Mick Hartley

Politics and Culture

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  • On the run to Clovis

    Jack Delano, March 1943. "Vaughn, New Mexico. One of the 5000 Class Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad freight locomotives about to leave on the run to Clovis, New Mexico."

    image from www.shorpy.com
    [Photo: Shorpy/Jack Delano for the Office of War Information]

  • Leading people who think of themselves as idealists into morally disastrous territory

    This, from a couple of weeks back, is well worth a read. In an appreciation (not so much a review) of Adam Kirsch's book On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice, Paul Berman discusses the current campus obsession with the demonisation of Israel and the valorisation of the Palestinian struggle.

    As originally conceived a couple of decades back, the academic/anthropological study of "settler colonialism", as set forward by theorists such as Patrick Wolfe, referred to the big English-speaking countries of the US, Canada, and Australia, which were established, so the theory has it, by genocidal projects directed against the original inhabitants. More recently though, as Berman notes, "the self-accusatory ideology has taken a strange twist".

    This is a turn, enraged and indignant, toward Israel. It is a belief that Zionism’s project to build a Jewish state represents the same imperial and genocidal impulse that led to the terrible assaults centuries ago by the English and other Europeans on the indigenous peoples of North America and Australia. Now, this is not an altogether preposterous belief. No one needs to be reminded that, in the course of Israel-and-Palestine’s modern history, masses of Jews did pour into Palestine from elsewhere in the world, and masses of Palestinians did get driven from their homes, and Palestinian suffering was severe from the start, and has lately become horrific in the extreme. These are realities which, seen from one angle, could indeed be likened to the arrival of European colonists in North America and Australia centuries ago and its resultant disasters. And yet, other angles do exist. One of those angles has to do with the history of the modern world, and not the history of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

    The single biggest event of the modern world was World War II, which was a bit of a catastrophe (on this point some people do need to be reminded). And the catastrophe had the effect of sending one enormous population after another into terrorized flight all over the world, like billiard balls banging into one another and ending up in places they had never imagined being. The largest instance of this was in the Indian subcontinent. The war led to the dissolution of the British Empire, therefore to the independence of the suddenly partitioned India and Pakistan, which sent fourteen million or more Hindus and Muslims into flight, terrified of one another and seeking the protection of their co-religionists.

    [It's perhaps worth noting that the ethnic cleansings of the last century weren't all a result of World War II. Apart from Stalin's propensity to move populations – eg the Tatars – from one end of the Soviet Union to the other, there was also the matter of the Greek/Turkish war, culminating in the evacuation of Smyrna in 1922.]

    The second largest instance was the fate of the Germans after Germany’s defeat. Some twelve million or more ethnic Germans and German citizens fled from the Slavic lands, and their erstwhile neighbors took over their homes and property. The flight of the Jews from Europe was still another instance, smaller only because the Jewish population in Europe was smaller, and smaller yet after so many of the Jews were murdered. The flight of the Jews from the Arab countries was still a further instance. And finally there was the flight of the Palestinians, desperate to escape the Jews, who were desperate to escape the Arabs.

    The “genocide” accusation against Israel and the Zionists has been a staple of the larger denunciation of Israel, back through the decades, and to question it right now can seem morally obtuse—right now, when Israel’s campaign to destroy Hamas has brought about the death of tens of thousands of Palestinians. Still, lucidity has its claims, and it is worth recalling yet another historical reality, which is that, over the long course of Zionism’s progress, the Palestinian population has not, all in all, shriveled. On the contrary. Nor has Zionism brought about the destruction of Islam, or of the mighty Arab civilization, or the Arabic language. Nor is there even the remotest danger of anything like that occurring in the future—which might suggest that “settler colonialism” is not the ideal framework for analyzing the Jewish-and-Arab tragedies. The consequences of World War II might appear to be a better framework.

