Mick Hartley

Intermission

Off for a week. Back next weekend, June the 4th or 5th.

At the Propeller Corporation

Jack Delano - October 1940. East Hartford, Connecticut. "New type of plating machine being used at the Hamilton Standard Propeller Corporation. It automatically dips the part into the proper solutions for the proper length of time."

[Photo: Shorpy/Jack Delano]

Ukraine now

An exhibition is being regularly updated and digitally displayed to the public at Wieden+Kennedy London's gallery (16 Hanbury Street, E1 6QR) until 31 May. Ukraine Now features the work of 16 photographers on the ground who are documenting the effects of the Russian invasion. It's curated by Kateryna Radchenko:

Kateryna's intentions are unequivocal: "We must tell our story to prevent it from happening ever again, or being silenced," she says. "So it's important to show what is happening in Ukraine now. Yes, there are many international journalists in Ukraine covering the events daily. However, there is a big difference between pictures taken by journalists temporarily visiting and photographers shooting in their home cities and towns. The latter know the context and have no opportunity to return home to a safe place after completing their assignment."

The project is raising much-needed funds for the Ukrainian Charity Foundation The Depths of Art, supporting those working in art, music, theatre, literature and cultural studies. Visitors can donate via a dedicated JustGiving page or can buy prints via Photofusion.

© Volodymyr Petrov

© Serhiy Hudak

© Pavlo Dorohoi

© Serhii Nuzhnenko

© Volodymyr Petrov

© Stas Yurchenko

Transitioning children

James Esses - who was fired from his job at Childline for voicing concerns about troubled young people being encouraged to mutilate their bodies - writes about the inconsistencies at the heart of the government's approach to medical transitioning:

We are regularly told that puberty blockers simply press the ‘pause button’ on puberty. But this is untrue. Studies have shown them to have negative impacts on brain growth and bone density. A child’s natural development is disrupted and can never proceed exactly as it should have, even if medication is later stopped. Research has also shown that ‘living as’ the other sex for a period of time can cause brain changes, making it more difficult for a child to come to accept their bodily selves.

Puberty blockers are a slippery slope, with studies showing over 90 per cent of children on puberty blockers go on to take cross-sex hormones. These hormones come with the risk of irreversible changes to hair growth and voice, impaired sexual functioning, cardiovascular conditions and, most worryingly, potential infertility.

Given that research demonstrates the majority of children with gender dysphoria will settle into their bodies, if given time, the medicalised pathway we are placing children on is deeply worrying.

Furthermore, increasingly younger children are being placed on this one-way path towards medicalisation, with parents being assured that if children start puberty blockers before they have even commenced puberty, this will make their lives easier.

When we consider this alongside other laws, regulations, rules and recommendations in place to govern child welfare and wellbeing in the UK, the stark inconsistency is clear.

Children under the age of 10 cannot be held legally responsible for a crime. Children under the age of 11 cannot open their own bank account. Children under the age of 12 cannot purchase Christmas crackers. Children under the age of 13 cannot engage in part-time employment. Nor can they sign up to Facebook. Children under the age of 14 cannot be in the standing section of a live concert. Children under the age of 16 cannot join the army, own a pet, buy aerosol paint or consent to having sex.

Children under the age of 18 cannot purchase scratch cards. They cannot get a tattoo. They cannot purchase cigarettes. They cannot drink alcohol in licenced premises. They cannot purchase fireworks. They cannot get married (unless they are 16 or 17 with parental permission). They cannot sit on a jury. They cannot vote in a UK parliamentary election....

We now find ourselves in a situation in which a child in the UK may not be able to buy a scratch card, but they are able to consent to highly potent, experimental treatment with no long-term data on the effects, all for a mental-health condition that usually resolves itself. And they can be left irreversibly scarred, both mentally and physically.

The sad truth of the matter is that we have robbed our children of one of the greatest wonders of childhood: the ability to try things out, make mistakes and then move on throughout life unscathed. For those children who proceed down a medical pathway that they later regret, the blame does not lie with them. It lies squarely with us, the adults. For we should have never allowed them to make that decision in the first place.

We're basically robbing them of their childhood.

