Saddam Hussein and then Colonel Gaddafi and decided that nukes are the only sure way of preventing US-led “regime change”.

Critics of that view say neither Kim Jong-un, nor his father, ever needed ICBMs to protect themselves. One is Prof Brian Myers of Dongseo University in Busan. In a recent speech to the Royal Asiatic Society, he said: “Our inability to stop this regime from acquiring nuclear weapons shows they were never vital to its security. If a North Korea without them were as vulnerable as Libya without them, it would have been bombed by 1998 at the latest.”

The reason that didn’t happen is South Korea’s extreme vulnerability to counter-attack. The capital, Seoul, lies only 50km from the DMZ, well within North Korean artillery range.

So if you were to accept Kim’s nuclear missiles aren’t needed for defence, what are they for? The answer according to Duyeon Kim is to achieve so-called decoupling - stopping the US from coming to South Korea’s aid if and when Pyongyang decides it’s time to “reunify”.

“Based on the North's public statements and their actions and their private comments, it appears that the nuclear weapons are for both deterrence and for potential use in forceful unification. That's something that they've talked about openly and in private.”

Myers agrees Kim’s nuclear weapons are about unification, but not necessarily by force.

“North Korea needs the capability to strike the US with nuclear weapons in order to pressure both adversaries into signing peace treaties. This is the only grand bargain it has ever wanted.

“The treaty with Washington would require the withdrawal of US troops from the peninsula. The next step, as Pyongyang has often explained, would be some form of the North–South confederation it has advocated since 1960. One would have to be very naive not to know what would happen next.”

The idea that poor, backward North Korea could impose unification on a modern, wealthy and militarily more advanced South appears preposterous, and maybe it is. But Bradley K Martin says, however unlikely, it remains Pyongyang’s objective.

“I have always believed reunification is their number one goal,” he says. “Many people say they gave up on it long ago - they know they can’t do it. Those people underestimate the confidence you can build if you have the attention of a whole people. If you are running the propaganda system in a one-man dictatorship you can convince people they can do anything.”

For more on the flawed Libya analogy, see Joshua Stanton.

Oklahoma 1939

Russell Lee, for the Farm Security Administration:

July 1939. Oklahoma City. "Shacks, tents, other makeshift shelter in May Avenue camp, which is partially under bridge and adjacent to city dump and hog wallow. Photographs show squalor, filth and vermin in which poverty-stricken inhabitants dwell. Water supplied by shallow wells and water peddler. Piles of rubbish and debris in which children and adults have injured feet. Privies. Families eating food from vegetable dumps, packinghouses and discarded from hospital. Children clothed in gunny sacks. Malnourished babies. Sick people. Cooking, washing, ironing, patching. Improvised chicken coop. Corn patch."

July 1939. Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. "Children of May Avenue camp family in small shack used as sleeping quarters. Poverty-stricken inhabitants here dwell in squalor, filth and vermin."

August 1939. "Home and family of oil field roustabout in Oklahoma City. During periods of unemployment the woman takes in washing and ironing."

July 1939. "Bed with roof over it in May Avenue camp, Oklahoma City."

July 1939. "Shack of family living in May Avenue camp, Oklahoma City."

August 1939. "Independent refinery. Oklahoma City, Oklahoma."

July 1939. "Tent home of family living in community camp. Oklahoma City."

July 1939. Oklahoma City. "Children taking bath in their home in May Avenue community camp." 

July 1939. "Woman living in camp near May Avenue, Oklahoma City. Her husband has been denied work relief. He is a world war veteran."

July 1939. "Detail of square dance in hills near McAlester, Pittsburg County, Oklahoma. Sharecropper's home."
[Photos: Shorpy/Russell Lee for the Farm Security Administration]

Hiding the nukes

Interesting - though speculative, of course. From the Daily NK:

The North Korean government has named Chagang Province a “Special Songun (military-first) Revolutionary Zone” and has reportedly created plans to designate the province a strategic region for the military. The region is mountainous, and harbors ideal terrain in which to conceal the country’s nuclear weapons. 

North Korea has widely publicized its intent to shut down the country’s nuclear program as demanded by the international community. This intent has been exemplified by an event scheduled for May 23 to close its nuclear site in Kilju, North Hamgyong Province, prior to the planned US-DPRK summit. There have been reports, however, that the North Korean authorities are making efforts to conceal the country’s nuclear weapons and associated material....

Chagang Province has over 98% of its area covered by mountains. This renders it largely unsuitable for traditional industry, but North Korea has developed military-related industries in the province for strategic reasons.

The province is located on the border with China, and there are reportedly underground tunnels in which high-level North Korean officials, including Kim Jong Un, can escape across the border. There are also archives containing material on the Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong Il and Kim Jong Un regimes in underground bunkers in the region.