    The proponents of the decolonization ideology insist on their own framework, even so, which means they insist on viewing the Jewish refugees as haughty imperialists, worthy of decolonization, and insist on viewing the Palestinians as American Indians. And they are adamant in these insistences. The decolonization argument tends to be, in Patrick Wolfe’s word, a matter of “binarism,” meaning there are Good People and Bad People, and he who speaks of mutual tragedies and mutual future possibilities is morality’s enemy. And by insisting on these contentions, the ideologues succeed in being analytically dubious and politically frightening at the same time.

    For it is one thing to deliver fire-and-brimstone church sermons on topics of Original Sin in the big English-speaking countries, but those same concepts in connection to Israel tend to have an ominous implication, given that, as everyone has come to see during this last year, Israel could indeed be defeated in a military war, and the Jews could indeed be “decolonized,” which is to say, massacred. And if that were to happen, the proponents of the decolonization ideology in the American universities—not just the students, but the professors, enough of them to be noticeable—would respond, as they have already shown us, by cheering.

    Also, of course, Israel is the ancestral home of the Jews – a point which could hardly have been advanced by those British colonisers staking their claims in North America and Australia.

    Their cheers would be deep and vigorous, too. That is because, in the decolonization ideology, as Kirsch explains, “Palestine is the reference point for every type of social wrong,” and the destruction of Israel would be the triumph for the ideology itself and for every well-intentioned person and political movement around the world. And so, the new and exotic academic ideology that inveighs against “settler colonialism” has turned out to be a recognizable thing. It is one more variation on a phenomenon well known to the twentieth century—the noble doctrine that turns into its opposite. Kirsch makes the point: “I see it leading people who think of themselves as idealists into morally disastrous territory, in ways that are all too familiar in modern history."

    We pass through Frantz Fanon and Gary Snyder (the hippie/Buddhist San Francisco poet? Yes indeed)….

    Finally:

    But I think that chiefly it is worth recalling that, in our own moment, the ideological condemnation of Israel, Judaism, and the Jews that carries the most weight in the world is the one that comes from the Islamist movement—the religious-and-political movement, that is, whose goal is to resurrect the ancient Islamic utopia that can be found in the Qur’an. This movement commands the support right now of many millions of people across the denominations in Islam, and it enjoys the backing of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and is confident of its beliefs and its ultimate triumph someday in the future. And naturally it exerts a pressure on everyone else, and especially on the people in the university quads right now who are protesting against settler colonialism. The pressure is to come up with ideological explanations of every sort—scientific-sounding explanations in the anthropological mode, or political explanations in the national-liberation style of the 1960s, or human-rights explanations in the modern humanitarian fashion, or countercultural displays of universal spirituality—to show that Islamism’s wrath cannot be entirely misplaced, even if the Islamist rhetoric, half medieval-theological, and half pseudo-scientific in the Nazi style (“malignant cancerous tumor,” to quote Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, just now), grates disagreeably on the modern ear.

    Which is how we come to the baffling sight of supposedly progressive anti-Israel protestors on our streets chanting in praise of Hamas, and Hezbollah, and the Houthis, and all the Islamist Jew-hating outfits that are backed and financed by the theocratic regime in Tehran.

  • Rowling on gender identity

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    Unlike sex, gender identity is neither scientifically observable nor testable. In spite of the million word salads attempting one, there's no stable definition of gender identity. The term is variously but not exclusively applied to an innate certainty that one is not the sex one was born, to a constantly shifting sense of self that may be male, female, neither or both, to the extent to which one identifies with often regressive sex stereotypes, or to something akin to a gendered soul, which may be trapped in the 'wrong' body.

    Gender identity is an unfalsifiable idea, a socio-political construct, a quasi-religious belief. At bottom, it is defined by little more than a person's subjective feelings, or (more accurately) their claim to feel those feelings. We are told we must believe in the existence of those feelings and that those feelings constitute a new form of fact, even though in literally no other sphere of human life is it held that a person's self-perception must be accepted unquestioningly as true or real.

