Mick Hartley

Politics and Culture

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  • Socialist monumentalism

    A two-part history of the North Korean socialist-kitsch style of monumental statuary in post-colonial Africa, from the Daily NK:

    North Korea has long relied on unconventional means to earn hard currency in the face of sweeping international sanctions that have effectively shut off most legitimate export channels. One of the more distinctive methods has been the export of architectural and monumental construction services to African nations, carried out through Mansudae Overseas Projects, a Pyongyang-based state company that deploys North Korean artists, engineers, and construction workers abroad to build statues, public buildings, and monuments under contract with foreign governments.

    The scope of this work across Africa is considerable. From towering bronze figures on Atlantic-facing hillsides to presidential palaces and independence museums, North Korea’s construction footprint on the continent reflects both a hard-currency strategy and, in several cases, Cold War-era political solidarity that outlasted the ideological moment that produced it. The United Nations Panel of Experts on North Korea has flagged Mansudae Overseas Projects as a significant sanctions-evasion mechanism, estimating that contracts in Namibia alone may have generated tens of millions of dollars for the regime. Revenue flows under government control, with a portion reportedly directed toward regime operating costs or routed through opaque financial channels.

    The best known of these monstrosities is Senegal’s huge African Renaissance Monument, which at least managed to outrage the local imams with its semi-naked figures.

    Elsewhere we see Ethiopia’s Derg Monument, plus three in Namibia: Heroes Acre, the State House, and the Independence War Museum.

    In part two we have Zimbabwe’s National Heroes Acre, Algeria’s Martyrs Memorial, Angola’s Agostinho Neto Memorial, and Botswana’s Three Dikgosi Monument.

    Zimbabwe’s National Heroes Acre:

    Located on the outskirts of the capital Harare, the Zimbabwe National Heroes Acre is a national cemetery and war memorial honoring those who contributed to the country’s liberation struggle and subsequent development. The site commemorates veterans of the Second Chimurenga — the guerrilla war waged against Rhodesian colonial rule during the 1960s and 1970s — and others designated as national heroes. Features include a tomb of the unknown soldier, large-scale statuary, an eternal flame, murals, and a museum. The site’s design incorporates two AK-47 rifles positioned back to back. Hero designation and burial rights are administered by the Zimbabwe African National Union–Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF), the ruling party that has governed Zimbabwe since independence, and the government.

    North Korea’s direct involvement in the site is well documented. North Korean architects and sculptors participated in the initial design and construction phases. The memorial is widely reported to have been modeled on Pyongyang’s Revolutionary Martyrs’ Cemetery, a prominent hilltop monument complex north of the capital. The collaboration reflects the close political and cultural ties between Harare and Pyongyang in the years immediately following Zimbabwean independence in 1980.

    No mention, we can safely assume, of the Gukurahundi – the mass killings/genocide from 1983 to 1987 perpetrated by Mugabe’s ZANU forces, helped by the North Korean-trained 5th Brigade, against the Ndebele ethnic group which largely supported Mugabe’s rival Joshua Nkomo. Now conveniently forgotten.

  • The philosopher of the red-green alliance

    Hussein Aboubakr Mansour, at Spiked, on Ali Shariati: the philosopher of the Iranian Revolution:

    When Marxists and Islamists marched together through Tehran in 1978, or march together on elite university campuses today, many find it mystifying. Here are committed materialists and committed theists, ideological enemies by every reckoning, united in a single cause. Who is using whom, and who is fooling whom? A large supply of boxed clichés, such as ‘useful idiots’ or ‘Islamists hijacking the revolution’, has been needed to interpret the alliance and reassure Western observers. The problem is that the paradox is entirely in their mind. The relationship between the left and the Islamic Republic was never one of paradox but of shared genealogy – with both rooted in a shared, revolutionary vision of history. And the inability to read it as such was itself a symptom of the massive delusions we have been captured by, for well over a century.

    In short, the compulsion for western intellectuals to find any cause, however irrational or deluded, that they can embrace against the consumerist materialist horrors of our modern liberal democracies. Communism didn’t work – so, next stop, Islamism.

    Meet Ali Shariati, the Iranian philosopher who was a key player in this latest derangement.

