Mick Hartley

National disgrace

You can always rely on the Guardian:

Theresa May will be the first leader to meet Trump. This is a national disgrace.

Rust red and blue

Round the Olympic Park and Hackney Wick:

De-sanctioning Sudan

Back to Tablet for this piece by Armin Rosen.

The Cuban refugees business wasn't the only last minute move from the outgoing Obama administration. There was also Sudan. Remember Darfur, and the charge of genocide against Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir? Well hardly anyone else does.

In one of the Obama administration’s last major foreign policy decisions, the outgoing president issued an executive order on January 13 lifting most of its sanctions against the government of Sudan, whose nominally Islamist regime had been accused of aiding terrorist groups and committing grave human rights abuses against its citizens. The move could bring an end to the National Congress Party regime’s decades of isolation and reverse the country’s economic plunge....

So what changed? According to the January 13 executive order, the lifting of the sanctions was the result of Sudan’s new cooperation on counter-terrorism, helpful moves towards ending the civil war in neighboring South Sudan, and supposed progress towards reaching a political settlement with various armed and unarmed domestic opponents. Counter-terror cooperation has improved, and Khartoum has largely stopped meddling in the affairs of its southern neighbor. But the regime of Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir, who is still under an International Criminal Court indictment for crimes against humanity, has made almost no progress towards internal political reconciliation—the issue that brought Save Darfur activists to the Mall over a decade ago. “Domestically, nothing has really changed,” says Ahmed Koduda, a commentator on East African affairs. “The Americans really wanted to get this done one way or another and needed to make it palatable to the advocacy community and American activists—they had to say, Sudan has cooperated on x, y, and z issues. But in reality, the regime has not done anything domestically to warrant this change.”...

Sudan is still a US-listed state sponsor of terror, and a more Islamist iteration of the current regime sheltered Osama bin Laden in the mid-1990s. And until late 2015, the Sudanese regime was essentially Iran’s only Sunni Arab ally. Tehran helped Sudan set up one of Africa’s largest domestic arms industries, and used Sudanese territory and military infrastructure as a transit point for weapons intended for Hamas and Hezbollah. But in October of 2015, Khartoum abruptly switched sides in the Saudi-Iranian cold war and sent ground troops to join Riyadh’s coalition against the Iranian-supported Houthi rebels who had overthrown the government of Yemen.

The lifting of US sanctions is partially the result of Saudi lobbying. If the Israelis actually did back the lifting of sanctions, the move would further reflect Jerusalem’s convergence of interests with the Gulf States in countering Iran and reflect a certain willingness among Israel and the Gulf countries to chase identical diplomatic objectives at the same moment.

[See this Michael Totten piece for more on the Israeli-Saudi convergence.]

There was another major change leading up to the executive order: Americans stopped caring about Darfur, and Bashir’s regime viciously crushed much of the region’s remaining armed opposition. Even if the Obama administration’s 11th-hour move preserves sanctions related to the Darfur conflict, it will greatly enrich the regime responsible for committing atrocities in the country’s west—atrocities that then-Secretary of State Colin Powell labeled as “genocide” in September of 2004. “It’s a miracle for the regime,” says Kodouda of the sanctions’ removal. “The sanctions have been the No. 1 political priority for Khartoum and with this partial removal the regime has scored a major political victory and morale boost.”

In the mid-2000s, Sudan became an unlikely focus for activists—many of them Jewish—who envisioned a foreign policy animated by human rights and a unique American responsibility to end atrocities, instead of by narrow national security or economic interests.The Save Darfur movement was an idealistic attempt to break American complacency about the lone superpower’s supposed moral responsibilities. “Those of us who occupy this building during the week are aware of what is going on in Darfur,” one member of the Senate said at the April 30, 2006 rally. “We get busy,” he lamented. “We get distracted. And the searing images of children being slaughtered, and women being assaulted start fading from view and we start worrying about gas prices and we start worrying about elections and the priorities start drifting down, down, until we no longer recognize the moral urgency that’s required.” The rally, he said, could be part of an effort change that sad reality: “In every corner of the globe, tyrants, and terrorists, powers and principalities will know that a new day is dawning and righteous spirit is on the move,” he said at the close of his speech.

That senator was Barack Obama, and a little over a decade later, he would help to prove just how far those images of Darfur had faded from view, and how radical that fleeting, long-ago, Jewish-led attempt to shape American foreign policy around human rights had really been.

Mountain in the clouds

Climbers approaching the summit of Mont Blanc:

[Photo: Eric Songbill Wong]

Turneresque.