But, thank goodness, there are limits:

A "reckless" doctor who wrongly prescribed puberty blockers to a transgender nine-year-old child after a ten minute chat on Skype has been struck off.

Michael Webberley’s treatment of 24 patients was deemed a "catalogue of failings" between February 2017 and June 2019, a tribunal found.

Seven of these patients related to GenderGP, a controversial private online clinic which a Telegraph investigation found was willing to prescribe sex change drugs and puberty blockers to children as young as 12 without asking them to talk to a doctor.

The Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service (MPTS) imposed its most severe sanction on Wednesday, erasing Dr Webberley from the medical register.

It ruled that his behaviour was "fundamentally incompatible with being a doctor" and amounted to "serious misconduct"...

Dr Webberley ran GenderGP with his wife and fellow GP, Dr Helen Webberley, who has received an interim suspension by the MPTS while a tribunal is ongoing.

A Telegraph investigation previously found that the online clinic used a legal loophole to flout NHS rules to issue valid prescriptions, which can then be used to obtain the medication from pharmacies in Britain, after the clinic was relocated to Spain in 2019. The pair are no longer listed as directors.

More on Helen Webberley and GenderGP here.

Russian genocide in Ukraine

Alexander J. Motyl in Tablet - Is Putin Committing Genocide in Ukraine?

Article II of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines genocide in the following manner:

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
a. Killing members of the group;
b. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
c. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
d. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
e. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Clearly, Ukrainians are a national group that the Russian regime is attempting to destroy by means of the actions identified under a, b, c, and e. Does the Russian regime intend to destroy Ukrainians as Ukrainians? More specifically, since “case law has associated intent with the existence of a State or organizational plan or policy,” does the Russian regime have such a plan or policy?

The answer is yes: The intent is there and the policy exists. For starters, Russian shelling and killing of Ukrainian civilians is clearly intentional and not the mere byproduct of military maneuvers. So, too, is the ethnic cleansing—the forced deportations of 1.3 million Ukrainians, including 223,000 children, to Russia’s hinterlands. There is also no military rationale for the wholesale devastation of Mariupol and Kharkiv. Both cities, and scores of other settlements, have been destroyed because they were inhabited by Ukrainians. And since Vladimir Putin determines all Russian policy, there can be no doubt that the decision to kill Ukrainians as Ukrainians is his.

Putin’s genocidal policy toward Ukrainians has a clearly expressed ideological and political underpinning. The Russian leader has repeatedly stated that he believes Ukraine is an historical aberration and that Ukrainians do not exist and have no right to exist. Dmitry Medvedev, former president and prime minister, has also gone on record saying that “Ukrainianism is a fake. It never was and is not.” It’s a small step from the view that Ukrainians don’t exist to the view that they shouldn’t exist.

One of the regime’s key propagandists, Petr Akopov, repeated Putin’s anti-Ukrainian claims on Feb. 24, the day the invasion of Ukraine began. “Ukraine as anti-Russia will no longer exist,” he intoned. Akopov expected Ukraine to fall quickly and therefore avoided recommending physical annihilation. That dishonor fell to another influential Russian propagandist, Timofey Sergeytsev, who published in early April what the historian Timothy Snyder has called “Russia’s genocide handbook.” In Putin’s Russia, opinions expressed by leading propagandists may be assumed to bear the president’s imprimatur.

The evidence of genocidal intent and policy is thus overwhelming. Before Sergeytsev’s damning article appeared, the genocide scholar Alexander Hinton had asked: “Has Russia carried out genocidal acts?” His answer: “Russia has targeted and killed civilians and reportedly forcibly deported hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians, including children, to Russia … Russia has also created ‘harsh conditions of life’ in parts of Ukraine … Russia seeks to seize and Russify Donbas and other parts of eastern Ukraine, where, if Putin is taken at his word, an ‘imaginary’ Ukrainian identity will be erased.”

“There is a significant risk that Russia will commit genocide in Ukraine,” Hinton wrote on April 4. “It is possible that a genocide has already begun.”

Nearly two months after Hinton’s tentative claim, we can confidently assert that the risk has become a fact. Russia is committing genocide in Ukraine.

