Mick Hartley

Joie de vivre

Photographer Sabine Weiss died this week:

Pioneering photographer Sabine Weiss, who was the last surviving member of France's celebrated humanist school, has died aged 97 at her home in Paris. Although she had stopped taking pictures, Weiss was actively involved in her archive until her death.

Born in Switzerland, she learned her art in Geneva, moving to Paris after World War Two. She became renowned particularly for her images on the streets of Paris, and for 70 years remained at the heart of French photography.

More here.

Man running

Amoureux et Femme Lisant, 1985

Enfants jouant au cheval, 1954

Cheval, 1952

Homme de Nuit Illumant sa Cigarette, Paris 1950

2 femmes et chien, 1954

Garçons sur Planche à Routlettes, 1952

Clochard, Le Baroud Poussé par son ami. 1955

Amoureux bois de Boulogne, 1952

Olhao, Portugal

New York, 1955

Courses à Auteuil, Paris 1952

Homme, Coin de Rue Tentes, 1950

Coquet, Place Blanche, Paris, 1953
[Photos: Sabine Weiss]

“Don’t touch my compost”

Army trainees in North Korea, instead of learning how to drive tanks, are shovelling shit:

With North Korean authorities already preparing for farming next year to expand food production, even students at a military tank training school are producing compost. 

A Daily NK source in North Korea said Monday that students at Unit 2734, a Korean People’s Army tank training school, have been producing compost since Dec. 14. Each cadet is tasked with producing 10 kilograms of compost a day from 2 PM to 7 PM, with mornings dedicated to training and cleaning weapons.

Despite criticism that students cannot focus on their training, the school has responded that it has little choice since it owns over 397,000 square meters of land.

Located in Yonghung-ri, Kaechon, South Pyongan Province, Unit 2734 is a military training body tasked with training tank drivers. The unit operates directly under the General Staff Department.

Some 600 to 700 students graduate from the center a year. They undergo three months of basic training, followed by a year of learning tank and armored vehicle theory and field training before they are deployed to mechanized and armored units.

Thus, many young soldiers are basically wasting their time doing agricultural work such as producing compost instead of learning how to drive tanks.

According to the source, this phenomenon has been going on for a while.

Late North Korean leader Kim Jong Il reportedly gave the unit high grades for farming, livestock raising, and mushroom cultivation when he visited in October of 2004. This means the unit responded to Kim’s praise by focusing on its side projects instead of training.

This focus has continued to the present day. Current North Korean leader Kim Jong Un reportedly praised the unit as a model of self-reliant production for harvesting dozens of tons of soybeans and corn this year and last.

The situation is growing increasingly excessive. After evening inspection, soldiers who were unable to fulfill their daily quota of compost reportedly steal compost from local farms and homes.

The source said because of this, when local residents see soldiers from the tank school, they openly tell them, “Don’t touch my compost.”

Locals and soldiers alike are criticizing the government’s policies. 

The source said the soldiers came to the school to learn how to drive tanks, but feel like they are learning how to steal human feces and animal manure instead. 

What's not clear is the extent to which compost in North Korea still involves the use of human excrement. The quote at the end suggests that, yes, it does still play a role.

A few years back we had the case of Oh Chong-song, the soldier who fled North Korea across the DMZ through a hail of bullets. When operated on, his intestines were found to contain parasitic worms - a likely result of the North Korean practice of using human excrement as fertiliser. Efforts have been made to improve the situation with fertiliser factories and the like - that is, drag the country out of the agricultural dark ages - but there's clearly a long way to go.

Meanwhile the military students continue to spend their time stealing shit.