The politics of the ballot box are preferable to the politics of the street

An interesting piece from Lee Smith - The Arab-isation of American Politics. He's talking about the current obsession with crowd numbers: not only Sean Spicer and the Trump crew obsessing over the crowd size at the inauguration, but equally the anti-Trump protest groups, and their belief that somehow the size of the crowds they attracted showed that Trump wasn't really the legitimate democratic choice. But liberal democracy - American democracy - isn't about the size of demonstrations. 

Trump was fairly elected with a plurality of the electoral college, and the outgoing president transferred authority to the incoming commander-in-chief peacefully. In other words, the mechanisms of democracy functioned properly. So why do so many Americans mistake what typically signals a failure of democracy for democracy itself?

In part, the talk about crowds is a sign of how American perceptions and expectations have been subtly and pervasively altered by our engagement with the undemocratic, and traditionally autocratic, Arab societies of the Middle East, especially since the beginning of the Arab Spring uprisings a little more than six years ago. Certainly, those bloody events should have reminded us that the politics of the ballot box are preferable to the politics of the street. But that’s not what happened. Instead, the massive protest movements of the Arab Spring were regarded across the American political spectrum, left and right, as genuine outpourings of democratic feeling....

Crowd politics is the opposite of electoral politics. In democratic societies, crowd politics are generally hostile to electoral politics and procedural government, and often presage their destruction. Consider, for instance, the crowds outside the Duma before the Bolsheviks took over, or Mussolini’s spectacles, Hitler’s even bigger spectacles. Crowds are not what democracy looks like. Rather, they are a consequence of the absence or the breakdown of democratic procedural norms.

Mass demonstrations are not a sign of a healthy democracy. Rather, as signs at the march more correctly advertised Saturday, they are a symbol and a means of “resistance.”

Adopting and retooling Arab tropes like “resistance”—often armed and typically directed at Israel—is hardly a new fashion for the progressive camp. Indeed, the romance with resistance dates back to at least the 1960s, when the European left seemed to hitch its wagon to the Arab cause, as a tip of the spear in the fight against capitalism, imperialism, etc. In fact, Europeans were simply paying lip service to Arab political and cultural ideas, embodied primarily in the Palestinian national movement....

Americans cherish lots of easy fantasies about mass-protest movements, which we imagine are cool like May ’68 in Paris. Americans can afford to be sentimental about protest movements because we have been fortunate that, even including the civil-rights and anti-Vietnam War movement, we have suffered relatively few casualties, and because everything turned out OK in the end....

Another tragedy then may come. The West, the United States, has been damaged by a series of tragedies that began Sept. 11, 2001, and have not stopped since. The deepest of these wounds were all self-inflicted. As the Trump era begins, we are likely to pay even more dearly for losing faith in our own ideas. What makes democracy possible is not pride in crowds but rather the sound skepticism that warns us of the danger of mass politics and the need for the judicious procedural tempering of the enthusiasms that our system is designed to generate but never to abruptly enforce. Otherwise, our self-pity and obsession with identity politics, or what the Third World calls “sectarianism,” combined with the widespread loathing for these things on the part of the electorate that chose Donald Trump, is apt to be a death sentence for our democracy.

The Bier of Kang Ki Sop

Is this a new trend? No longer content with just looking at things, the Young Marshal is now happy to be photographed caressing corpses:

From the official Rodong Sinmun news agency:

Kim Jong Un, chairman of the Workers' Party of Korea, chairman of the DPRK State Affairs Commission and supreme commander of the Korean People's Army, Sunday visited the bier of Kang Ki Sop, alternate member of the Central Committee of the Workers' Party of Korea, deputy to the Supreme People's Assembly of the DPRK and general director of the General Administration of Civil Aviation, to express profound condolences over his death....

Kim Jong Un paid silent tribute to Kang Ki Sop, revolutionary soldier who not only fulfilled an important flight duty in a responsible manner after growing up to be a competent flight guiding official thanks to the particular trust and loving care of President Kim Il Sung and leader Kim Jong Il but also successfully ensured the operation of the international and domestic regular air service and thus raised the international prestige of the Party and state and made a great contribution to developing the nation's air transport.

He looked round the bier of Kang Ki Sop....

He did more than look around.

Creepy.

Cuban refugees

I wasn't aware of this. Michael Totten:

One of Barack Obama’s last acts as president was a total jerk move, and Donald Trump approves of it.

