Mick Hartley

On the beach

From Iran, année 38: Photography Since the Revolution:

Public Place, 2015 © Morteza Niknahad & Behnam Zakeri

Frieze Sculpture Park

In the English Gardens, Regent's Park:

Ugo Rondinone, Summer Moon, 2011

Tony Cragg, Stroke, 2014

John Chamberlain, FIDDLERSFORTUNE (2010)

Miquel Barcelo, Gran Elefandret, 2008

KAWS, FINAL DAYS, 2013 

Edouardo Paolozzi, Vulcan, 1999

Hank Willis Thomas, Endless Column, 2017

Bernar Venet, 17 Acute Unequal Angles, 2016

An inspiring vision of the future

BF Myers, in his book The Cleanest Race, argued that North Korea, far from being the last bastion of communism, was in reality more like a far-right military dictatorship, with its worship of the strong leader, its bellicose rhetoric, and its obsession with racial purity. And now, influenced to some extent by Myers' book, we're seeing far-right groups hailing the North Koreans as an inspiring vision of a racially-segregated future. Bradley Jardine and Casey Michel:

Adolf Hitler’s face decorates the hall as Kim Jong-un, North Korea’s eternal leader, sits ready to give a rousing speech. The audience looks on seemingly entranced. And suddenly, electronic drums thud over an apocalyptic string arrangement.

Welcome to The Daily Traditionalist, a video blog by Matthew Heimbach, an American white nationalist who advocates dividing the United States into ethnically and culturally homogenous states.

“As long as [North Koreans] can maintain their blood, it will maintain their identity as a people,” he says. “It’s pretty amazing if you actually look at what they’re trying to do [there].”

For many on the far right, the Korean peninsula’s secretive regime offers an inspiring vision of the future.

“North Korea has much to be admired,” said Matteo Salvini, head of Italy’s right-wing party Northern League, in 2014. “They have a splendid sense of community. Children play on the streets and respect their elders — things that no longer exist in Italy.”

Yet North Korea’s admirers rarely mention Pyongyang’s penchant for torture, extensive gulag system, mass famines, or thriving narcotics and meth industries. These inconvenient details are either deliberately avoided, or they are blamed on the West....

“American imperialism and American militarism cannot abide a country [like North Korea] that wants to be sovereign and that rejects the radical globalist agenda,” Heimbach tells The Diplomat, adding that North Korea has survived despite being a “pretty universal punching bag” among Western governments.

Even Russia’s Alexander Dugin, an ideologue for white nationalists, has praised Pyongyang as an “island of freedom,” arguing that Russia should provide it with weapons of mass destruction to protect its sovereignty.

“If their weapons take flight, we [the Russian people] should cheer them on!” he says. “To not understand that North Korea is a seed of humanism and democracy in the face of an American occupation is to demonstrate complete and utter ignorance.”

Anti-Semitism is another factor bonding white nationalists to Pyongyang. In an online blog post railing against “global Zionism,” former head of the Ku Klux Klan David Duke writes that “as the Jewish Lobby dictates U.S. foreign policy, North Korea’s hostility toward Israel has made it a target for aggression.” Citing North Korea’s refusal to recognize the state of Israel, Duke writes that “the Jewish-supremacist media” has long singled Pyongyang out for destruction.

Still, given North Korea’s Cold War origins, the admiration from white nationalists is a curious development. But in 2009, North Korean authorities removed all references to communism within its constitution, adding fuel to the argument that North Korea is a far-right regime.

“After the [Korean Central News Agency] press release in 2014 likening Obama to a revolting monkey and poking fun at his ‘indeterminate bloodline,’ I would have thought it would be hard to keep pretending this is a far-left state,” says B.R. Myers, author of The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves And Why It Matters — a book that argues against the Stalinist tropes in the international community’s perception of the country.

According to Myers, North Korea is an ethno-nationalist regime with a deep-seated military industrial complex. Much like Nazi Germany, Pyongyang’s entire command economy is geared toward its armed forces, not public services.

“It is a far-right state, practicing the ideology it preaches, and doing very well by its own standards — if not by our own materialist standards,” Myers tells The Diplomat.