    Gender identity ideology is doing measurable, serious harm to some very vulnerable young people and to women. We're watching a medical scandal of terrifying proportions unfold in front of us, along with an assault on the rights of women and girls in the developed world that is unparalleled in my lifetime. I've read treatises on astrology that make more sense than the spiel written on gender identity and I believe that those who continue to push gender identity as 'real' or scientifically observable are guilty of causing widespread damage. The effects are being felt not only by vulnerable individuals, but in once-impartial and rational disciplines and institutions, which, like you, have embraced a form of faith-based fundamentalism masquerading as intellectual sophistication.

  • The pyramid-selling of Jew-hatred

    Howard Jacobson at the JC on the aniiversary of Oct. 7th – ‘Politics stepped in where pity alone, at least for a while, should have spoken’:

    In its own way, the aftermath was, and remains, a second atrocity. To say this is to take nothing from the horror of the massacre itself. Finding language adequate to describe the barbarity bedevilled and continues to bedevil discussion of it. Those not looking for a fight shook their heads and called it “appalling”. But “appalling” is a hand-me-down word that costs the user nothing. It is like saying that “our hearts go out” to the relatives of a disaster victim. Those looking for equivocation, like the UN secretary-general António Guterres, were quick off the mark to remind us that the attack, though undoubtedly appalling, “did not happen in a vacuum”. If only Desdemona hadn’t dropped that handkerchief.

    Others among us searched for expression adequate to the shock of the massacre having happened where it happened, where we thought we had found safety from such murderousness at last, and language equal to the brute malevolence of it, the naked, face-to-face cruelty of the rampage, the indifference to the age or gender of those shot, raped, degraded and dismembered, the seeming joy taken in the ravening and the kidnapping of the innocent. Did we have the words to describe the deep damnation of the savagery or did we have to make up new ones? I am not convinced I have found them yet.

    Had the killers come from some other world? Did they not have wives and mothers and children of their own, no knowledge of the affections to stay their hands, no imagination for others’ agony and grief, and no anticipation of their own remorse, supposing they would ever feel it? …

    If the robotic “appalled” was the best expression of abhorrence so many people could find, it was because they didn’t feel much in the way of abhorrence at all. Experience teaches that those who say they are appalled, as often as not aren’t. The Jews got what was coming, that was all. History was having its way. Politics – the politics of Jew-aversion with its new academic-kindergarten name of anti-colonialism – stepped in where, for a brief hour at least, pity alone should have spoken.

    A professor of some subject that was no subject at some university that was no university mocked our sorrow for the young mown down at a music festival. “Don’t have music festivals on someone else’s land in that case,” he jeered before a tear could dry. We can say, at least, that his subject had never been history, geography or humanity.

    The inhumanity of each new responder gathered strength and even glee from what had been said before. This was the pyramid-selling of Jew-hatred. “Where’s the Jews?” someone shouted from the steps of the Sydney Opera House. I recall wondering if the wrong news had got out. Did people think it was the Jews who had gone on a murder spree? If not, how to understand the carnival of Jew-revulsion that was unloosed in hours? The blood of Jews had been lavishly spilt, which only made the most educated in our society bay for more? By what logic of morality or compassion could this be? When we find a victim of a road accident lying in the road, we don’t rush over and kick him.

    It was as though permission had finally been given to say whatever one liked about Jews. And that included abandoning the pretence that anti-Zionism wasn’t anti-Jewish. Israeli, Zionist, Jew; in the rush to condemn, the terms became openly interchangeable. The barricades of truth and decency had come down and those who felt they’d been confined for too long behind them could now pour through and abuse to their hearts’ contents. I remember the first time I swore. Once one filthy word came out there was no stopping the rest of them. Of such exhilaration are all mob acts of racism made, but this was different in that the mob had PhDs….

