Mick Hartley

Water and mud

Down the Lea, and round through the Olympic Park to the Abbey Creek mud flats at low tide, on a brisk bright morning:

 

The definitive death of the Arab spring

Further to that "genocide summit" last week, when Bashir met Bashar, it seems that the Arab League are now preparing to readmit Syria into the fold, some eight years after kicking Damascus out over its brutal repressions. Perhaps the hypocrisy of pretending to care about mass murder became too obvious for an organisation one of whose leading lights is wanted for crimes against humanity and genocide by the International Criminal Court. Or, more likely, the Arab League want to prise Damascus away from Tehran. Syria, as Assad knows only too well, is strategically central to the whole region:

At some point in the next year it is likely Assad will be welcomed on to a stage to once again take his place among the Arab world’s leaders, sources say. Shoulder to shoulder with the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, and Egypt’s latest autocrat, General Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, the moment will mark the definitive death of the Arab spring, the hopes of the region’s popular revolutions crushed by the newest generation of Middle Eastern strongmen....

Earlier in December, the Sudanese president, Omar al-Bashir, became the first Arab League leader to visit Syria in eight years, a visit widely interpreted as a gesture of friendship on behalf of Saudi Arabia, which has shored up ties with Khartoum in recent years. Pro-government media outlets posted pictures of the two leaders shaking hands and grasping each other’s arms on a red carpet leading from the Russian jet that ferried Bashir to Damascus along with the hashtag “More are yet to come”.

Diplomatic sources have told the Guardian there is a growing consensus among the league’s 22 members that Syria should be readmitted to the alliance of Arab nations, although the US is pressuring both Riyadh and Cairo to hold off on demanding a vote from members.

The move comes despite Assad’s intimate ties to Iran, to whom the regime owes its survival. For Saudi Arabia and the UAE, re-embracing Syria is a new strategy aimed at pivoting Assad away from Tehran’s sphere of influence, fuelled by the promise of normalised trade relations and reconstruction money.

So we now live in a world where mass slaughter and crimes against humanity are no barrier to political success.

Devotedly defending the leader

As an addendum to my post on Landscape Painting in North Korea, and the complete lack of any culture outside Kim worship, here's another item from the official Rodong Sinmun news agency with a similarly innocent headline - Young People Hold Dancing Parties. 

Youth and Students throughout the country had dancing parties on Dec. 24 in celebration of the 27th anniversary of Chairman Kim Jong Il's assumption of the supreme commandership of the Korean People's Army and the 101st birth anniversary of the anti-Japanese war heroine Kim Jong Suk.

Dancing parties took place amid the playing of the song "Fortune of Korea" in the plazas of the Monument to Party Founding, the Arch of Triumph and the Pyongyang Indoor Stadium and other venues here.

The events showed the respect and glory to Kim Jong Il, who provided a powerful political and military guarantee of the DPRK.

While dancing, the dancers renewed their determination to become human fortresses and shields of devotedly defending Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un just as was done by Kim Jong Suk who created the tradition of devotedly defending the leader.

"Song of Youth", "Song of Socialist Advance" and other songs revved up the atmosphere.

"Revved up the atmosphere"? I bet they did.

Meanwhile, according to this report from South Korea's Chosun Ilbo, North Korea is in the grip of a major purge of "impure elements" - corrupt officials and military officers who, presumably, are deemed less keen than the young dancers in "devotedly defending the leader".

At the end of a year where so much was promised, from Trump's supposed breakthrough talks with Kim Jong-un , to South Korean President Moon's resurrection of the friendly Sunshine Policy towards the North, nothing much appears to have changed in the land of eternal darkness.

Smoke and snow

More Jack Delano from Shorpy. Still winter, still Pennsylvania.

January 1941. "Scene in west Aliquippa, Pennsylvania. Stacks of the Jones and Laughlin Steel Corporation in background."

January 1941. "The end of the afternoon shift at the Jones and Laughlin Steel Corporation. Aliquippa, Pennsylvania."

January 1941. "Little boy in Freedom, Pennsylvania."

[Photos: Shorpy/Jack Delano for the Farm Security Administration]

Assad doubling down on executions of political prisoners

The Syrian regime's war against its people reaches some kind of horrific and brutal climax. From the Washington Post:

As Syria’s government consolidates control after years of civil war, President Bashar al-Assad’s army is doubling down on executions of political prisoners, with military judges accelerating the pace they issue death sentences, according to survivors of the country’s most notorious prison.

In interviews, more than two dozen Syrians recently released from the Sednaya military prison in Damascus described a government campaign to clear the decks of political detainees. The former inmates said prisoners are being transferred from jails across Syria to join death-row detainees in Sednaya’s basement and then be executed in pre-dawn hangings.

Yet despite these transfers, the population of Sednaya’s once-packed cells — which at their peak held an estimated 10,000 to 20,000 inmates — has dwindled largely because of the unyielding executions, and at least one section of the prison is almost entirely empty, the former detainees said.[....]

Even before they reach the gallows, many prisoners die of malnutrition, medical neglect or physical abuse, often after a psychological breakdown, the former detainees said.

One former prisoner said guards had forced a metal pipe down the throat of a cellmate from the Damascus suburb of Darayya. “They pinned him to the wall with it and then left him to die. His body lay among us all night,” said Abu Hussein, 30, a mechanic from the western province of Homs. Another described how prisoners in his own cell had been forced to kick to death a man from the southern city of Daraa.  [....]