Our outgoing president ended two long-standing policies that helped Cuban refugees flee the oppressive Castro regime and find safe harbor and the opportunity to live free and productive lives in the United States.

First, the “wet feet, dry feet” policy, a modified version of the Cuban Adjustment Act passed in 1966, granted political asylum to Cuban citizens who managed to reach American soil. Obama killed it with a stroke of his pen. Any would-be Cuban refugee who arrives on American shores will now be deported back to Castro’s police state.

Obama also ended the Cuban Medical Professional Parole Program, passed in 2006 during the Bush Administration, which allowed Cuban doctors to defect to the United States through any American Embassy in the world.

The Castro regime hated these policies. Granting asylum to Cubans lucky enough to reach the United States undermined the legitimacy of the dictatorship and put the lie to its propaganda. Any government that drives its own citizens into the ocean to escape has failed catastrophically.

It was, no doubt, all part of Obama's policy of breaking with the old-style US hostility towards unpleasant regimes, in the fond hope that they'd melt under the warmth of his smile. Like Iran, for instance.

Yes, Obama deep-sixed these policies, not Trump, but Trump won’t reverse anything. Last year in an interview with the Tampa Bay Times, our new president said America’s Cuban refugee policies are unfair. “I don’t think that’s fair. I mean why would that be a fair thing? I don’t think it would be fair. You know we have a system now for bringing people into the country, and what we should be doing is we should be bringing people who are terrific people who have terrific records of achievement, accomplishment.... You have people that have been in the system for years [waiting to immigrate to America], and it’s very unfair when people who just walk across the border, and you have other people that do it legally.”

So that’s it, then. Obama slammed the door on Cuban refugees, and Trump is not going to open it. That hardly counts as a bipartisan consensus, but it certainly fits with America First.

Very Islamic

Are there people still obtuse enough to maintain the absurd fiction that ISIS has nothing to do with Islam? If there are, here's Tom Holland - reviewing Graeme Wood's The Way of the Strangers: Encounters with the Islamic State - to set them straight:

The venue for the declaration of the “Islamic State” had been carefully chosen. The Great Mosque of al-Nuri in Mosul was a fitting location for the restoration of a “caliphate” pledged to the destruction of its enemies. It was built in 1172 by Nur al-Din al-Zengi, a warrior famed for his victories over the Crusaders. When Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi ascended the pulpit in July 2014 and proclaimed his followers to be “the backbone of the camp of faith and the spearhead of its trench”, he was consciously following in Nur al-Din’s footsteps. The message could not have been clearer. The Crusaders were back and needed defeating....

The Parisian concert-goers murdered at the Bataclan theatre in 2015 were as much Crusaders as those defeated by Nur al-Din in the 12th century – and those slaughters prefigure a final slaughter at the end of days. When the propagandists of Islamic State named their English-language magazine Dabiq, they were alluding to a small town in Syria that – so they proclaim – will at last bring the Crusades to an end. Every issue is headed with the same exultant vaunt. “The spark has been lit here in Iraq, and its heat will continue to intensify – by Allah’s permission – until it burns the Crusader armies in Dabiq.

How much does Islamic State actually believe this stuff? The assumption that it is a proxy for other concerns – born of US foreign policy, or social deprivation, or Islamophobia – comes naturally to commentators in the West. Partly this is because their instincts are often secular and liberal; partly it reflects a proper concern not to tar mainstream Islam with the brush of terrorism.

Unsurprisingly, the first detailed attempt to take Islamic State at its word ruffled a lot of feathers. Graeme Wood’s article “What Isis really wants” ran in the Atlantic two years ago and turned on its head the reassuring notion that the organisation’s motivation was anything that Western policy­makers could readily comprehend.

“The reality is,” Wood wrote, “that the Islamic State is Islamic. Very Islamic.” The strain of the religion that it was channelling derived “from coherent and even learned interpretations of Islam” and was fixated on two distinct moments of time: the age of Muhammad and the end of days long promised in Muslim apocalyptic writings. Members of Islamic State, citing the Quran and sayings attributed to the Prophet in their support, believe themselves charged by God with expediting the end of days. It is their mandate utterly to annihilate kufr: disbelief. The world must be washed in blood, so that the divine purpose may be fulfilled. The options for negotiating this around a table at Geneva are, to put it mildly, limited.

In The Way of the Strangers, Wood continues his journey into the mindset of Islamic State’s enthusiasts. As he did in the Atlantic, he scorns “the belief that when a jihadist tells you he wants to kill you and billions of others to bring about the end of the world, he is just speaking for effect”....