Myers suspects communistic mischaracterizations of North Korea to be politically motivated. The people who advocate that the United States should negotiate with Pyongyang regardless of its behavior would rather “evoke memories of successful Cold War negotiations with communist states than of the unsuccessful appeasement of Nazism,” he says.

Interestingly, Myers’ book — and its argument that North Korea functions as a far-right state — appears to have accelerated support from Western white nationalists. Heimbach, for instance, says an “Asian nationalist” friend gave the book to him, and that the read “definitely opened my eyes” regarding the Kim regime.

“I have been told by various people that The Cleanest Race is a cult book among radical rightists,” says Myers. “I suppose some people, perhaps those opposed to globalization and diversity, can read my description of the country and find it an appealing place.”

Ridiculous demands

The Rason Special Economic Zone is right at the north-eastern tip of North Korea, up against the Russian and Chinese borders. It was established by Pyongyang in 1992 to promote economic growth through foreign investment. It's of special interest to the Chinese in particular because the city of Rason is an ice-free port, and the Chinese have no coast line here to the east of North Korea: there's a narrow strip of Russian territory between China and the Sea of Japan. The Russians have some interest too, as Vladivostok, some distance up the coast, can't always claim to be ice-free.

So it's all going swimmingly, then? Not exactly:

Chinese and Russian investors in Rason Special Economic Zone of North Hamgyong Province are reportedly withdrawing from North Korea. The root cause of the phenomenon is said to be the North Korean government's inconsistent policies. 

Rason, regarded as a symbol of North Korea's reform and openness, has been actively seeking foreign investment, although sources in the region say it now feels like a “ghost town,” and has lost signs of its previous vitality. Foreign investors have stopped visiting the city, and existing foreign-owned companies are said to be withdrawing in quick succession. 

 "The Chinese companies in Rason all want to withdraw, citing unacceptable government practices. Some Russian companies have withdrawn from the city in the middle of construction, realizing that they can't expect to profit from investing in the city," a source in North Hamgyong Province told Daily NK.

 "The Chinese investors used to mobilize their own vehicles to carry goods to the city, but now these practices are disappearing. Rason has for some time been regarded as a risky investment by foreign investors."

 According to a separate source in North Hamgyong Province, the city of Rason has lost its credibility with foreign investors due to repetitive swindling by North Korean businesses and institutions. North Korean entities are known to insist that conditions that were previously not mentioned in contracts have not been met, or provide various excuses for not remitting money that has been earned. 

 "Some foreign companies have left the city quickly, without even attempting to take their investment profits with them, believing that it’s a waste of time. They must have concluded that they should leave before losing even more," he said.

 "Some private Chinese investors have yet to receive any of their profits because they believed that their North Korean counterparts would abide by their promises to remit the money. Despite this, some small and medium-sized businesses and private investors appear unwilling to leave the city.”

"Foreign investors are tired of North Korea's ridiculous demands and are saying that they will never invest in North Korea again. Even the local residents are saying that the city is being abandoned.”

In addition the Mangyongbong, a ferry that's just started up service between Rason and Vladivostok, has failed to attract the hoped-for foreign travellers. Tourists, it seems, are no longer interested in visiting the DPRK. God knows why not.

The internal collapse of the Kim regime is still our best hope for avoiding war. This all helps.

Lightning cloud

North-west Oklahoma:

[Photo: Vanessa Neufeld/National geographic Your Shot]

So What

The opening track to "Kind of Blue", Miles' 1959 masterpiece:

The personnel differs slightly from the recorded version. Wynton Kelly replaces Bill Evans on piano, and Cannonball Adderley on alto sax is missing (he was ill on the day of the recording). Apart from that we have John Coltrane, tenor sax, Paul Chambers, bass, Jimmy Cobb, drums. Plus members of the Gil Evans Orchestra. And, this being as cool as it gets in jazz, lots of smoking.

In case you're interested:

It is one of the best known examples of modal jazz, set in the Dorian mode and consisting of 16 bars of D Dorian, followed by eight bars of E♭ Dorian and another eight of D Dorian.

 

Card Alley

February 1936. "Card Alley. North Beach District (Italians). San Francisco, California."