  • How it started

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    There’s been a year of gaslighting, denialism, hatred and war but let’s remember how it started. With thousands of terrorists and ordinary civilians invading Israel and murdering, kidnapping and raping civilians.
    This is a clip from a new documentary which will be on Channel 4 on Wednesday called One Day in October.
    It’s taken from Hamas cameras and shows their glee as they get close to Kibbutz Be’eri – a socialist kibbutz where many people from Gaza worked – and their plans for the civilians who live there: ‘It’s time for the nation of Jihad! Be’eri! I swear to God we’ll slaughter them! Livestream it!’

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  • Undermining Cass

    An interesting look at how well-funded smear campaigns are being used to discredit the Cass Review in the US – notably the smearing of the Society for Evidence Based Gender Medicine (SEGM) by the Southern Poverty Law Centre (SPLC). Amongst other revelations: SPLC describe SEGM as a hate group for (in part) taking $400k from three charitable foundations, despite SPLC taking $22 million from those same foundations in the last 3 years alone. You'll need to read the whole piece for the details, but here's the gist:

    The more US-based lobbyists can publicly discredit SEGM, the more suspicion can be cast on anyone with any connection to them, any evidence they produce, and now on the findings of the Cass Review. The fact is that the Cass Review’s damning assessment of the evidence for the efficacy and safety of puberty blockers fatally undermines legal cases based on arguing the opposite. The Cass Review is already being cited by their Republican opponents, so in the absence of any actual response grounded in evidence, SPLC’s huge resources are turned to an international smear campaign – one that is exemplified by their CAPTAIN report, which as I’ve previously discussed is built on an echo chamber of activist groupthink and conspiracist logic….

    I think that anyone seeking to understand and address the misinformation and disinformation currently being spread about the Cass Review need to take a long look at the incredibly well-financed activists in the US who have been successfully traducing tiny organisations and blameless individuals, with no serious opposition, for years. As with feminist targets before, these attacks don’t stop at the door of SEGM – they spread, by relentless guilt-by-association, to contaminate absolutely everyone who touches them, or anyone connected to them. Unchecked claims like this are toxic to public discourse, spreading and gaining traction with zero corrective force, creating an unwarranted chilling effect around their targets. Bystanders are quick to believe there is no smoke without fire, and UK clinicians cannot realistically defend their reputations from this sort of partisan dreck from the US. Blandly wondering why the Cass Review has been “largely ignored” in the US misses the point – it is not merely being ignored, it is actively being undermined.

  • The new McCarthyism

    Etan Smallman in the Telegraph on the blacklisting of gender-critical voices in the arts:

    Social media mobs can be spotted at 50 paces. But across the arts, a more insidious phenomenon is being reported – a secret blacklisting for having expressed views deemed to offend the consensus of the “community of the good”.

    Overnight, gigs evaporate and polite excuses are made as invitations are rescinded and doors come crashing shut.

    The Telegraph has spoken to gender-critical creatives across fine art, publishing, poetry, theatre, music, dance and TV who have said their reputations have been sabotaged and incomes decimated by behind-the-scenes boycotts several referred to as “soft cancellation”….

    Laura* is a 50-year-old British TV writer-director, who found her ability to make a living placed in jeopardy after submitting a pilot script about transitioning teenage girls and their mothers to her US managers.

    “It’s exactly the territory you’d think TV shows would want to explore,” she says. “It’s good,” said the reply, “but there’s just no way we could send this out.”

    Laura was surprised by the silence she received when she then forwarded it to her agent. After much chasing, she was dropped as a client in 2021. “They sent quite a careful email, saying, ‘We don’t think that we are creatively aligned with you and we don’t think that we can help you any more.’”

    Not creatively aligned? That is, they only want clients who agree with their ideology. Kind of like…well, you name it, but Stalinism certainly comes to mind along with McCarthy.

    “This wasn’t a hateful diatribe, but a carefully considered and researched script and series outline,” she says. “It’s like McCarthyism, basically. Certain ideologies are considered unquestionable.”