The truth has a habit of prevailing

Jess de Wahls - the embroidery artist who had her work removed from the Royal Academy after she was accused of transphobia (that is, she'd noted that sex was real) only for the decision to be publicly and humiliatingly reversed, with an apology from the RA - joins the end-of-the-year chorus on the gains made this year in the battle against gender ideology, while noting that there's still a way to go. At UnHerd - The heretics will not be silenced:

Yet this debate is far from won. Activists often still succeed in framing it as a “trans rights issue”, rather than something that actually concerns women. Looking at the vast political capture, it’s sometimes easy to lose hope. We see the Mayor of London tweet ideological dogma such as: “Trans women are women, trans men are men, and all gender identities are valid.” We see the leader of the Labour Party say: “it’s not right to say that only women have a cervix, it shouldn’t be said”. We see MPs such as David Lammy, who has made clear that he doesn’t even know what a cervix is, state unchallenged that there are “dinosaurs hoarding rights in the Labour Party”, referring to brave women like Rosie Duffield who keep pushing back against this ideological land grab....

In many institutions and companies, “preferred pronouns” are now being implemented from the top down under the guise of “diversity and inclusion”. Anybody who dares to question this may find themselves quickly under investigation for alleged “transphobia” or called a bigot and cowed into silence.

Let’s make no mistake: “preferred pronouns” aren’t, as some would have you believe, just a courtesy. They are a form of compelled speech; they ask people to no longer trust their eyes, but instead do as they are told or be ostracised. I have previously written about the parallels between the current climate and the East German Stasi under which my whole family used to live. And it is becoming clearer by the day that those comparisons were not an exaggeration.

Just look at the state of academia, where professors who dare to acknowledge the biological reality of the sexes are being de-platformed and hounded, regardless of the toll the often-aggressive behaviour has on their well-being. The use of smear campaigns and intimidating “protests”, with individuals donning balaclavas and waving smoke flares, seems to have washed over from the US and are now commonplace whenever a “heretic” has been identified and needs “dealing with”. Just ask Professors Jo Phoenix and Kathleen Stock.

That this ideology has also crept deep into the Arts, once the most tolerant of disciplines, was clearly highlighted by my attempted cancellation. It was by no means the first time an artist has been attacked and ostracised publicly for her alleged thought crimes, but it was certainly a turning point due to the involvement of the Royal Academy. The public apology and reinstatement of my work in their shop thrust into the spotlight something that has been happening quietly but constantly for quite some years now.

When I wrote on these pages in August about the deafening silence within the arts establishment following the attempt to cancel me, I did so with a sense of despair. It seemed to me that the blue-haired activists had won; that ‘diversity and inclusion’ now only matters as long as you repeat the mantras and toe the party line.

Things still look bleak. But after everything that has happened this year, a sense of optimism has started to creep in. That isn’t merely because the alternative is a dystopian hellscape of authoritarianism that history has seen many times before. It’s because the truth has a habit of prevailing.

What’s striking this year is the growing number of women and men who have started to say: Enough. One court case verdict follows another, holding the line against a vicious new orthodoxy that seeks to burn witches while screaming “JUST BE KIND”.

The Forstater ruling has cemented the protection of “gender critical belief” in law. The charity LGB Alliance has now firmly established itself as a much-needed alternative to Stonewall. Grassroots organisations such as FiLiA, FairPlayForWomen and Women’s Place UK provide support and resources to a vast and growing number of gender-critical women who have found their voice. And for everybody who dares speak out regardless of the consequences, there are many more waiting in the folds, preparing for their moment to be brave.

Fortunately, in my own case sanity prevailed and, like a monsoon rain, the stains my detractors tried to smear me with have washed right off, leaving me free to continue to create work without censorship, encouraged by a rapidly growing number of patrons and supporters. And I am not alone: despite great efforts to the contrary, heretical artists are finding new ways to exhibit work and bypass gatekeepers.

That is the lesson of the past year. Finally, the tide is turning. We have not been silenced; let alone defeated. So to those art students with a firm grasp on reality who may feel a bit hopeless: don’t be afraid. Come on in, the water’s fine.

Heretical artists - now there's an interesting idea...

The BBC and antisemitism

Remember that Oxford Street antisemitic attack four weeks back, when a coach of young Jewish kids celebrating Chanukah were abused and spat at by a bunch of Asian youths? The BBC report cited anti-Muslim slurs heard inside the bus, in response to "allegations of anti-Semitic abuse". No one else has been able to hear these supposed anti-Muslim slurs, while the antisemitism is clear and blatant. The Jewish Chronicle has refused to let this go. Here's their latest report today:

THE JC can reveal damning new evidence which appears to undermine the BBC’s claim that an anti-Muslim slur was uttered by a victim of the antisemitic Chanukah bus attack on Oxford Street.