Who or what is responsible for Russia’s transformation into a state committed to the genocide of Ukrainians, and for the apparent support of a critical mass of Russian people for mass murder? For one, Vladimir Putin not only dismantled Russia’s nascent democratic institutions and created a totalitarian dictatorship; he also routinized and normalized violence, both in practice and in speech, by assassinating political opponents, promoting an explicitly imperialistic agenda, and militarizing Russian society. Russians have been bombarded with these messages for over 20 years; unsurprisingly, many see the world only in zero-sum terms: Either Russia destroys Ukraine and defeats an irredeemably Russophobic world—if necessary with atomic weapons—or else it’s the end of Russia.

Which explains what nationalist Alexander Dugin meant when he said that Russia losing to Ukraine would be "the end of the world".

See here for Timothy Snyder on “Russia’s genocide handbook.”

People of Ukraine

Portraits from Ukraine, by photographer Mark Neville. He started work on his latest book Stop Tanks with Books a few years back, before his eventual move to Kyiv in October 2020, in an attempt to draw attention to Ukraine and its people, and the threat from Russia. Clearly the whole project has a fresh urgency now, since the Russian invasion. The book, as well as Neville's photos, has short stories about the conflict from Ukrainian novelist Lyuba Yakimchuk, and research from the Centre of Eastern European Studies in Berlin about the millions of Ukrainians already displaced by the war.

Making Stop Tanks With Books was my attempt to fight Russian aggression. My photographs, Lyuba Yakimchuk’s incredible short stories about living in Russian occupied Donbas, the research carried out by ZOiS about the 2.5 million people already displaced by the war, by 2018, and the ‘call to action’ are interwoven here not just to provoke empathy, but also to provide a clearer understanding of this brave, kind, misrepresented nation.

“Boy with dog, Troitske, Luhansk,” 2019

Rhythm Büro Rave, Kyiv,” 2019

“Aleksandr Konokov and Sasha on their Goat Farm in Desiatyny, Zhytomyr region,” 2017

“Couple at Stanytsia Luhanska Bridge,” 2019

“Soldier in Mariupol,” 2021

Ukrainsk, Donetsk," 2021

"Yana and Igor Karaman with friend Galina, Odesa," 2017

"Zhytomyr Special Boarding School for Deaf Children No.2," 2016

"Policewomen, Mariupol," 2019

"Zhytomyr Special Boarding School for Deaf Children No. 2," 2016

"Lina in a national costume, Orihovo-Vasylivka village, Donetsk," 2018

"Maria Holubets, Natalia Tarasenko, Rozalia Boiko, Maria Shvanyk and Rozalia Mahnyk, at the Greek Catholic Monastery, Zvanivka," 2018

"Skateboarder in Mariupol," 2021

"Three Kilometres from the frontline, Donetsk," 2019

"Soldier, Avdiivka," 2019

"Kristina in Troyitske, Eastern Ukraine, an hour after the shelling," 2016
[Photos © Mark Neville]

Impossible to look at these people and not wonder what's happened to them over the past few months.

Faces from Xinjiang

John Sudworth at the BBC:

Thousands of photographs from the heart of China’s highly secretive system of mass incarceration in Xinjiang, as well as a shoot-to-kill policy for those who try to escape, are among a huge cache of data hacked from police computer servers in the region.

The Xinjiang Police Files, as they’re being called, were passed to the BBC earlier this year. After a months-long effort to investigate and authenticate them, they can be shown to offer significant new insights into the internment of the region’s Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities.

The documents provide some of the strongest evidence to date for a policy targeting almost any expression of Uyghur identity, culture or Islamic faith - and of a chain of command running all the way up to the Chinese leader, Xi Jinping....

The hacked files contain a number of speeches from high-ranking Party officials that allow an insight into the mindset behind the policies, as well as some of the clearest evidence so far for where responsibility ultimately lies.

In a speech, stamped as “classified” and delivered by Zhao Kezhi, China’s Minister for Public Security, on a visit to Xinjiang in June 2018, he suggests that at least two million people are infected with “extremist thought” in southern Xinjiang alone.