After seven years of war, more than 100,000 Syrian detainees remain unaccounted for. According to the United Nations and human rights groups, thousands, if not tens of thousands, are probably dead.  [....]

Although all sides in the conflict have arrested, disappeared and killed prisoners, the Syrian Network for Human Rights monitoring group estimates that as many as 90 percent have been held across a network of government jails, where torture, starvation and other forms of lethal neglect are used systematically and to kill. At one point, Sednaya alone held as many as 20,000 inmates, according to Amnesty International.  [....]

Once the prisoners are hanged, their bodies are usually carried straight from the execution room to a waiting truck or car and then transported for registration at a military hospital before being buried in the mass graves on military land, according to Amnesty International.

On the Lea

On a sunny morning:

Landscape Painting in North Korea

I wrote last December about North Korean culture. Or rather, how there wasn't any:

There is no culture in North Korea beyond regime propaganda. Nothing. Not music, or dance, or film, or art, or writing. Nothing. 

Has there, I wonder, ever been a society that has so successfully managed to erase every positive human attribute of free creativity and imagination? I don't think the Soviet empire, despite its best intentions, ever came close. It's impossible to imagine some North Korean equivalent of The Master and Margarita, for instance, or the struggles of Shostakovich as recently dramatised in Julian Barnes's The Noise of Time. Culture bubbled under the surface even in the darkest days of Stalin. But under the Kims? Of course there may be stuff going on that we don't hear about, but it seems unlikely. The reach of state propaganda, the fear of discovery, and the relentless struggle for survival, make it all deeply improbable. Glorifying the Kims, culture-wise, is effectively all there is.

A recent item in the official Rodong Sinmun gives a moment's hope. Landscape Painting and Handicraft Exhibition Opens. What could be more innocent and apolitical than that?...Landscape painting and handicrafts? Well...

A landscape painting and handicraft exhibition opened on Friday at the Korean Art Gallery to mark the 101st birth anniversary of the anti-Japanese war heroine Kim Jong Suk.

Displayed at the center of the exhibition hall is oil painting "The great leader Comrade Kim Il Sung and anti-Japanese war heroine Comrade Kim Jong Suk seeing the sunrise of Korea on the top of Jong Il Peak."

Also displayed are acryl painting "Best wish of all people" depicting President Kim Il Sung and Chairman Kim Jong Il, Korean painting "By dedicating the whole life" and oil painting "By becoming a sentry" showing the noble traits of Kim Jong Suk who devoted her all to the accomplishment of the cause of Juche revolution.

110 odd Korean paintings, oil paintings, embroidery and craftworks are displayed.

They deal with the exploits performed by the peerlessly great persons throughout the country.

Peering at the peerlessly great persons:

Kim Jong Suk? She was Great Leader Kim Il Sung's second wife, and grandmother to Kim Jong-un.

Destructive Jewish principles

A controversy among the leading intellectual lights of Egyptian society. Sheikh Saeed Numan, a cleric at Al-Azhar University who we encountered last week talking about foetus marriages, claims that the Jews have a plot to decrease Egypt's population. Two weeks later Egyptian journalist and political sociologist Dr. Hoda Zakariya disputes the learned cleric's theory. On the contrary, the Jewish plan is to increase Egypt's population.

Who is right? Whatever, clearly the Jews are up to no good one way or another.

Also, from Sheikh Numan:

"Darwin's theory of evolution says that humans were originally apes. At the same time, Darwin talked about God's Chosen People. We also have Sigmund Freud who said that human beings are controlled by sex. We have Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx who said that religion is the opium of the people. We have Theodor Herzl, who created the Protocols of the Elders of Zion that destroyed the world. As a religious scholar, I am responsible for preventing destructive Jewish principles from infiltrating my society."

Now we have the data

James Kirchick on the latest EU survey into antisemitism in Europe:

All too often, the issue of anti-Semitism in Europe is written about as an amorphous problem, like it was some noxious vapor floating in the ether that occasionally inflicts itself on individual Jews. In reality, it usually manifests in three distinct forms—left, right, and Muslim. Earlier this month, the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights launched its second survey on anti-Semitism. Interviewing some 16,500 individuals across 12 member states, it touts itself as “the biggest survey of Jewish people ever conducted worldwide.” The findings are dispiriting yet confirm what many know but few will say: that European anti-Semitism is predominantly Muslim in origin, followed in close second by the left-wing variety. According to “respondents who experienced some form of anti-Semitic harassment in the past five years,” 30 percent of the perpetrators were Muslim, 21 percent were people espousing a left-wing view, and only 13 percent expressed a right-wing view.  [...]

Before solving a problem, it is necessary to identify it. Few political leaders or journalists or other public figures are willing to state the obvious fact that the main source of anti-Semitism in Europe today is not among the usual suspects on the far right but the red-green alliance, where the primeval Jew hatred of Muslim immigrants is excused away by the anti-Zionist cosmopolitanism of the secular left. No one should have required a survey to see this, but now we have the data.  

Winter's steel

Jack Delano. January 1940. "At the steel plant in Midland, Pennsylvania." 

January 1941. "Houses and Pittsburgh Crucible Steel Company in Midland, Pennsylvania."

January 1941. "Mill district of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Long stairway in a working class section." 

[Photos: Shorpy/Jack Delano]