[Photo: Shorpy/Dorothea Lange]

This nightmare scenario

Lee Smith wonders if, after years of failed US policy towards North Korea, Trump just might be the man to break the mold. Well, that's about all the choice we have at the moment.

The nightmare that American policymakers feared 20 years ago—a nuclear-armed North Korea with ballistic missiles that can hit America, and obliterate our treaty allies in Asia—is now frighteningly real. Twenty years of American negotiators pursuing a combination of rational carrots and sticks has failed to change the behavior of a totalitarian hermit kingdom led by a family of brutal sociopaths.

What makes this nightmare scenario even scarier is that Donald Trump is both literally and figuratively the last man capable of stopping Kim Jong Un. The current American president is the sole decider on the planet who might be able to stop the slow-rolling nightmare of a gangster regime determined to end American hegemony in Asia, on the internet, and wherever else that the U.S. insists that the rule of law should be enforced. Yet President Trump is undisciplined and emotional and seems incapable of crafting any policy that can’t be summed up in less than 140 characters.

Yes, the peace and security of the world may all come down to Donald Trump—and experienced U.S. policymakers are terrified. For instance, former senior State Department official Wendy Sherman has “very little” confidence in Trump’s ability to manage the “high-risk” diplomacy the situation demands. “Trump has lost … credibility,” says Sherman, because “he says so many outrageous things all of the time.”

For Sherman, the Clinton administration’s policy director for North Korea, who was involved in negotiations over the 1994 Agreed Framework with Pyongyang, the answer to the North Korean nightmare is more diplomacy. Presumably, like the kind of negotiations that Sherman conducted to broker the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action over Iran’s nuclear program.

Indeed, some policy hands, including former Secretary of State John Kerry, are already suggesting that the model for nuclear diplomacy with North Korea should be America’s nuclear diplomacy with Iran.

Got that? The way to stop North Korea from launching nuclear weapons on American cities and/or U.S. allies is to make a deal with the Hermit Kingdom patterned after the deal made with the Islamic Republic—which was brokered by the same team that led American policy down this path with North Korea in the first place.

The logic here may be difficult for ordinary mortals to parse. Direct negotiations didn’t work with the North Koreans, or else they wouldn’t be testing ballistic missiles and threatening American cities with nuclear annihilation. And that kind of diplomacy won’t restrain the Iranians, either, who have tethered their nuclear weapons program to the North Koreans while turning large swaths of the Middle East into a depopulated kill zone.

The fundamental problem isn’t that North Korean ruler Kim Jong Un is a lunatic—of course he is. A man who executed his top officials with anti-artillery, or has his half-brother assassinated in broad daylight, is advertising the fact that he’s a dangerous sociopath who doesn’t care what the world thinks.

Nor is the problem that American policymakers spent two decades kicking the can down the road and thereby emboldened American enemies. That critique is true enough – but it’s also too easy. Foreign policy, especially in a democracy, is often about postponing the inevitable and arranging it so that someone else has to clean up the mess.

What’s startling is that two decades later, so few people are willing to recognize the plain truth that North Korea’s sociopathic dictator is determined to shove in our faces: North Korea has the bomb, and it is able and willing to use it....

North Korea’s launch Tuesday is the culmination of a quarter of a century of failed American policy, afflicting both parties, through three administrations, that has brought the world to the brink of catastrophe. I don’t know if Trump has special abilities that will help him navigate what may soon turn into a major disaster. He tried to work with the Chinese who now clearly think a nuclear North Korea is less of a problem than a reunified Korean peninsula. Beijing, therefore, is a nonstarter, and the United States, as Trump has tweeted, will have to solve it on its own.

My hope is that Donald Trump knows something from the real estate business, or Queens, or he learned something along the way that’s not taught in the fancy graduate school programs, like Johns Hopkins and Georgetown, that produce American “strategists.” Because those are the people—whose vanity and self-love come in epic proportions—who put Americans and the rest of the world in the middle of this mess. And it’s certainly not diplomacy with Pyongyang that’s going to save the day. Give us anything but more Wendy Sherman and John Kerry. The peculiar paradox of statesmanship suggests that a reckless outsider who speaks his mind before fully calculating the cost might be the best hope our planet has left.

A reckless outsider as our only chance? Hmm. This does not look good.