    Painter and digital artist Birdy Rose, 37, says her income “stopped overnight – it was like a lightswitch went off”, after posting that “women don’t have penises” on Facebook in 2017. She was left having to take a job at McDonald’s, but it did not stop there. Her critics aimed their sights on her fiancé, acoustic folk punk artist Doozer McDooze, and “started holding his career hostage”.

    The 44-year-old, who had not entered the gender debate, soon started losing gigs. Some fellow musicians and festivalgoers even explained why. One spelled it out in writing: “You either need to live with the stigma of her choices, which will cost you gigs and friends, or publicly distance yourself from her beliefs.” One band explained they would not be on the same bill as him because his partner “has opinions that may be upsetting to other people”. McDooze now works as a delivery driver on minimum wage.

    And so it goes.

    A disabled visual artist who goes by the pseudonym Con-She says she has been “humiliated by these terrifying young zealots”. “I had a very posh bloke at a funding pitching session suggest to me, an abuse survivor, it would be OK for him to punch me – ‘hypothetically’ – if he identified as trans, because that would mean he was above me in the oppression hierarchy.”

    She says she has stopped received any public funding in recent years, but knows she will never be able to prove why, and is left relying on food from community fridges. “I’ve worked very hard to keep it the right side of full public cancellation, so no kind of stooshie comes up when you google my real name, in the hope that I can salvage something.”

    Rachel Ara was an artist-in-residence at the V&A, who was exhibiting everywhere from Vienna to Seoul, before a lecture she was due to present about her work in 2019 at Oxford Brookes University was cancelled when students from the LGBTQ+ society denounced her as someone who “frequently shares transphobic discourse on her social media”. “Literally everything stopped,” she says. She now works as a caretaker.

    “There’s nothing concrete to sort of grip on to,” says Ara, 59. But she did receive an email from one curator saying that her views on the distinction between sex and gender identity were “out of date”. Ara says: “I mean, this was a straight woman and I’m gay. She was basically telling me that everyone’s gender-fluid.

    “It’s not just the trans issue. It’s like you have to be a set thing to work in the art world now. You have to be left-wing, you have to be pro-Palestinian, you have to be blah, blah, blah, and although some of those things I am – it shouldn’t really matter. Art should be a mash-up of discussions and views.”

    But, of course, cancel culture is a right-wing fantasy.

  • Rail detector

    Jack Delano, March 1943. "Kiowa, Kansas. An Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe rail detector car. These cars are actually traveling scientific instruments, which not only detect faulty rails but also record the place and extent of the defect."

    image from www.shorpy.com
    [Photo: Shorpy/Jack Delano, Office of War Information]

  • “Death to Israel” is not “criticism”

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    Within Our Lifetime (WOL) is an extremist organization that celebrated 10/7; that demonstrated against NOVA; that mourned the death of Nasrallah. It has crossed lines that should never be crossed like openly aligning itself with foreign terrorist organizations that cry “Death to America” and “Death to Israel.”

    Yet the NY Times whitewashes WOL as a “pro-Palestinian group” that is “relentless” in “its criticism of Israel.”

    “Death to Israel” is not “criticism.” It is a call for genocide against Jews in the Jewish homeland.

     

  • Ignorance about Israel

    Hadley Freeman in the Sunday Times:

    But over the past 12 months people have said things to me about Israel that felt as if they were squeezing my sciatic nerve. Not because I disagreed with them but because what they were saying was so — here comes the technical term — ignorant. And the worst part is, they took pride in the ignorance, because things like “context” and “history” are seen now by too many as mealy-mouthed justifications for the killing of Palestinian and Lebanese citizens. They are not. But they are real.

    In the US the big book out now is The Message, by Ta-Nehisi Coates, one of the most revered American writers working today, whose articles about racism in the US have won pretty much every prize possible. In the new book he claims that Israel is analogous to the antebellum American South and Palestinians are analogous to the American slaves, and any claim that it’s more complicated than that is “horseshit”. When asked last week why he left out any references to Palestinian terrorism, Coates replied, “The reporters who believe more sympathetically in Israel’s right to exist don’t have any trouble in getting their voice out.” But if partial history is wrong in one direction, it is wrong in the other. Or, apparently, not: “I’m the child of Jim Crow. I have a moral compass about this, and perhaps it’s because of my ancestry,” he said. So whereas his ancestry gives him a moral compass, journalists who believe in Israel’s right to exist (to quote Liz Lemon from 30 Rock, “Jack, just say Jewish — this is taking for ever”) are full of horseshit.

    Historical ignorance is not moral clarity. It’s narcissism, laziness and stupidity. And, as the war continues, the ignorance mushrooms, perhaps to simplify a conflict that is so complex. An English friend told me the other week that October 7 was “inevitable”, by which they meant “understandable”. Another described Israel as a “colonial settler country”, as though Holocaust survivors who couldn’t return to their native countries — including my Polish ancestors — were white supremacists. Others blame Israel entirely for what’s happened to Gaza, to which I say: google Yasser Arafat. How is it so hard for some people to understand that Binyamin Netanyahu is appalling and Hamas and Hezbollah are murderous terrorists who have sacrificed their own people’s lives because they hate Israel, Jews and the West? Are they stupid, or just stupid about Jews?

    Just stupid about Jews, I'd say. It's an increasingly common phenomenon now, though it has an ancient dark history as – what it really is – antisemitism.

    Jerry Coyne mentions the Ta-Nehisi Coates book (scroll down), and cites this review in the Free Press by Coleman Hughes:

    His new essay collection, The Message, is a masterpiece of warped arguments and moral confusion. But it is important to take it seriously, not because Coates’s arguments are serious, but because so many treat them as if they are.

    Coates’s overarching themes are familiar: the plundering of black wealth by the Western world, the hypocrisy at the heart of America’s founding ideals, and the permanence of white supremacy. If The Message departs from his earlier work in any way, it’s that his desire to smear America has been eclipsed by his desire to smear Israel—an exercise that takes up fully half the book. (More about that, which Coates has declared “his obsession,” in a bit.)

    . . . His final essay is called “The Gigantic Dream,” a reference to one of Theodor Herzl’s diary entries, in which the founder of modern political Zionism explains how he came to the conclusion that the Jews needed a state. Coates begins by describing his visit to Yad Vashem, the magnificent and horrifying Holocaust museum in Jerusalem.

    It quickly becomes clear, however, that acknowledging the Holocaust is but a throat-clearing exercise before the main event: over one-hundred pages of the most shamelessly one-sided summary of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict I have ever read.

    . . . For example, I was waiting for Coates to mention a single instance of Palestinian terror, but the moment never came. He does, however, find the space to mention so many of the Israeli policies that were implemented specifically to prevent the terror attacks that murdered so many innocents during the Intifadas—checkpoints in the West Bank, for instance.

    Though Coates didn’t look into Israel-Palestine until his 40s, according to his recent New York profile that may be his “greatest asset”—a pair of fresh eyes, as it were. But far from an asset, Coates’s hasty research is a liability, resulting in errors that always come at the expense of Israel. For instance, as an example of Israel’s Jim Crow–like “two-tier society,” he asserts that “Jewish Israelis who marry Jews from abroad needn’t worry about their spouses’ citizenship,” whereas the state “tracks Palestinian noncitizens through a population registry” and “bars Palestinian citizens from passing on their status to anyone on that registry—abroad or in the West Bank.”

    The implication conveyed by this sentence—that Israeli law treats Arab Israelis differently than Jewish Israelis—is simply not true. The law in question is neutral as regards the race of the citizen attempting to naturalize his or her foreign spouse. The restriction is instead based on the nationality of the spouse.

    Yep, Not just ignorance about Israel, but wilful ignorance about Israel. Well, it sells books, and gets you a fawning NYT review.