Mick Hartley

Politics and Culture

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  • Escalation and risk in Ukraine

    The latest from Lawrence Freedman, on western miscalculations following on from Biden's early declaration that the US would never get involved in a war with Russia:

    We miscalculated how much control of Ukraine mattered to Putin, and were therefore shocked when he gambled on being able to subjugate his neighbour in a matter of days. We miscalculated again when we assumed this would succeed quickly when the invasion failed to achieve its immediate objectives. The Russian campaign soon faced yet more setbacks, leading to a massive loss of life and equipment, and a need to devote ever more resources to the war effort.  Yet Putin did not buckle and from late last year was confident that he had regained the initiative.

    The main reason for this is the painful Congressional dance surrounding military assistance to Ukraine, now finally concluded. But we must also consider to what extent Ukraine’s lack of vital capabilities, or at least the delay in getting them, which meant that it could not do more when it had the initiative, is due to Western countries allowing themselves to be intimidated by what are considered to be Putin’s extreme risk-taking propensities, including a readiness to contemplate nuclear escalation.

    My argument in this lecture is that the West was influenced by a combination of Putin’s assumed recklessness shaped by a familiar strategic construct  – the escalation ladder – that can be seriously misleading.  In particular I’ll argue that it led policymakers to start with the most dreaded scenario – nuclear use – and then work backwards to ask how it might come about. A better approach would have been to start with the situation faced by Putin and the options available to him, of which nuclear use was but one and by far the least compelling….

    Conclusion:

    I am not arguing in this lecture for sanguinity about either nuclear risks or  Vladimir Putin’s mental state. I am arguing against allowing our analysis of one of the most difficult and fateful conflicts we have seen in Europe for almost 80 years to be overly influenced by our worst fears and simplistic theories about how they might be realised. Hard strategic assessments of the state of the war may lead to awkward conclusions but we have not helped ourselves, let alone Ukraine, by opting for an approach which has results in demands that Ukraine accept a bad peace and caution in providing it with the weapons it needs to achieve a better peace.  

  • Failing to be in the proper spot

    The life of a North Korean stationmaster:

    The North Korean Ministry of State Security has recently informed senior officials at provincial bureaus about the punishment given to people arrested in connection with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s visit to Russia last September, Daily NK has learned….

    According to the material, the stationmasters at four stations on the railroad that Kim Jong Un rode on in North Hamgyong Province and South Hamgyong Province on his way to Russia were arrested on the spot for failing to demonstrate their loyalty to the North Korean leader.

    The stationmasters were quietly executed or sent to political prison camps on Apr. 12, seven months after their arrest, in line with the Central Committee and the Ministry of State Security’s internal decision that the legal procedures should be completed before the Day of the Sun (Apr. 15, birthday of Kim Il Sung).

    “Two of the stationmasters were arrested and executed in private for failing to be in the proper spot when the Marshal’s [Kim Jong Un] train passed by. The other two stationmasters were arrested and sent to political prison camps after the Marshal raised concerns about the dilapidated state of the railroad and surrounding areas while riding on the train,” the source said.

    The classified material from the Ministry of State Security also said that the stationmasters’ families were notified of their fate and then whisked away by local state security departments early in the morning on Apr. 13….

    The Ministry of State Security asked its bureaus in each province to diligently fulfill their duty of maintaining ongoing supervision and oversight to safeguard the government and preserve the physical safety of Kim Jong Un.

    The ministry also reminded bureau officials that the position of the party and the government is that anyone subject to Kim’s personal criticism should be targeted and investigated without mercy, the source said.

  • Chanting Khamenei propaganda in America’s streets.

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    "They have the nerve to tell us Iranians that we "don't represent Iranians" as we sound the alarm for our youth being brutalized and lynched, while the regime steals our people's money to fund regional terror under the guise of a "Resistance Front," and somehow the Ayatollah has become the "true" voice of Iran. Fuck all of you."

  • The charge of corruption on Earth

    While the students at Columbia and elsewhere, in their righteous anti-Israel frenzy, chant the praises of Hamas and of Iran's proxy armies committed to the killing of Jews, real protest heroes do emerge. Just not on American campuses.

    An Iranian court has sentenced to death a popular rapper jailed for more than a year and a half for supporting nationwide protests sparked by Mahsa Amini’s death, according to local media reports.

    “Branch 1 of Isfahan Revolutionary Court… sentenced Toomaj Salehi to death on the charge of corruption on Earth,” the singer’s lawyer Amir Raisian says, as quoted by the reformist Shargh newspaper.

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  • Sala Mayor

    Photographed by Siobhán Doran, these are the sala mayor (living rooms) of The Houses that Sugar Built – mansions in the Philippines financed by the sugar trade.

    As seen at the Sony World Photography Awards exhibition at Somerset House.

    This series is part of a book project, Houses that Sugar Built: An Intimate Portrait of Philippine Ancestral Homes, for which I was granted access to these historic mansions. I largely set about photographing the houses against a spoken ‘backdrop’, as my colleague interviewed the owner or custodian, but sometimes worked in complete silence. The sala mayor (main living room) typically showcases the character of the architecture and the lifestyle of the people, but also leaves room for the viewer’s interpretation of these unique residences.

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    [All images © Siobhán Doran]

    [As ever, click to enlarge]

  • The persecution of Christians in North Korea

    From the Daily NK:

    Some of the more than 200 defectors repatriated from China to North Korea last year are being held in political prison camps. Among the 200 defectors, all those who tried to reach South Korea or interacted with Christians while in China were sent to the camps without exception.

    Speaking on condition of anonymity, a source in North Korea told Daily NK on Monday that ten of the defectors who were forcibly repatriated last October were sent to political prison camps after three months of intense interrogation about their defection and behavior in China. The defectors were interrogated at centers run by state security departments in Sinuiju and Onsong County.

    The authorities found that the ten defectors had either contacted Christian groups in China, provided information about North Korea to other countries (such as South Korea or the U.S.), or attempted to go to South Korea.

    In particular, defectors were automatically sent to the camps if there was any evidence that they had read the Bible or heard Christian doctrine. Any North Korean who comes into contact with Christianity, even once, risks being sent to a political prison camp, which is tantamount to a life sentence.

    According to the 2022 Report on International Religious Freedom released by the U.S. State Department last year, an estimated 50,000-70,000 North Koreans are in political prison camps simply for being Christians.

    North Korean state security departments base their interrogations of repatriated defectors on case files provided by the Chinese police. If the case files mention anything related to religion, the defectors cannot avoid being sentenced to the camps, no matter what excuses or explanations they offer, the source explained.

    There's the obvious threat to North Korea's Kim worship, of course, but Christianity also teaches the individual conscience – a dangerous heresy in the Orwellian Juche dystopia.

  • From demonised Jew to demonised Israel

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    Full text:

    I think Mehdi – who has been a perfect gentleman to me when he invited me on his shows – does not see that contemporary antisemitism, antisemitic anti-Zionism, bends the meaning of Israel and Zionism out of shape until both become fit receptacles for the tropes, images and ideas of classical antisemitism.

    In short, that which the demonised Jew once was, demonised Israel now is: uniquely malevolent, full of blood lust, all-controlling, the hidden hand, tricksy, always acting in bad faith, the obstacle to a better, purer, more spiritual world, uniquely deserving of punishment, and so on.

    Antisemitic anti-Zionism has three components: a programme, a discourse, and a movement.

    The programme is not two states for two peoples, but the abolition of the Jewish homeland; not Palestine alongside Israel, but Palestine instead of Israel.

    The discourse is a distorting, demonising and dehumanising system of concepts: ‘Zionism is racism’; Israel is a ‘settler-colonialist state’ for 'White' Europeans which ‘ethnically cleansed’ the ‘indigenous’ people, went on to build an ‘apartheid state’ and is now engaged in an ‘incremental genocide’ against the Palestinians.

    Add in the ugly phenomenon of Holocaust Inversion – the deliberate and systematic Nazification of Israel in street placards depicting Netanyahu as Hitler, in posters equating the IDF and the SS, in cartoons portraying Israelis as Nazis, and even in the language of intellectuals.

    The global social movement seeks to exclude one state – and only one state – from the economic, cultural and educational life of humanity: the little Jewish one.

    So, while it's good to oppose old school Nazi racial antisemitism, it is better still to also realise that antisemitism existed long before and long after the Nazis. And that it has always been a shape-shifter.

    Antisemitism has taken on radically different forms and supposed ‘rationales’ in different cultures at different times.

    Medieval priests made one claim about ‘the Jews’, Enlightenment philosophers made another. The Nazi SS officer had his claim, as did the Stalinist Central Committee Member.

    Each told a different story about the alien, powerful, malevolent and tricksy Jew. Each story has served to justify a murderous attack upon the Jews who have been indicted as:
    • the betrayer and killer of the universal God, drainer of gentile blood, poisoner of the wells, etc (Christian antisemitism);
    • the tribal anachronism, the enemy of the Age of Reason (Enlightenment antisemitism);
    • the rootless cosmopolitan, everywhere the enemy of and fifth column within organic nations (Counter-Enlightenment antisemitism);
    • the biologically programmed threat to all races, to be eliminated to the last child (Nazi antisemitism);
    • the sons of apes and pigs who will be killed on a Day of Judgment (some forms of Islam and modern Islamic antisemitism);
    • the arch-capitalist exploiter – to be hung from the lampposts as German Communist Ruth Fischer put it, latterly the arch-colonialist (Left antisemitism);

    Today, in addition to all of the above (each of which is still with us), there is a new form of antisemitism which has been the consequence of the development of a Jewish State – Israel – and the demonisation of it.

    ‘Zionism’, properly understood, is a movement of national liberation for the Jewish people. But it is demonised today through the antisemitic ideas of the ‘The Zios’, ‘The Zionists’, ‘Global Zionism’ and ‘the all-powerful Jewish Lobby’.

    Once it was ‘the Jew’ now it is ‘the Zionist’ that is – for the contemporary antisemite – malign, still controlling the world for Jewish purposes, and still string-pulling. The ‘Zionists’ power is still seen by the antisemite as virtually unlimited, still exercised through their hidden control of global media, political parties and governments, and global finance. 'They' are still uniquely evil, the modern-day Nazis.

    And that world view – for that is what it is – is antisemitism ‘dressed up’ as anti-Zionism.

  • Working hard enough

    In New Hampshire they're debating a bill that "requires school sports teams to be expressly designated as male, female, or coed, and prohibits biologically male students from participating in female designated sports or entering female locker rooms." Here's a science teacher:

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    The comments are not kind. As Helen Joyce puts it, "And men should just try harder if they want to get pregnant."

    The bill failed.

  • Labour should apologise to Rosie Duffield.

    From the Telegraph:

    JK Rowling has said Labour must apologise to an MP who was investigated over allegations of transphobia, after a frontbencher said she agreed with the author’s stance on biological sex.

    Shabana Mahmood, the shadow justice secretary, last night said she supported JK Rowling’s view that “biological sex is real and is immutable”, prompting Rowling to call on Labour to say sorry to Rosie Duffield.

    The Canterbury MP was investigated by Labour over a complaint that she had been transphobic for liking a tweet by author Graham Linehan, 55, the Father Ted creator and now a gender-critical campaigner.

    The party dropped its year-long investigation into Ms Duffield earlier in 2024 but she has spoken about feeling “isolated” among Labour MPs for her views.

    Those with gender-critical views believe that a person’s sex cannot be changed and are generally opposed to the idea that gender identity is more important than biological sex.

    Those with gender-critical views know that a person’s sex cannot be changed. And they generally don't believe in "gender identity", viewing it as cult-speak nonsense. It's why they're called gender-critical.

    Following Ms Mahmood’s comments on Monday night, the Harry Potter author wrote on X: “If senior opposition figures agree with me that sex is real and immutable, I hope we’ll soon see an apology to [Rosie Duffield], who believes exactly what I believe.”

  • Deprogramming a cult

    Suzanne Moore in the Telegraph, on those still in denial after the Cass Report:

    How do we deprogramme a cult? Cult thinking, after all, involves unquestioning commitment; thinking one is on a special mission to save humanity; an “us versus them” mentality; peer pressure that may induce guilt or shame; the cutting of ties with family and friends; and being very fearful of ever leaving.

    Anyone who has questioned the gender cult has been deemed “far right” or transphobic, but Cass has put a spanner in the works. Neither she nor people like me want to take away the right for adults to transition. Either cult members accept there is a difference between adults and children, and begin to understand safeguarding, or they will have to operate a dark, underground web of selling drugs to children.

    They may continue to worship at the altar of “gender identity”, but they can no longer expect all public institutions to go along with their dodgy faith. Instead, this new religion should assume its rightful position among the many strange but unscientific beliefs that we co-exist with: astrology, reiki, and past-life regression, for instance. You can’t stop folk believing weird stuff, but when something is harmful to women, to gay people, to children, then we have every right to refuse this faith in the public sphere.

    Until fairly recently, it has been heresy to do so. Those still defending the sterilisation and mutilation of children are exposing themselves daily. Of course, they are squirming because it was never about the children for them; it was about proving their own purity to the other cult members. The kids were just collateral damage in a culture war we were told was not actually real.