Peppered with references to President Xi Jinping, the speech heaps praise on the Chinese leader for his “important instructions” for the construction of new facilities and an increase in funding for prisons to cope with the influx in detainees necessary to reach that two million target.

And if the mass internment of Xinjiang’s Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities really does flow from orders given by the Chinese leader, then there are hints too about the kind of timeframe he has in mind.

The cache contains another secret speech, delivered in 2017 by Chen Quanguo - until recently Xinjiang’s hardline Communist Party secretary.

“For some, even five years re-education may not be enough,” he tells his audience of senior military and police cadres, a seeming admission that for as long as any Uyghur continues to feel a loyalty to identity or faith at least as strong as to the Party, there’s no end in sight.

“Once they are let out, problems will reappear, that is the reality in Xinjiang,” he says.

The Eichmann film

A new film uses Adolf Eichmann's actual voice, expressing pride in his part in the Holocaust. From the Times of Israel:

Convicted Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann is heard but not seen in a new film as an actor mouths the words he used over 60 years ago to describe his key role in the Holocaust.

Eichmann, a key architect of Nazi Germany’s Final Solution, went into hiding after the war and was snatched from Argentina by Israeli intelligence in May 1960 to be put on trial in Jerusalem. Israel executed the top Nazi official by hanging in 1962 for his role in the mass murder of six million Jews.

Four years before he was captured, Eichmann gave hours of interviews to Dutch Nazi journalist Willem Sassen at the reporter’s home in Argentina. Sassen was one of many Nazis who also fled to the South American country after the war.

The recordings include remarks attributed to Eichmann that prosecutors presented at the trial, but that he denied at the time, including his clear declaration of having no regrets about the mass murder and even an expression of disappointment that millions more Jews were not killed.

Eichmann claimed in his defense during the trial that he was just a minor bureaucrat.

“In conclusion, I must say to you… I regret nothing. I have no desire to say that we did something wrong,” Eichmann said in the recordings.

“If we had killed 10.3 million Jews I would say with satisfaction ‘Good, we destroyed an enemy.’ Then we would have fulfilled our mission. And thus, to my regret, it was not to be,'” Eichmann is heard saying in parts of the recordings that feature in the film and in which he was apparently referring to the entire Jewish population of Europe on the eve of the Holocaust.

It all rather blows a hole in Hannah Arendt's famous "banality of evil" line. Here's what I wrote back in 2014:

Can we now finally drop the "banality of evil" nonsense?

German historian Bettina Stangneth's new book "Eichmann Before Jerusalem" takes a more detailed look at the Nazi bureaucrat:

Smuggled out of Europe after the collapse of Germany, Eichmann managed to live a peaceful and active exile in Argentina for years before his capture by the Mossad. Though once widely known by nicknames such as “Manager of the Holocaust,” in 1961 he was able to portray himself, from the defendant’s box in Jerusalem, as an overworked bureaucrat following orders—no more, he said, than “just a small cog in Adolf Hitler’s extermination machine.” How was this carefully crafted obfuscation possible?

Well, it was possible - or at least became the accepted post-hoc truth - mainly as a result of Hannah Arendt, who swallowed wholesale and then successfully propagated Eichmann's carefully crafted defence in her 1963 book "Eichmann in Jerusalem", popularising the "banality of evil" catchphrase as an explanation and exculpation of Eichmann. He was, she believed, a foolish man who was capable of thinking only in trite cliches and banalities, someone who saw his job as a Nazi functionary simply as a matter of doing his job well: of doing what he was told, and obeying orders. 

Arendt's hugely influential book had the effect of somehow diminishing the Jerusalem trial. Eichmann's kidnapping by Israeli agents in Argentina was an illegal act, she said, and he was tried in Israel even though he was not accused of committing any crimes there. "If he had not been found guilty before he appeared in Jerusalem, guilty beyond any reasonable doubt, the Israelis would never have dared, or wanted, to kidnap him in formal violation of Argentine law." She described the trial as a show trial arranged and managed by Prime Minister Ben-Gurion, which Ben-Gurion wanted, for political reasons, to emphasize not primarily what Eichmann had done, but what the Jews had suffered during the Holocaust. She pointed out that the war criminals tried at Nuremberg were "indicted for crimes against the members of various nations," without special reference to the Nazi genocide against the Jews.

