Down the purity plughole.
Exclusive: The Scottish Greens have expelled a number of members who declared "sex is a biological reality".
An official complaint accused them of making the party less safe for trans and non-binary members. pic.twitter.com/fhaFjXkuHx
— Holyrood magazine (@HolyroodDaily) May 16, 2024
If you enjoy vicious reviews – and who doesn't? – then this, from Tanya Gold in the JC, is well worth a read:
The Tattooist of Auschwitz, Heather Morris’s 2018 novel about a Jew in Birkenau, has become a TV series because hunger for mainstream entertainment about the Shoah is insatiable. It is consoling – if you are not a Jew – and exciting, again if you are not a Jew. If you are very cynical, as I am, you may think it allows the reader to pretend an interest in, and care for, Jewish suffering that rarely extends to Jews who are alive….
It is true that Morris’s book is about a real person: the Slovakian Jew Lale Sokolov, who was the tattooist at Auschwitz-Birkenau from 1942-45. He fell in love with a fellow prisoner named Gisela Fuhrmannova, married her after the war, moved to Melbourne, and lived a useful life. Lale met Morris in the years before between Gisela’s death and his own. He told her his story, I think, because he wanted absolution for surviving. He didn’t need it and, even if he did, it won’t come from a writer as credulous and self-important as Morris. The blurb says she meticulously reproduces Lale’s fate. She doesn't. She can't. (The Auschwitz Memorial Research Centre published a list of factual errors too long to type. Some are so basic they could have been resolved in an hour). She published 12 years after his death, and I wonder if that is important: the distance allowed her greater freedom to dream.
And she does. In Morris’s hands Lale is a magic Jew: ever-imaginative, resourceful and lucky. Promoted to tattooist, and so saved, he has freedom of movement in the camps, and he dispenses food, medicine, even life itself. The problem with this, of course, is that death in Auschwitz – and almost all died, the majority on arrival – becomes, by compare, a sort of moral failure: a lack of imagination, resource and luck. For those who don’t understand Birkenau – and you wouldn’t read this book if you did, and if this is all you read you wouldn’t – it brings un-magic Jews and Nazi psychopaths no closer.
The prose style is a minor crime. “Her eyes dance before him”. “His heart skips a beat”. “His mind [is] a whirlpool”. He works “around the clock”. (Too many transports, you see: it’s exhausting.) “Flowers. He learned from a young age, from his mother, that women love them”.
Or, Lale says, “always dress to impress”. Lale is quite keen on fashion. On meeting the SS for the first time he thinks: “Under different circumstances he might appreciate the tailoring”. Would he? “I’m just a number,” Gisela tells him. “You should know that. You gave it to me.” As I read this junk, I write a parallel musical in my head and I think: if that doesn’t close Act 2, what can? There is a rogue, too: Josef Mengele, who is a sort of pantomime villain like Captain Hook. He stalks around with a soul “colder than his scalpel”, smirks and steals people’s testicles. It never happened….
If you want to read about the Shoah read histories and memoir. Primo Levi’s If This is a Man and Elie Wiesel’s Night are partial, but they don’t pretend to be anything else. Levi himself said: “We who survived the camps are not true witnesses. We are those who, through prevarication, skill or luck, never touched bottom. Those who have, and who have seen the face of the Gorgon, did not return, or returned wordless”. But that is Levi, not Morris, who has the gumption to write Mills & Boon in hell. It fulfils the criteria of the Shoah novel for idiots, at least. It makes the reader feel better, know less, and care less, about the people who are fictionalised. That is, they die twice.
Still, there’s laughter in the trying. I would have called it Under a Birkenau Moon. Or Love Macht Frei.