    The Islamic Republic of Iran, which has drawn upon itself the consequences of a half-century of revolutionary ideology, was the unintended offspring of such a literary mind made even more dangerous by systematic philosophical education; a single, extraordinary and almost entirely misunderstood intellectual who translated Martin Heidegger’s work into Farsi, called Jean-Paul Sartre and Frantz Fanon his idols, spent his formative years in Paris, and proceeded to reconstruct the whole arc of Islamic sacred history as a mystified version of a Marxian theory of history, in which all events point towards an Islamicised, socialist ending. To understand Ali Shariati is to understand the Red-Green alliance, decolonialist narratives, and the ideological obsession with Palestinian liberation not as separate phenomena requiring separate explanations but as expressions of a single, revolutionary-cum-apocalyptic philosophy of history that has been operating, largely undetected, for the better part of a century.

    Worth a read.

    Yet the revolution that Shariati, more than most, helped to ferment from the ground up ended by bringing to Iran and the Middle East not the liberation it promised but a revolutionary state of torture and terror ruled by a dictatorship – not of the Marxist philosopher-king but of the Islamic law-doctor-king. Where the secular left had filled the air with slogans of progress, the new regime filled it with martyrdom, death and the promise of total war for the liberation of Palestine. The philosopher had yielded to the jurist; the Paris café had yielded to the Shia seminary, but the revolution continued, unbroken and unrepentant, under a new name and always seeking death and destruction.

  • More Greens

  • Stoke Newington blossom

    Greenway Close, Clissold Park.

  • Easter morning

  • Severe psychiatric morbidity

    Interesting.

    Article here. “Psychiatric Morbidity Among Adolescents and Young Adults Who Contacted Specialised Gender Identity Services in Finland in 1996–2019: A Register Study”

    “Conclusion : Severe psychiatric morbidity is common among gender-referred adolescents and appears to be more prevalent in those referred after the recent surge in referrals. Psychiatric needs do not subside after medical gender reassignment.”

    Summary:

    • Gender-referred adolescents show high psychiatric morbidity, yet gender differences and mental health trajectories after medical gender reassignment remain poorly understood.
    • These adolescents had markedly higher psychiatric morbidity than controls before and after referral, with treatment needs often persisting and even intensifying after medical interventions—on some, they might even have a negative impact.
    • Findings emphasise the need for thorough psychiatric assessment and ongoing treatment throughout medical gender reassignment.

    Adolescents who present for gender assignment treatment – particularly boys – are deeply troubled and suicidal. After medical intervention they’re even more deeply troubled and suicidal.

    Hmm. Not at all what we were told….

  • Kimjongunism

    In North Korea it’s increasingly hard to keep up with the ideological twists. From the Daily NK:

    A provincial party official in North Hamgyong province was seized by State Information Bureau agents the moment he stepped down from the lectern at a political lecture session last month, after accidentally mixing quotes from Kim Il Sung into a presentation intended to promote the distinct ideological legacy of Kim Jong Un, Daily NK has learned….

    A Daily NK source in North Hamgyong province reported Thursday that the incident occurred in mid-March during a lecture session held in Chongjin city. The official, attached to the provincial party committee, had been explaining what the state describes as the independent and distinctive character of Kim Jong Un’s ideology when he mistakenly incorporated instructions associated with Kim Il Sung. He was detained by agents present in the room as soon as the lecture ended.…

    “The word going around inside the provincial party is that the arrest was carried out deliberately and publicly to make an example,” the source said, “to show that anyone who damages the authority of General Secretary Kim Jong Un will not be forgiven regardless of their rank or position.”

    A second line of reasoning also circulated. “In the past, it was Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il whose names appeared at the head of documents and lectures,” the source said. “Now, General Secretary Kim Jong Un’s name is the one being emphasized as singularly dominant across everything. Mixing in the previous leaders’ instructions was seen as a refusal to accept that shift.”

    Out with the old: in with the new.

    The incident reflects the intense pressure that has accompanied a sweeping ideological campaign launched following the Ninth WPK Congress, which elevated Kim Jong Un’s personal ideology as a distinct system of thought separate from the legacy of his predecessors. North Korea’s ideological tradition had long framed Kim Jong Un’s thinking as the continuation and development of “Kimilsungism-Kimjongilism,” the combined ideological framework of the two previous leaders. The current campaign treats Kim Jong Un’s thought as independently supreme, a shift that has created new pitfalls for officials accustomed to decades of standard formulations.

  • At the Wireless Festival

    It’s just cynical – hoping for some of that old Bob Vylan-style publicity….

    Added:

  • “Coming out”

  • Bloomsbury blossom

    Gordon Square this morning: