Mick Hartley

The latest from historian Timothy Snyder, after Putin's cosy chat with Tucker Carlson – Putin's genocidal myth:

Everyone who does not fit Putin's neat story (Russia is eternal, so Russians can do whatever they want) has to be removed, first from the narrative of the past, and then from those counted as human in present.  On Putin's logic, it does not matter what people believe or how people understand their own past.  It is he who decides which souls are bound to which other souls.  Other views have no place in nature, because they arose from events which (in his story) should never have happened.  His view must govern the past, which requires violence in the present: genocide. 

If there are people who say that Ukraine is real, they must be destroyed.  That has been the logic of Russia's mass murder from the start.  Putin expected Ukraine to fall in a few days because he thought he needed to eliminate a few Ukrainians in an artificial elite.  The more Ukrainians there turned out to be, the more people had to be killed. The same holds for physical expressions of Ukrainian culture.  Russia has destroyed thousands of Ukrainian schools.  Everywhere Russian troops reach, they burn Ukrainian books….

Putin is the dictator of the largest country in the world and personally controls tens and more likely hundreds of billions of dollars.  And yet in his story he is a longwinded victim, because not everyone agrees with him.  Russia is a victim because Russians can tell a story about how they need to fight a genocidal war, and not everyone agrees.  Ukrainians are the aggressors, because they do not agree that they and their country do not exist. 

Indeed, says Putin, Ukrainians are "Nazis," a word that in his mouth just means "people who refuse to accept that Russians are pure no matter what we do."  This is a victim claim: if the Ukrainians are "Nazis," then Russians — even though they started the war and have killed tens of thousands of people and kidnapped tens of thousands of children and carry out war crimes every single day — must be the righteous sufferers. 

This is how myth matters. If all the wrong in the past was done by others, as Putin says, then all the wrong in the present must be done by others.  Putin's story divides good and evil perfectly.  Russia is always right, others are always wrong. Russians can behave like Nazis while calling others "Nazis" and all is well.  Russia is a people with a special purpose, resisted by conspiracies.  Putin's war has been fought with fascist slogans and by fascist means, with mass propaganda and mass mobilization.

There follows a history lesson which is very much worth reading. A shame that Putin won't read it.

And this:

Putin makes a mistake about the Ukrainian language, over and over, that is typical of imperial deafness.  It is true that Ukrainians today can speak Russian (although many also, for understandable reasons, refuse to do so) as well as Ukrainian.  When they encountered Russians, until very recently, Ukrainians would switch to Russian.  This courtesy gave Russians the impression that Ukrainian was just a dialect of Russian or that Ukrainian did not exist.  The simple truth is that Ukrainians know Russian because they learned it.  Russians do not know Ukrainian because they do not learn it.  Russian soldiers right now, two years into the war, persist in calling the Ukrainian they hear on radio intercepts "Polish" because they are unable to grasp the obvious: that there is a Ukrainian language, and they do not understand it.  Putin's notion that there is no Ukrainian language is like his idea that there is no Ukrainian country or Ukrainian people: it is genocidal, because only mass killing can make it true.  And of course one thing that is clear from this interview is that Putin takes it for granted that killing any number of people is preferable to admitting a mistake.  Ideas matter.  It is because he is wrong about everything that he must kill.

From the JC:

Israel has poured scorn on claims by the head of UNRWA that it was unaware of a subterranean Hamas facility built under the aid agency’s Gaza HQ.

Philippe Lazzarini, commissioner-general of UNRWA — which was set up to aid Palestinian refugees in 1949 following Israel’s War of Independence —tweeted that it “did not know what was under its headquarters” following revelations of the Hamas data centre by Israeli military officials.

But his claim of ignorance was immediately dismissed by Israel’s Co-ordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) which tweeted back, “Oh, you knew”….

Israeli officials believe the underground data centre beneath the UNWRA HQ, which had computer servers and living quarters, was used by the terrorist group for intelligence gathering and communciations.

“There is no doubt that UNRWA staff knew that [Hamas] was digging a massive tunnel beneath them,” Colonel Benny Aharon, commander of the 401st Armoured Brigage, was quoted by the Times of Israel as saying “Whoever worked at UNRWA knew very well who was coming in, and who they were covering for.”

Oh, you knew.
Digging a tunnel takes longer than 4 months.
We invited senior @UN officials to see, and during past meetings with you and other UN officials, we stated Hamas’s use of UNRWA's headquarters.
You chose to ignore the facts so you can later try and deny them. https://t.co/EIliKpDi5h

— COGAT (@cogatonline) February 10, 2024

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We've had Network Rail; we've had LNER. Is there a UK train company that doesn't push Pride a la Stonewall? – to distract, they no doubt hope, from their total lack of competence.

Theodore Dalrymple tries Avanti:

They (whoever “they” are) will not leave us alone. They will badger us on the seas and oceans, they will badger us on the beaches, they will badger us on the landing grounds. They will never give up, until we surrender.

I took an Avanti train recently painted in all the colours of the rainbow and others beside. On the side of the train, more than once, in huge capital letters was painted the word “Pride”. Apparently, the train company had run a train with a staff exclusively of LGBTQ+ personnel.

Pride in what, exactly? If sexual orientation is not a choice and therefore nothing to be ashamed of, then it can be nothing to be proud of either. Taking pride in what is not an achievement is stupid, self-congratulatory and arrogant. It is an invitation to poor behaviour, insofar as it exculpates in advance in the name of being proud ex officio.

On the train, the reservation system did not work, and the shop on board could not take credit cards because of “technical problems”. At one station there was an announcement that the rest of the train’s journey had been cancelled, though it had not been, leading to the impression that we, the passengers, were not in fully competent hands.

Personally, I want trains to run on time, to coin a phrase. I want them to be clean and not overcrowded. I do not want to have to stand in the corridor squeezed like a sardine in a tin. I do not much care what the sexual orientation and spare time activities of the staff are, so long as they are competent and polite.

I do not want to be subjected to the moral hectoring of managers who cannot keep lavatories clean or to be indoctrinated with Avanti-thought. I do not want propaganda trains à la Soviet Union.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Pennines:

The Labour Party is sticking with a parliamentary candidate who claimed that Israel deliberately allowed the Hamas terror attacks of October 7 to happen to give it “the green light” to invade Gaza.

Azhar Ali, who will defend Labour’s 10,000 majority in the Rochdale by-election at the end of this month, was forced into a grovelling apology after it was reported that he was recorded telling a local Labour party meeting that Israel had chosen to remove its border guards after being given advance warning of the attack, in which 1,400 people were killed.

I wonder if Labour's candidate in Rochdale also claims that girls in his town deliberately allowed themselves to be groomed, drugged and gang raped by grooming gangs? https://t.co/hYFDZiMZ22

— Julia Hartley-Brewer (@JuliaHB1) February 11, 2024

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On Friday: "The centre of Jewish life on Leeds campus has been defaced and protests are currently ongoing demanding the removal of the Israeli-educated Jewish chaplaincy husband-wife team on campus".

Yesterday, in the Mail:

A Chaplain at Leeds University was forced into hiding with his young family yesterday after receiving death threats over his role as an IDF reservist.

Rabbi Zecharia Deutsch, wife Nava and their two children were moved to a safe location on police advice amid a shocking hate campaign.

Pro-Palestinian campaigners have accused Rabbi Deutsch of 'genocide' after he returned to Israel after Hamas's October 7 terror attacks to serve in the Israeli Defence Force.

He resumed his chaplaincy duties last month, leading to an escalation in anti-Semitic threats on campus.

On Thursday evening, the hate campaign intensified with 'hundreds' of malicious calls to the family, including threats to kill Rabbi Deutsch, to rape and kill Mrs Deutsch and to murder their children.

After what Hamas did on October 7th!? Obscene.

In a recording of one phone call to Mrs Deutsch – heard by the Mail – the caller said: 'Tell that Jewish son of a bitch we are coming for him.

'We're coming to his house, we're going to kill him, and you as well you f****** racist bitch.'

Another caller said: 'Us Muslims are coming for you, you dirty Zionist m***********.'

Another said: 'We are going to get you. How dare you come back to Leeds and expect the Muslims not to do 'owt, when all you lot have been doing is killing innocent children.'

We have a serious problem….

Hadley Freeman in the Sunday Times weighs in on the craven Royal Society of Literature [me yesterday]:

In 2021 I interviewed the most courageous man I’ve ever met: Salman Rushdie. We talked about his books, and we also talked about the fatwa, when he had to live in hiding for almost a decade because the Ayatollah Khomeini called for his death over perceived blasphemy in his 1988 novel The Satanic Verses.

Everyone likes to imagine that they’d have been on the right side of history then, defending Rushdie’s freedom of expression. But many weren’t. John le Carré, of all people, said of The Satanic Verses, “There is no law in life or nature that says great religions may be insulted with impunity.” I asked Rushdie if he thought people would react better now: “Put it like this: the kinds of people who stood up for me in the bad years,” he said, meaning people in the liberal arts, “might not do so now. The idea that being offended is a valid critique has gained a lot of traction.”

Just over a year later, Rushdie was very nearly murdered on stage at an event in New York. And once again, some who should have known better sat on their hands. The Royal Society of Literature (RSL) discussed putting out a statement of support for him, but this, according to reports “was closed down by the leadership”. Dame Marina Warner, former president of the society, said, “Regarding Salman Rushdie, the official reason given was that speaking up for the rights of a writer to free expression would offend some of our members and fellows and that the RSL is not a political body. This attitude produces the odd situation that one of the few places in the UK where a writer can’t express their views is in their own society.”

This obscene ludicrousness bubbled over last week when Bernardine Evaristo, president of the RSL since 2022, defended many of the recent changes that have sparked concerns among the society’s august members, such as relaxing the famously tough membership requirements to diversify the fellows. Evaristo insisted the RSL believed in freedom of speech. But, she added, “it cannot take sides in writers’ controversies … but must remain impartial”. Rushdie retweeted this and added: “Just wondering if the Royal Society of Literature is ‘impartial’ about attempted murder @BernardineEvari? (Asking for a friend.)”

To be fair to the RSL, its was not the worst response to the attack. Twenty-four hours after Rushdie’s stabbing, the chairwoman of the Society of Authors (SOA) at the time, the novelist Joanne Harris, felt compelled to tweet a poll asking if authors had ever received a death threat, with the possible answers being “Yes”, “Hell, yes”, “No, never” and “Show me, dammit”. Harris later rewrote the answers, saying she got the tone wrong (unfortunate from someone whose literal job is writing). But, really, who cares, given Rushdie (author of some of the greatest British novels of all time) versus Harris (author of Chocolat) is giant against pygmy stuff.

Now, in Harris’s defence, most people did not think she was mocking Rushdie. No, they thought she was mocking JK Rowling, who had tweeted her support for Rushdie and was rewarded — as she often is — with death threats because of her scepticism about gender ideology. Under Harris’s aegis, the SOA showed strong antipathy to any author who dared to question identity politics. When Kate Clanchy was accused in 2021 of using racist tropes in her memoir Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me — largely by people who hadn’t read her book — Harris did not defend her, and when the then president of the SOA, Sir Philip Pullman, did, he ended up having to resign.

Harris, whose pronouns are listed as “she/they”, is a big fan of gender ideology, and so while leading the SOA she repeatedly failed to defend writers such as Rowling, Rachel Rooney, Onjali Rauf, Julie Bindel and others who lost work and received death threats because they understand biology. And where is Harris now? Well, at the end of last month the RSL announced she would judge its new UK-France young adult literary prize. Let’s hope no YA author dares to suggest anything wacky like that a woman doesn’t have a penis.

But this isn’t another story about the “wokification” of an organisation — it’s about fear. At the end of every year, the RSL publishes a large magazine, but this year the society suddenly announced it had been pushed back to spring and, according to Private Eye, the editor had been fired by Molly Rosenberg, who now heads what the RSL describes as a “queer/female-led team dedicated to building an open, diverse and inclusive workplace”.

Sounds lovely.

“Horseshoe theory” sums up how the far left and far right are actually so close they almost touch, and identity politics perfectly illustrates that. In the RSL and SOA’s attempts to be inclusive, they have shown themselves to be as exclusive as the old way of thinking, if not more so. Worse, they are cowards, scared of backlashes on social media, though apparently fine with Rushdie being stabbed.

But when a literary society is more interested in the diversity of its writers than the quality of their writing, and is more worried about causing offence than the physical safety of novelists, it has ceased to have any reason to exist.

Those claims about "trans children" killing themselves if they didn't get "gender-affirming care"…

“A study which purported to show a ‘lifetime suicidal ideation’ reduction in those who received puberty blockers actually found twice as many serious suicidal attempts in participants who received the blockers than those who just wished they had received them” 👇 https://t.co/HUh1SqW0qN

— Lucy Stone 🇮🇱 (@lucystone1871) February 10, 2024

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Daniel Bel-Ami at Fathom reviews German scholar Matthias Küntzel's latest book Nazis, Islamic Antisemitism and the Middle East:

Nazis, Islamic Antisemitism and the Middle East tells the story of an important but largely unknown chapter of Middle Eastern history. It focuses on the concerted drive by Nazi Germany to promote anti-Semitism in the region between 1937 and 1945. This was in line with the Nazi’s goal of annihilating the Jewish people not just in Europe but worldwide.