“Nuclear weapons can be hidden anywhere, but the North Korean authorities have chosen, it seems, a place where even satellites will have difficulty locating them,” a source in Chagang Province said.

“Hiding the nuclear weapons and material there also means the authorities plan to store them in a highly contained facility.”

The North Korean authorities have already created airtight plans for storage, according to the source. The government is focusing on a plan to strengthen the ideological background of residents in the region to prevent any secrets from leaking to the outside world. The authorities also appear to be preventing free movement in the province as the area becomes fortified.

Trump, meanwhile, is casting doubt over the forthcoming summit, suggesting it may be delayed. And the fuss over the closure of the North's nuclear test site in Punggye-ri - will South Korean journalists be allowed to attend? - continues. But it's all a pantomime. Getting rid of its nuclear weapons was never an option for Pyongyang.

A police state to rival North Korea

In Xinjiang, in China's far west, a province the size of Western Europe sitting directly up from Tibet, the Han Chinese have for decades now been carrying out  a brutal campaign against the local largely Muslim Uighurs. Since 1949, when the People's Republic of China "liberated" Xinjiang, aka East Turkestan, it has ruthlessly crushed any independence movement, both by repression and by encouraging Han Chinese immigration. Claims of genocide have been made, with some justification.

Now the repression is getting too obvious to ignore, even for a mainstream media much happier to have their news stories handed to them by the likes of Hamas. From the NYT:

"What does it take to intern half a million members of one ethnic group in just a year? Enormous resources and elaborate organization, but the Chinese authorities aren’t stingy. Vast swathes of the Uighur population in China’s western region of Xinjiang — as well as Kazakhs, Kyrgyz and other ethnic minorities — are being detained to undergo what the state calls 'transformation through education'. Many tens of thousands of them have been locked up in new thought-control camps with barbed wire, bombproof surfaces, reinforced doors and guard rooms.

The Chinese authorities are cagey and evasive, if not downright dismissive, about reports concerning such camps. But now they will have to explain away their own eloquent trail of evidence: an online public bidding system set up by the government inviting tenders from contractors to help build and run the camps....

Over the last decade, the Xinjiang authorities have accelerated policies to reshape Uighurs’ habits — even, the state says, their thoughts. Local governments organize public ceremonies and signings asking ethnic minorities to pledge loyalty to the Chinese Communist Party; they hold mandatory re-education courses and forced dance performances, because some forms of Islam forbid dance. In some neighborhoods, security organs carry out regular assessments of the risk posed by residents: Uighurs get a 10 percent deduction on their score for ethnicity alone and lose another 10 percent if they pray daily.

Uighurs had grown accustomed to living under an intrusive state, but measures became draconian after the arrival in late 2016 of a new regional party chief from Tibet. Since then, some local police officers have said that they struggled to meet their new detention quotas — in the case of one village, 40 percent of the population.

A new study by Adrian Zenz, a researcher at the European School of Culture and Theology, in Korntal, Germany, analyzed government ads inviting tenders for various contracts concerning re-education facilities in more than 40 localities across Xinjiang, offering a glimpse of the vast bureaucratic, human and financial resources the state dedicates to this detention network. The report reveals the state’s push to build camps in every corner of the region since 2016, at a cost so far of more than 680 million yuan (over $107 million).

A bid invitation appears to have been posted on April 27 — a sign that more camps are being built. [....]

In February, a Uighur man studying in the United States gave Foreign Policy [link] one of the most detailed descriptions of detention conditions published to date. He was arrested upon returning to China for a visit last year, and then held for 17 days on no known charge. He described long days of marching in a crowded cell, chanting slogans and watching propaganda videos about purportedly illegal religious activities. As he was being released, a guard warned him, 'Whatever you say or do in North America, your family is still here and so are we'.

Last month, an ethnic Kazakh man described to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty his four-month stint in a camp in northern Xinjiang. He met inmates serving terms as long as seven years. He said he had been made to study how 'to keep safe the domestic secrets' of China and 'not to be a Muslim'” In these cases, as in many others, detainees were held incommunicado, their families left to wonder what had happened to them. [....]

Labeling with a single word the deliberate and large-scale mistreatment of an ethnic group is tricky: Old terms often camouflage the specifics of new injustices. And drawing comparisons between the suffering of different groups is inherently fraught, potentially reductionist. But I would venture this statement to describe the plight of China’s Uighurs, Kazakhs and Kyrgyz today: Xinjiang has become a police state to rival North Korea, with a formalized racism on the order of South African apartheid.

There is every reason to fear that the situation will only worsen. Several accounts of Uighurs dying in detention have surfaced recently — a worrisome echo of the established use of torture in China’s re-education camps for followers of the spiritual movement Falun Gong. And judging by their camp-building spree in Xinjiang, the Chinese authorities don’t seem to think they have come close to achieving whatever their goal there is."