But those foolish Israelis hadn't got themselves a monster like Goering. Rather, they'd got themselves a clown. In her words:

Despite all the efforts of the prosecution, everybody could see that this man was not a "monster," but it was difficult indeed not to suspect that he was a clown. And since this suspicion would have been fatal to the entire enterprise [his trial], and was also rather hard to sustain in view of the sufferings he and his like had caused to millions of people, his worst clowneries were hardly noticed and almost never reported.

So a major trial of a man guilty of helping to plan the Holocaust, and put into action the murder of some six million Jews, becomes in Arendt's telling a rather petty exercise in Israeli vindictiveness and self-serving publicity.

This was far from the truth, though. And Eichmann was certainly no fool. 

Arendt mocked Eichmann's appeal to Immanuel Kant in his trial: the poor man simply didn't understand Kant's argument about the categorical imperative. But Eichmann was just playing to the gallery there. Stangneth, in her research, came across a long note he'd written, dismissing Kantian moral philosophy.

In the trial in Jerusalem Eichmann cynically invoked Kantian morality, but as a free man in Argentina he declared that “the drive toward self-preservation is stronger than any so-called moral requirement.” Kantian universalism was diametrically opposed to his racially tinged völkisch outlook. He had been a “fanatical warrior” for the law, “which creates order and destroys the sick and the ‘degenerate,’ ” and which had nothing to do with humanist ideals or other weaknesses. From a surprising admission of German inferiority — “we are fighting an enemy who . . . is intellectually superior to us” — it followed that total extermination of the Jewish adversary “would have fulfilled our duty to our blood and our people and to the freedom of the peoples.”

There was nothing at all banal about the evil of Adolf Eichmann.

The end of the world

Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin - Russia losing in Ukraine would literally mean the end of the world.  "So there is only one option: a full-scale victory for Russia and the beginning of a new multipolar world order":

Not just a lone nutter. He is, unfortunately for Ukraine and for the rest of the world, Putin's guru.

The biological facts of womanhood

The NHS may be erasing women, but there are still a few people around with some sense:

The government has overturned an attempt to introduce gender-neutral language on a piece of legislation that had referred to “expectant people” instead of mothers.

Downing Street acted over the Ministerial and Other Maternity Allowances Bill, which was designed to make provision for ministers on maternity leave.

Before it received royal assent the bill was amended to replace gender-neutral nouns with gendered ones such as “mother”.

New guidance has now been issued by the government to ensure similar language is not repeated in future bills.

A government source told The Times: “The government is ensuring that sex-specific language continues to be used in the drafting of legislation where appropriate. This is crucial to ensure that the experiences of women are not erased while drafting legislation and reflects ministers’ concerns that militant Stonewall guidance has crept into the civil service with a political agenda to erase women and the concept of biological sex.”...

Downing Street has come under increasing pressure from within the Tory party to resist moves by pro-trans campaigners to impose gender-neutral rules....

Baroness Noakes, a Tory peer, criticised “an increasing use of language that eliminates women. People who challenge this in public are often labelled transphobic”.

“I am proud of my own record on LGBT issues, both in your lordships’ House and in the organisations with which I have been involved, but I am not prepared to be erased as a woman.”

Baroness Gale, a Labour peer, added: “Considering that only women can get pregnant and give birth, I cannot see any reason why ‘woman’ cannot be used. I believe in using gender-neutral language where appropriate, but I do not believe it is appropriate in this bill.”

Baroness Hayman, a crossbencher, said: “The price of so-called gender neutrality in this bill is an awkward and ugly distortion of the English language and an affront to common sense.

“Far from encouraging respect for language and the recognition of diversity, to which I am fully committed, it risks bemusing and alienating the public and damaging the very causes that passionate advocates of such language espouse.”

She said: “There is no malice in wishing to maintain the biological facts of womanhood and the lived experience of women, which includes menstruation, childbirth and menopause. That view happily co-exists with respect and concern for transgender people.

Can someone please tell the NHS.