As Samuel Rubinstein argues, at UnHerd, the present emphasis at universities on social justice rather than the pursuit of truth and free enquiry has some unfortunate historical parallels:
Columbia in 2024 is very far indeed from Heidelberg in 1933. Still, the history of the universities under Nazism, and of historians under Nazism in particular, gives us good reason to be wary of the politicisation of higher education. Jonathan Haidt recently argued that “universities must choose one telos: truth or social justice”. And it is strange but instructive to recall that the Nazi universities emphatically chose “social justice” (as they would see it) over “truth”.
On 18 January 1934, almost a year after Hitler came to power, a historian named Ulrich Kahrstedt delivered a speech urging his colleagues at the University of Göttingen to do their bit for Germany’s “new culture”. His speech contained all the lurid images that one would expect. The Treaty of Versailles had been an intolerable humiliation; ethnic Germans over the border in Poland were routinely “hunted down and killed”. He reserved particular contempt for those in his faculty who seemed to care more about the plight of their Jewish colleagues than the misfortunes of their own race — those who shed more tears over the “daughter of the cattle dealer Levi not being accepted as a student” than over the “scores of German women who killed themselves after being violated by Negroes”.
Hitler, according to Kahrstedt, had come to rescue the Germans from this pitiable state, and in that task the universities had an important part to play. Kahrstedt’s audience was then well-primed for the climax of his speech:
“We reject international science, we reject the international republic of letters, we reject research for research’s sake. Here, medicine is taught and learned not to increase the number of known bacteria, but rather to keep Germans healthy and strong. Here, history is taught and learned not to say ‘how it actually was’, but to let the Germans learn from how it actually was. Here, the natural sciences are taught and learned not to discover abstract laws, but to help the Germans to sharpen their tools in the competition between peoples.”
These two neat rhetorical triads were then fittingly capped off with a third: “Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!” […]
Hitler himself subscribed to such a position: on the very first page of Mein Kampf he describes how history was his favourite subject at school because it aroused his political passions. And of course Kahrstedt, in his speech on 18 January 1934, violently rejected the notion that the historian’s task is simply to find out “how it actually was” — here citing the 19th-century Prussian historian Leopold von Ranke — arguing instead that historians ought to devote their work wholly to contemporary political ends. We find something even more strikingly “postmodern” in the declaration of Moritz Edelmann, the editor of the Nazi historical journal Vergangenheit und Gegenwart (“Past and Present”), that history should “liberate itself from the dependence on the written source” in service of present needs.
The experience of the German universities in the Thirties should therefore disabuse us of various popular ideas. Students do not have a special affinity for social justice: their protests and obsessions do not need to be revered as though they contain moral truths inaccessible to others. Education in the humanities does not really instil “empathy” or “good citizenship”, whatever some of its advocates like to say. And if, finally, there is anything to be learned from this dark chapter in the history of scholarship, it surely is this: we cannot allow politics to supplant truth as the university’s highest end.
And, on the subject of student demands, here's Michael Lind at Tablet:
“The issue is not the issue.” This saying of the campus left is as true today as it was in the 1960s. Whatever the ostensible issue may be that provides the occasion for a nationwide wave of campus protests, the list of demands presented to university administrators by student protesters and allied outside agitators is remarkably similar—suggesting that the point of the exercise may lie closer to home.
For half a century now, the passion of idealistic students involved in campus protests that were purported to be about national and global issues—the Vietnam War, racism, police shootings, climate change, and now Israel’s war against Hamas—has been diverted into narrow efforts to multiply jobs and teaching opportunities for leftist professors, administrators, consultants and other foot-soldiers and clients of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. In turn, these campus activists have helped to transform American universities from engines of upward mobility and economic growth to taxpayer-funded ideological indoctrination centers.