The Charedi students whose panicked voices can be heard in a video clip of the attack have categorically rejected the BBC’s allegation that they used any racist phrase whatsoever.

And a dossier of exhaustive analysis by forensic audio experts and a distinguished, independent linguist, commissioned by the Board of Deputies, appears to confirm their testimony.

The revelations heap further pressure on the BBC to justify its claims to the Jewish youngsters. So far it has refused to apologise, causing outrage.

Rabbi Schneur Glitzenshtein, who organised the bus trip, told the JC that he had personally spoken to those whose voices are heard in the video. “All they were doing was trying to protect each other,” he said. “That insult did not happen.”

Separately, the Board of Deputies commissioned digital experts DigFind and D3 Forensics, who used audio technology to slow down and clean up the recording so that each syllable of the phrase in dispute could be heard.

Professor Ghil’ad Zuckermann, Chair of Linguistics and Endangered Languages as the University of Adelaide inSouth Australia, one of the most senior experts in his field, then studied the tape.

The Professor, who is fluent in 13 languages, including Hebrew, and is a consultant to the Oxford English Dictionary, established that the “slur” was actually a Hebrew phrase, “Tikrah lemishu,ze dachuf” meaning: “Call someone, it is urgent.”

Professor Zuckermann suggested that BBC editors may have fallen victim to a phenomenon known as the “Apollonian tendency” — the wish to make order of unfamiliar information by applying ideas that are already in the brain of the person listening. This is a concept explored by Professor Zuckermann in his book Language Contact and Lexical Enrichment in Israeli Hebrew (Palgrave Macmillan 2003).

Or, as I said at the time, "of course, to the specially attuned ears of a BBC journalist, any Hebrew is going to sound like a slur against Muslims".

Board President Marie van der Zyl told the JC: “A community charity shouldn’t have to use its precious funds to commission experts to disprove the BBC’s flawed journalism. At the very least, the BBC should apologise and give us our money back.”

Writing in the JC this week, Ms van der Zyl described the BBC’s reporting of the incident as a “colossal error”. 

She writes: “It has added insult to injury in accusing victims of antisemitism of being guilty of bigotry themselves. Others will have to judge whether the corporation has a legal case to answer here. 

“But what takes this from an egregious failure to something far more sinister is the BBC’s behaviour when confronted with its mistake. Instead of admitting it was wrong, it has doubled and tripled down. This raises serious questions about deep-seated biases within the BBC towards Israelis, and indeed towards Jews in general.”

The BBC continues to stand by its allegations against the Jewish youngsters. But the findings will increase pressure on the corporation, which this month faced a mass protest outside Broadcasting House over its coverage of the attack. 

BBC Director-General Tim Davie is due to meet the Board of Deputies next month to discuss its coverage of the 29 November attack, the JC has learnt. 

Professor Zuckermann, the author of the report commissioned by the Board, has 25 years’ experience in forensic linguistics, has taught at Cambridge University and has 10 postdoctoral fellows.

He was asked to consider both phrases — “Dirty Muslims” and “Tikrah lemishu, ze dachuf” — to see if one could be definitively ruled out. He studied both the uncompressed raw footage and the version that had been cleaned up by forensic experts, to ensure the audio had not been tampered with. At the disputed point in the recording, at three seconds in, Professor Zuckermann says that only the modern Hebrew can be heard.

He writes: “Given the above native pronunciation of ‘mishu’ and ‘dakhuf’ and given the cohesiveness of the complex sentence in Israeli (“Call someone, it’s urgent”), it is clear to me what is heard around the three second mark is a native Israeli sentence rather than an English expression. 

“I hypothesise that the BBC … misheard ‘mishu’ as ‘Muslim’ and perhaps even the preceding ‘tikrah’ as ‘dirty’.”