Update: Joshua Stanton.

This week, I’ve read more snark at President Trump for giving Xi Jinping three months to bring Kim Jong-Un to heel than I saw directed at Barack Obama for outsourcing his entire North Korea policy to China for eight years. Regardless of your views of Trump, he inherited a problem that Obama (and lest we forget, Secretary of State Clinton) ignored for eight critical years. History should record that Obama, Clinton, and Kerry squandered our last best chance to block Kim Jong-Un’s path to nuclear breakout without the use of force or violence.

Bicycle graveyard

Hangzhou, China:

[VCG/Getty Images]

[Thanks Matthew]

Living with a nuclear North Korea

It's all getting serious now with North Korea. A common perception - made more plausible with Donald Trump's absurd diplomacy-by-twitter - is that China and Russia are the sensible ones here. Simon Jenkins in the Guardian, for instance:

The only strategic caution being pursued towards North Korea is from China and Russia. They are like grown-ups watching two children screaming at each other in a playpen. They know that North Korea is a threat to no one but South Korea, whose new government is sensibly seeking to reduce tension. There is no way China or Russia wants a hot war in the Pacific, where each has its own power game in play. China could flick a switch on North Korea, but it need not do so yet, least of all when the country is causing Washington such evident anguish and embarrassment – at no cost to Beijing.

The diplomacy of dumb is characterised by an abuse of language. It talks of “threats to national security” when it means threats to human life and property. It calls unacceptable what it intends to accept. It declares red lines it knows it will cross. It nationalises risk, and converts it into fear, dancing to the tune of the security-industrial complex, which profits from exploiting that fear.

Dumb diplomacy fetishes distant threats – such as from Saddam Hussein’s Iraq – which require that “something must be done”, when such threats are not susceptible to anything it can constructively deliver. It imposes sanctions it cannot enforce. It is so obsessed with risk aversion, it closes New York airport to Muslims and packs Wimbledon with submachine guns. This is the sort of madness that preceded the first world war.

It's a constant theme of Jenkins, that we have nothing to fear but fear itself. That was indeed the title of a Jenkins article published the very morning of the Madrid bombing in 2004. He's learnt nothing.

China and Russia can afford to play the statesmen here, because they have absolutely no interest in curbing North Korea, or in seeing an end to the nightmare Kim regime. And, contrary to Jenkins' claim, Pyongyang has made it abundantly clear that the US is its main target, and main object of hatred.

As Joshua Stanton argues, we simply cannot live with a nuclear North Korea:

Can we learn to live with a nuclear North Korea that sold missile technology to Iran, built a nuclear reactor in a part of Syria now controlled by ISIS, and threatened to sell nuclear weapons to terrorists? That attacked our South Korean treaty ally or U.S. forces stationed in Korea in 1968, 1969, 1970, 1976, 1983, 1987, 1998, 2002, 2010, and 2015, killing 50 South Koreans in 2010 alone? That sends assassins to murder human rights activists and dissidents in exile? That has launched cyberattacks against banks, newspapers, nuclear power plants, and the Seoul subway? That launched another cyberattack against a Hollywood movie studio, made terrorist threats against movie theaters in the United States, and chilled the freedom of expression that Americans cherish and have given their lives for? That may already be able to strike the United States with a nuclear weapon? The very idea is madness. One day, Kim Jong-Un, whose tolerance for risk always exceeds the calculations of our “expert” class, will go further than we are prepared to tolerate. Down this path lies war — a war whose potential will grow more destructive with each passing year.

Any fool who can hear the rising roar and see the boiling cloud of mist ahead knows where this current is carrying us. We cannot live with a nuclear North Korea if it means — as it assuredly does — the end of nonproliferation and the beginning of an age in which nuclear, chemical, biological, and cyber-terrorism will cease to be theoretical and become imminent and frequent. Fundamentally, the question isn’t really whether we can live with a nuclear North Korea, but whether a nuclear North Korea so inculcated with hatred of America, and with contempt for our open and democratic society, would live with us.

Update: that didn't take long. A Guardian piece measures up Trump and Kim Jong-un - and guess who comes off worst. Don't assume Trump is more responsible with nuclear weapons than North Korea.