From there Matthias Küntzel, a German political scientist and historian, draws a broader conclusion about anti-Semitism in the Middle East. In his view its origins do not lie in the Arab world’s reaction to the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. It is instead better seen as an aftershock of the Holocaust. Several Arab regimes tried to destroy the newly formed Jewish state mainly because they were motivated by the Nazi propaganda campaign a few years earlier.

Of course, Küntzel is not denying there were instances of anti-Jewish hatred in the Islamic world before 1937. He is well aware, for example, that in many Muslim countries Jews were given the status of dhimmis. That is, they were protected as long as they accepted a clearly inferior rank and legal status. There are also several anti-Jewish passages in classical Islamic texts including the Koran. His argument is that Islamic anti-Semitism fuses together the racial anti-Semitism which emerged in Europe with the classic anti-Judaism evident in early Islam. It was the Nazis, Küntzel argues, who played the key role in bringing genocidal anti-Semitism to the region.

Küntzel identifies several channels through which the Nazis exerted their influence. From 1937 onwards they gave financial backing and other forms of support to Amin El-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem. El-Husseini was an important religious and political figure as well as an ardent anti-Semite. In 1941 he met Hitler in Berlin.

The Nazis distributed large numbers of El-Husseini’s pamphlet, Judaism and Islam, first published in Cairo in 1937. For Küntzel, , it was a seminal document, the first to link the Jew hatred of classical Islamic texts with the conspiratorial anti-Semitism that emerged in Europe in the late nineteenth century. In his view it was the foundational text of Islamic anti-Semitism….

And this:

[T]he collapse of the Ottoman empire at the end of the First World War brought an important change. The division of the region between Britain and France opened the way for Germany to intervene later on in the name of anti-colonialism.

It's not hard to see a current parallel here, with the Free Palestine anti-Israel crowd motivated by the cynical claims of Islamist groups like Hamas to be fighting in the name of anti-colonialism: claims which have been shamefully twisted into the mindless chants that somehow it's now Israel who are the new Nazis.

Photographers Roberto Conte and Stefano Perego spotlight the best buildings from their book Brutalist Italy:

Some of the buildings featured in Brutalist Italy have been abandoned or are in need of maintenance, while others remain in good condition. While the architectural style continues to be divisive, the photographers believe there is a growing interest in it.

"Taken as a whole, brutalism still encounters almost automatic resistance from a good portion of the population, while there is a strong and significative growth of the interest in this kind of architecture, as it also happening in rest of the world," Perego said.

"We definitely belong to the second category!"

Hey, me too.

Cemetery Extension, Jesi (1994)

Jesus the Redeemer Church, Turin (1957)

Marxer Laboratories, Loranzè (1964)

National Temple to Mary, Mother and Queen, Trieste (1965)

Villa Gontero, Cumiana. (1971)

Tree House, Fregene (1971)

Industry Viaduct-Musmeci Bridge, Potenza (1976)

Casa del Portuale, Naples (1981)

Our Lady of Tears Sanctuary, Syracuse (1994)
[Images © Roberto Conte and Stefano Perego]

More brutalist delights…

East European Brutalist
Finding Brutalism
Brutalism worldwide
Madrileño brutalism
Eastern Bloc Brutalism
Brutal North
Brutal delights
Fantasy Brutalism

It'd be hard to find a clearer case of spinelessness than the Royal Society of Literature and its current president Bernadine Evaristo, currently at the centre of a dispute:

The main disagreement stemmed from the RSL not making public stands in support of Salman Rushdie, after a knife attack in 2022, and Kate Clanchy, who was dropped by her publisher after she was accused of using racial stereotypes in her work. “It cannot take sides in writers’ controversies and issues,” wrote Evaristo, saying the organisation “must remain impartial”.

It must remain impartial between an author and someone who tries to kill the author? Apparently so.

Dame Marina Warner, Evaristo’s predecessor as president, said she had been told by the society’s management that to support Rushdie could cause “offence”.

Causing offence to supporters of an Islamist would-be killer? 

Just wondering if the Royal Society of Literature is “impartial” about attempted murder, @BernardineEvari ? (Asking for a friend.) https://t.co/4ZIMDELb1i

— Salman Rushdie (@SalmanRushdie) February 8, 2024

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