One of the reasons why the BBC came third last week in the Wiesenthal Center's antisemitism list, after Iran and Hamas.

The new gender threat

Maya Forstater provides an overview of the gender wars so far, and the progress that's been made this year. But the battle is by no means over:

The dark heart of what we are being pressured not to talk about, is how gender ideology dismantles safeguarding norms, the systems set up to stop organisations from becoming enablers of child abuse. Don’t keep secrets with children, respect boundaries, allow people to speak up, don’t punish whistleblowers. Recognise the risk that men pose to women and children: 98 per cent of convictions for sexual assault are against men. Gender ideology overturns all this and forces people to pretend that sex doesn’t matter, and must be overruled by self-identified gender. Even in spaces where women and girls are undressing, even in sporting competitions where we know that males have an unassailable advantage, even in contact sports where it is not only fairness but safety that is at stake. Even when it comes to recording the sex of a rapist, or deciding whether he can be put in a woman’s prison. Even when it comes to whether women who have been raped or subject to years of domestic violence can be allowed to recover in a female-only space.

Gender ideology corrupts all of these systems and makes them seem more complex than they are, by making the simple words man/woman, male/female, he/she fraught and apparently difficult to define. How much fairness and safety for women, children and vulnerable people should be traded off to meet the deeply-felt desire of some men to be treated as if they were female?

How about — none.

And there's a new threat, in the form of the proposed Gender Recognition Act, which would make it a crime to try and persuade a confused young person - who's been soaked in social media pressure to believe that the answer to all their problems is transitioning and irreversible medical intervention - to think again:

The elevation of “misgendering” to a secular sin for which you might get a criminal conviction (Kate Scottow), a visit from the police (Harry Miller), lose your job and career (me), be thrown off social media, or at the very least be frowned upon in polite society, has rested in large part on a false parallel between race and racism, and sex and transphobia.

I had a long and decent discussion with one of the architects of the Gender Recognition Act last month. He said to me, “I recognise the free speech issues in your case, but don’t you see that calling a transwoman ‘male’ or ‘he’ is as offensive as calling a black person a nigger?”

No, I said, it is not.

The parallel between race and sex is bogus. Sex is two billion years old, predating human beings and shaping our evolution in profound ways. Race is only skin deep, tens of thousands of years old at most. Calling a man who wants to be treated as a woman “male” (a father, he, him, a man) might not be kind, but it is not inherently insulting, and it is often necessary — when safety and fairness, and other people’s privacy and dignity matter. Excluding “transwomen” from women’s spaces like any other male is not like Jim Crow laws, because men who identify as transwomen are not a subset of women, but a subset of men.

If you want to reach for a race analogy, think of Rachel Dolezal. Her feeling of being black may have been subjectively heartfelt and authentic to her, but to everyone else it was offensive appropriation.

It's a ridiculous comparison. Sex is a fundamental of human biology: race is not.

The push to recognise it as a right when an adult desires to be treated as the opposite sex, creates a demand for a “born this way” narrative in which there exist transgender children who know their gender identity infallibly from an early age. These children, it is argued, should be raised as the opposite sex, given drugs to prevent puberty and then operated on to achieve a passing appearance.

A growing number of detransitioners, left with trauma and damaged bodies, argue that what was done to them was child abuse, or medical negligence in ignoring the wider reasons for their unhappiness.

What we know is that most gender non-conforming children would grow up to be gay if their gender issues were left to resolve naturally. The modern experiment in transitioning children before they’ve grown up is a brutal new form of conversion therapy.

Amnesty International, Stonewall, Mermaids, Gendered Intelligence and Chair of the College of Policing Nick Herbert — the same organisations that tried to make it dangerous to say men are not women — now want to criminalise parents, teachers and therapists who tell children they are not “born in the wrong body”.

This is almost a carbon copy of the move to equate disagreement with gender ideology with racist hate speech. Except this time the bait-and-switch move is with sexual orientation.