The modern era of left-wing identitarian studies programs on campus dates back to 1968, when a 133-day strike by students at San Francisco State College led to the creation of America’s first Black studies department. The protest at San Francisco State was dominated by a group called the Third World Liberation Front. The most prominent protest leader was George Mason Murray, who taught freshman English as a graduate student while serving as the minister for education of the Black Panther Party. According to The Daily Sundial, the student newspaper at San Fernando Valley State College:
An immediate, violent revolution of black people against “the fascist leaders of this country” was called for by Black Panther George Murray, addressing a crowd of about 300 in the open forum Tuesday … “A tide of fascism led by Lyndon Johnson is running rampant in America,” said the bearded Murray … Murray called Hubert Humphrey “a homosexual, freakish monster.” He further charged that the federal government was “full of homosexuals.” To confirm this he said that the atom bomb was copied after a man’s penis.
[…]
The clearing of tent encampments on a number of universities by police during the present anti-Israel protests does not mean that most universities will not capitulate to some or all protester demands later, when public attention is focused elsewhere. Already Brown has bowed to pressure and agreed to a vote on divestment from Israel. The Rutgers administration has also agreed to consider divestment from Israel and—you saw it coming, didn’t you?—agreed to “develop anti-Palestinian, anti-Muslim and anti-Arab racism training for all administrators and staff.” All that training means more work and money for existing left-wing faculty and perhaps the hiring of additional left-wing bureaucrats or nice paychecks for external consultants who will develop expertise in anti-Arabophobia training overnight. Northwestern has agreed to create a segregated community center for the exclusive use of “Middle Eastern, North African, and Muslim students” and has promised to fund five fully paid undergraduate scholarships for Palestinian students and two professorships for visiting Palestinian faculty.
The kaffiyeh may have replaced the kente cloth, but the self-serving strategy in which leftist professors persuade naive students to blackmail university administrators into giving them more subsidies, status, and institutional power has not changed since Black Panther Education Minister George Murray led the movement for Black studies at San Francisco State in 1968. Decades from now, when today’s campus protests have receded into history, their legacy may be the permanent transformation of American universities from engines of upward mobility and scientific progress to fairgrounds with expensive tickets and midway tents on a quad, displaying exotic varieties of leftist identity politics.
American and Canadian universities.
Canadian students demand the liberation of Palestine!
A set of demands from the student union at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Canada (via Jerry Coyne):
We demand:
1. Public disclosure of the entirety of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University investment portfolio.
2. Immediate divestment from all weapons manufacturing, military supplying, and companies operating in Israel or the occupied Palestinian territories.
3. In response to emails sent from Dr. Shannon regarding the rights and responsibilities for students and faculty to speak truth to power, and exercise their academic freedom: an apology from, and the resignation of, the President of NSCAD University, Dr. Peggy Shannon.
4. Anti-oppression training for ALL faculty and administration at NSCAD, focusing particularly on Queerness, indigeneity, and anticolonialism.
5. Free tuition for all students.
6. Free housing for all students.
7. The implementation of a Palestinian Art History course.
8. A scholarship offering free tuition and housing for one student currently living in Palestine.
9. That the NSCAD Board of Governors be made up entirely of students, faculty, and staff, with at least 50% +1 seat on the Board being held by students.
10. That NSCAD university moves all its banking to a credit union.
11. The immediate breaking of the lease of NSCAD with the Port Authority, regarding NSCAD’s Port campus, and a commitment of no financial dealings with the Port Authority going forward.
12. That all funds divested through the process of realizing the above demands be reinvested in the rebuilding of universities from the Gaza Strip that have been destroyed.
Yes, that would be the Greens. From the JC:
Three Green Party parliamentary candidates have shared incendiary material online including a video in which a woman claims “Zionists will drink the blood of Palestinians”, the JC can reveal.
The disclosures, which follow a recent JC exposé of inflammatory posts by newly elected Green councillors, have heightened fears that the party has become a safe haven for extremists.
Other posts by the candidates feature an October 7 conspiracy theory, support for the Palestinian “resistance” and material comparing Israel’s war against Hamas to the Holocaust….
Elizabeth Waight, who is standing in Bethnal Green and Stepney, posted a video on Instagram on March 27 in which a woman said: “What’s left for the Zionists [is] to eat the flesh and drink the blood of the Palestinians… I think this will happen soon.”