“Conversion therapy” (or “practices”) is proposed to be a perception-based crime, with a self-appointed victim. It will put “gender identity” (that concept Kathleen Stock called “ill-conceived as a potential object of law or policy”) into law and criminalise adults who try to steer children away from being sterilised and medicalised for life because of teenage unhappiness.

The government is trying to rush through this legislation in time for a razzmatazz LGBT Summit next summer.

Don’t worry, say the government and the organisations that have been promoting the persecution of people like Harry Miller, Alison Bailey, Kathleen Stock, myself and so many others for speaking up. There will be safeguards, guidance and training (by Stonewall!). Only the guilty need be fearful of having their livelihoods destroyed, losing their home or having their children taken away. Trust us!

For UK readers, if you are making a new year’s resolution this year, make it this: email your MP on 1 January and ask for an appointment. Call their office on 4 January. Turn up at their surgery. Speak to them face-to-face. Tell them why they shouldn’t accept this proposed new law as simply a good thing.

And make sure to fill in the consultation before 4 February.

Hate speech in Norway

The subject of hate speech has been to the fore here with Harry Miller's notable victory in his court case, after his supposedly transphobic remarks were logged by Humberside police as a "non-crime hate incident". The court ruled that this had a "chilling effect" on freedom of speech. As a triumphant Miller said, "Being offensive is not, cannot and should not be an offence".

Not so in Norway, though. 

A man in Norway has been convicted and sentenced after insulting a trans-identified male over Facebook messenger.

The defendant, a 52-year-old man known only as MF, was charged with making insulting remarks to a male who identified as a woman. The exchange between the two took place over Facebook in March after they had both joined a discussion group about the City Council in Oslo.

The discussion grew heated, and culminated in MF sending the transgender male a series of comments regarding his gender identity. The original, Norwegian-language comments were published in the country's NRK media outlet.

MF was then reported to police by the trans-identified male who investigated and charged him under Section 185 of the Norwegian Penal Code. The case came as the first under the country's tightened hate speech law, amendments to which were approved in November of 2020 and officially implemented in December of 2020.

The amendments to Section 185 broadened the scope of 'hate speech' to include discriminatory or hateful statements directed towards transgender people.

During his trial, MF attempted to argue that his statements were made within the confines of free speech, but the court ultimately rejected his claim and sentenced him to prison for 21 days on condition. MF must also pay a fine of 15,000 kroner (approx. $1,700), as well and additional 3,000 kroner (approx. $340) in legal costs to the court.

Offensive? Yes. A crime? Never.

The earth will get rid of the filth of this malignant growth

Egyptian Islamic scholar Dr. Gamal Abd Elsattar  was the Undersecretary for Religious Endowment in the Morsi government and now serves now as president of the International University for Renewal in Turkey. And he really doesn't like Jews:

Gamal Abd Elsattar: "We have wronged ourselves and Allah punished us by allowing [the Jews,] the scum of the earth, to act insolently towards us."

Interviewer: "What kind of oppressors are these Zionists?"

Elsattar: "It is said that no sin is worse than heresy. They defy Allah and His prophets. They slayed the prophets unjustly. They say things that are not true about Allah. They say that their hearts are hardened. They say that Allah is poor and that they are rich. They defy Allah. They are an evil seed on this earth. Allah told us that this seed must be uprooted. In order for the Earth to heal – this is not only about Muslims – it must get rid of this malignant growth.

"One of the harbingers of Judgment Day – like victories and conquests – is that the earth will get rid of the filth of this malignant growth. [The Prophet Muhamad said:] 'Judgment Day will not come until the Muslims fight the Jews and kill them, and the Jews will hide behind rocks and trees, but the rocks and trees will say: 'Oh Muslim, oh servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.' This is not just a hadith about death and war. It is about the earth getting rid of this scum."

I think we've been here before.

Guide dog

January 1928. "CANINE CHAPERONE. Senator Thomas D. Schall, blind solon from Minnesota, is now able to get around the Capitol without an attendant since his specially trained German police dog has arrived to lead him around. The dog, 2 years old, has been specially trained for the purpose."

[Photo: Shorpy/Harris & Ewing Collection]

Schall ran away to join the circus as a young lad, was blinded in his twenties by an electrical shock from a cigar lighter, and on December 19, 1935 - seven years after this picture - was struck by a hit and run driver while walking across the Baltimore–Washington Parkway in Cottage City, Maryland. He died in Washington three days later, becoming one of the few United States Senators or Congressmen to die in a road accident while in office. History does not relate whether the dog was guiding him at the time.

Solon was an Athenian statesman: hence the term "solon" for a wise law-maker - the kind of pomposity, much in vogue at the time, that would delight in the phrase "canine chaperone".

Trouble at the mine

Japan is seeking UNESCO World Heritage status for an industrial site which used Korean slave labour. The Koreans are not amused:

Korea on Monday protested again Japan's plan to list another site where masses of Koreans were used as slave labor in World War II as a UNESCO World Heritage site.

On Tuesday, the Japan Agency for Cultural Affairs announced its plan to register a mine on the island of Sado in Niigata Prefecture on the UNESCO World Heritage list. About 1,000 Koreans were forced into hard labor in the mine during World War II, when Korea was under Japanese colonial rule.

This is only the latest attempt by Japan to glorify its industrial heritage by glossing over its reliance on Korean slave labor in wartime and the suffering of the forced laborers. In previous listings it has blatantly ignored UNESCO stipulations to prominently document the troubling history of industrial sites.

Japan will decide by Feb. 1 whether to formally recommend the Sado mine to the UNESCO World Heritage Committee, which will make a decision in 2023 based on results of a review by the International Council on Monuments and Sites, a non-governmental international organization advising on the matter.

The Sado mine was the biggest gold and silver mine during the Edo period in the 17th century, but it was used to produce war materiel like copper during the Pacific War. 

Many Koreans were mobilized into hard labor there in this process but there are no verbal testimonies from survivors. In 2019, the Foundation for Victims of Forced Mobilization by Imperial Japan in a report said at least 1,140 Koreans were pressed into forced labor at the Sado mine, but the documentations remains sketchy.

Since 2005, Niigata Prefecture and Sado have pushed the UNESCO project. But they purposely restricted the timeframe to the Edo period, which sparked criticism that they are attempting to cover up the dark side of its wartime history.

Back in 2015, Japan also caused conflict with Korea when Hashima Island, also known as Battleship Island where many Koreans were forced into hard labor at a coal mine, was recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage site.

At the time, Japan pledged to "take follow-up measures to specify the history of forced mobilization of laborers and memorialize victims." But the Industrial Heritage Information Center in Tokyo, a facility that opened as part of the pledge, instead downplayed their suffering and displays documents purporting to show how well they were treated.

The Foreign Ministry here on Monday urged Japan to retract the plan. "It's deplorable that Japan is pushing for another World Heritage designation of a wartime forced labor site when it has not kept its promises at other modern industrial sites," such as Hashima Island, a ministry spokesman said.

The fate of the comfort women - Koreans forced to act as sex slaves to the Japanese troops during the occupation - is a long-running source of friction between the two countries.

A hammer blow to Russia’s already beleaguered civil society

I posted this in October, from Eric Lee:

Last week, more than thirty masked young men broke into a public meeting at the human rights NGO “Memorial” in Moscow. They shouted “Scum!”, “Fascists!” “Get out of Russia!”, and “There’s no room for foreign agents!” They ordered members of the audience to lie down on the floor. They were there to stop the showing of a film, “Mr. Jones”.

The 2019 film tells the story of Gareth Jones, a Welsh journalist who stumbled upon the story of the 1932-33 Ukrainian famine in which millions died. At the time, the Soviet regime denied there was a famine and they were assisted in this by New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty. It was only many years later that the regime admitted that the famine had taken place, and indeed that it was man-made.

Stalin had wanted to crush the Ukrainian peasantry, who he considered to be deadly enemies of the Soviet state and his policy of collectivisation of agriculture. It was one of the worst genocides of the twentieth century and the Ukrainians today call it the “Holodomor”.