Chingford and Wood Green candidate Chris Brody uploaded links to an article that suggested that the 9/11 and October 7 terror attacks were “false flag operations executed to open the path toward more slaughter and mayhem”.
Bristol East candidate Naseem Talukdar circulated comparisons between the Holocaust and the war in Gaza and liked a video clip in which anti-Israel activist David Miller says “we have to destroy Zionism”.
Oh dear. Whatever happened to the whales?
The descent of Owen Jones, pt. 73:
Owen Jones platforming unsourced conspiracy theories that dehumanize Jews?
Yes, that is utterly predictable. pic.twitter.com/3yAN0iwXCy
— Hen Mazzig (@HenMazzig) May 15, 2024
Remember them, back in March?
A women’s football competition has been branded “misogynist” after it was won by a team featuring five transgender players amid accusations one had broken an opponents’ leg in two places.
Flying Bats FC won every match they played during the four-week Beryl Ackroyd Cup, including a 10-0 victory in which one of their trans players scored a double hat-trick.
Since winning Sunday’s final in Sydney, Australia, 4-0, it has emerged organisers had earlier held a crisis meeting, during which rival teams were warned forfeiting games against the Bats would result in disciplinary action and could even be viewed as “an act of discrimination”.
The same meeting included accusations a 6ft 2in, 14st Bats player had once broken the leg of 5ft 6in, nine-and-a-half stone opponent in two places and claims 24 of the injured player’s team-mates had quit because they did not want to face the LGBTQ+ side.
Flying Bats went on to win the $1,000 (£514) first prize on Sunday.
Now here's Claire Chandler:
The Flying Bats fielding 5 males in a women’s football league is no anomaly. Watch as I show that it was an explicit direction from the very top of Australian sport that male intrusion in women’s community sport is to be prioritised over fairness for women, and women who object… pic.twitter.com/5Opoo9u8d5
— Senator Claire Chandler (@SenatorClaire) May 15, 2024
The Times headline – Don’t teach children about changing gender, schools told:
Schools must not teach children that they can change their gender identity and should avoid “explicit” conversations about sex until they reach the age of 13, the government is to say.
Ministers will warn schools on Thursday that gender identity is a highly contested area and that teaching children about it could have damaging implications. Staff will be explicitly told to avoid proactively teaching children about gender identity. If asked, they should teach “biological” facts about sex.
Good news, you'd think.
The BBC headline has a different focus: Plan to ban sex education for children under nine.
Schools in England will be banned from teaching sex education to children under nine, under new government guidance to be published on Thursday.
The BBC has not seen the new guidelines but a government source said they included plans to ban any children being taught about gender identity.
If asked, teachers will have to be clear gender ideology is contested.
But…and there lots of buts..
But headteachers have told the BBC that there is no evidence of a widespread problem….
Pepe Di'Iasio, headteacher at a school in Rotherham, told Today that he believes pupils are being used "as a political football".
Teachers "want well informed and evidence-based decisions", he said, and not "politicised" guidance.
Not so keen at the BBC then. "A political football"…
Also.
BBC not even attempting impartiality here https://t.co/gkTvSbi0pd
— Dennis Noel Kavanagh (@Jebadoo2) May 15, 2024
From the Times Viewing Guide to tonight's TV – Praying for Armageddon: Storyville, on BBC2., "which focuses on the evangelical right in the US and hopes among some that America’s relationship with Israel could somehow lead to Armageddon and the Second Coming of Christ".
Christian fundamentalism is a favourite subject for documentary makers. It allows them to show extreme behaviour and religious fervour without offending some of the other leading world faiths.
Ain't that the truth.
Islamist fervour is a major factor in our political landscape – mainly, but not only, in the Middle East. But yes, they do get offended easily. It's a lot safer to stick with these wacky Christian fundamentalists…
Mick Hartley 