The advertising tag line for the film was “The truth can’t be hidden forever.”

So why today, ninety years later, do young Russian nationalists feel the need to suppress the showing of this film in Moscow? Why were they trying to hide the truth about Ukraine’s “terror-famine”?

In Russia today, history has been weaponised by the Putin regime. It is now illegal to publish books that criticise the role of Stalin during the Second World War. There is a national mythology originally crafted by Stalin which Putin has fully embraced. In it, the peace-loving Soviet Union was brutally attacked by the Nazi barbarians and Stalin rallied the whole nation to rise up and defeat the aggressor.

There is no mention of the Great Purge in the late 1930s when Stalin decapitated the Red Army, leaving it leaderless just in time for the outbreak of the war. Nor is anyone encouraged to talk about the infamous Hitler-Stalin pact that divided Poland into German and Soviet zones, and handed over several other countries to Soviet hands. And of course the initial collapse of the Red Army in 1941, and the surrender of literally millions of its soldiers in the opening weeks of the German invasion, is another taboo subject.

Today a film that exposes one of the greatest crimes of the Stalin regime is not welcome in Putin’s Moscow. Nor, it turns out, is the organisation that hosted it — Memorial. Memorial has been doing outstanding work for decades to keep alive the memory of Stalin’s victims. It preserves a history that the current rulers of Russia would prefer be forgotten....

Now the wishes of the Russian nationalist thugs have been granted: Memorial has been banned.

Russia’s Supreme Court on Tuesday ordered the shuttering of Memorial, Russia’s oldest human rights watchdog, for repeatedly violating the country’s foreign agent law.

The group's closure rounds out a year in which Russian authorities have cracked down on nearly all forms of dissent, from Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny's opposition groups to independent news outlets and rights organizations.

State prosecutors argued that the group systematically refused to label itself as a “foreign agent” on its website and other published materials as is required. Memorial has maintained that there was “no legal basis” for the case against it and called the law a tool to crack down on independent groups.

For Memorial’s supporters, the move to liquidate the organization is a hammer blow to Russia’s already beleaguered civil society, and to efforts to come to terms with the country’s traumatic 20th century.

“Shutting down Memorial is worse than a crime,” Vyacheslav Igrunov, a Soviet-era dissident and founding member of the organization, told The Moscow Times. 

“It’s a terrible mistake that will come back to bite the authorities.”

Founded in the twilight of the Soviet Union by nuclear physicist turned anti-communist dissident Andrei Sakharov, Memorial aimed to support human rights in contemporary Russia while highlighting historical abuses in the U.S.S.R.

As Mikhail Gorbachev’s reform program opened the door to discussions of Stalin-era repressions, Memorial took a leading role in publicizing many of the Soviet Union’s worst excesses, including the 1940 Katyn massacre of Polish prisoners of war.

In a joint statement last month, Gorbachev and Novaya Gazeta editor and 2021 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Dmitry Muratov warned against Memorial’s closure, saying the case has “caused anxiety and concern in the country, which we share.”

And now the decision has been made. The totalitarian nature of Russia under Putin is fully revealed.

For some observers, it is Memorial’s work in the historical field that has placed it in the Kremlin’s crosshairs.

With President Vladimir Putin presiding over a limited rehabilitation of the Soviet past, including defending Josef Stalin’s wartime leadership and foreign policy, Memorial’s investigation of the totalitarian past has fallen out of official favor.

With Russia’s modern-day security services — the heirs to the Stalin-era NKVD secret police — widely thought to have the president’s ear, aspersions cast on their predecessor organizations can be politically perilous. 

Ahead of the ruling, a state prosecutor argued in court argued that Memorial had blackened the Soviet Union's wartime legacy, asking, "Why do we, the offspring of victors, have to repent and be embarrassed, instead of being proud of our glorious past?"

“Memorial has become the primary opponent of the official position on history,” said Andrei Kolesnikov, an analyst at the Carnegie Moscow Center think tank.

“The authorities imagine that if you destroy the organization, you can destroy its narrative too.”