That their enthusiasm for, say, slavery or the discriminatory taxation of religious minorities causes such offence to contemporary morality only confirms to them that there is a desperately pressing task of purification to perform. As Wood observes, “These practices may be rejected by mainstream Muslim scholars today, but for most of Islamic history, it barely occurred to Muslims to doubt that their religion permitted them.” Verses in the Quran, sayings of the Prophet, the example of the early caliphate: all can be used to justify them. Why, then, should Islamic State not reintroduce them, in the cause of making Islam great again?

Perhaps the most dispiriting section of Wood’s book describes his attempt to find an answer to this question by consulting eminent Muslim intellectuals in the US. Scholars whose understanding of Islam derives from a long chain of teachers (and who have framed documents on their walls to prove it) angrily condemn Islamic State for ignoring centuries’ worth of legal rulings. It is a valid point – but only if one accepts, as Islamic State does not, that scholarship can legitimately be used to supplement the Quran and the sayings of Muhammad.

When Wood asks Hamza Yusuf, an eminent Berkeley Sufi, to demonstrate the group’s errors by relying only on the texts revealed to the Prophet, he struggles to do so: “Yusuf could not point to an instance where the Islamic State was flat-out, verifiably wrong.” This does not mean that it is right but it does suggest – despite what most Muslims desperately and understandably want to believe – that it is no less authentically Islamic than any other manifestation of Islam.

East street art

Brick Lane:

Hackney Road:

Infantilisation

I only watched the first of the latest Sherlock series. I never much liked it, (see here and here for earlier reactions) but sometimes you check stuff out as much as anything because it's good to keep abreast of what everyone else is watching. But one was enough.

In place of the classic detective story, where you're alongside the great crime solver as they try to make sense of the evidence in the most logical way - the detective story, that is, whose rules were laid down as much as anyone else by Conan Doyle - we have a show which defies analysis. You think you've made sense of it when - whoosh! - along comes another twist which completely changes everything. After a while your only choice is to give up thinking, and just sit back and marvel at how clever the programme makers are. Or, as in my case, give up in disgust. The point the programme wishes to make is, not that logic and reason can solve the crime, but that Sherlock - or rather the team making the TV series Sherlock - works at a level beyond anything you could possibly manage (superSherlock) so you better give up thinking and sit there open-mouthed, as wonder follows shock follows wonder. It's like Doctor Who: magical detective stories for teenagers.

And the Sherlock - Moriarty rivalry is more like a playground sneer contest than a battle between two supposedly great minds.

Also, we learn, it's not even about the crimes. As we saw in that first programme - the one I watched - the crime (man disappears, found dead in car) is of no interest. The real dramas are absurd sub-Bond spy machinations which may or may not have happened to members of Sherlock's inner circle, and, above all, Sherlock's family psychodramas. Can he feel? Can he love?? Does he need some psychotherapy???

Liel Leibovitz was similarly unimpressed:

The premise of the fourth—and, by most reports, final—season of the show, which concluded on Sunday night, was jarring: There are other Holmes siblings, and they are the smart ones. Sherlock, he of the deerstalker and the mind palace, is triumphant simply because he can empathize, a fact that is driven home again and again in sepia-toned flashbacks of the celebrated deducer at 6, looking adorable in knee-length shorts and curls.

It’s hard to discuss this premise any further without spoiling the twists and turns of a season rich with them, but if the previous paragraph strikes you as strange, well, it’s because it is: We love Sherlock, have always loved him, because he’s the embodiment of pure reason and a solver of really difficult mysteries, not because he’s super good at resolving family conflicts and diligent about working out his repressed childhood memories.

Such emotional overindulgence not only robs one of popular culture’s most astute thinkers of his wits, but also forces us all into an infantile state in which all focus is always on the self and its constant, nagging needs. Like Pope Lenny [Jude Law in The Young Pope], whose tastes—he only drinks Cherry Coke Zero—and his attachment to Sister Mary, the nun who raised him from boyhood, both suggest that he’d never quite gotten around to the task of growing up, Sherlock, too, is another child replaying his earliest traumas on a much more lavish stage.

What would a young and conservative pope do if placed on the throne? How would the world’s greatest detective use his powers to combat anything from Russian hackers to Islamist terrorists? These are fascinating questions, but we’ll never know the answers. Instead of men, the gods of prime time have given us two simpering boys, and instead of great and good dramas that explore all that is human and terrifying and hopeful about our struggling species, we’ve just more gilt and noise.

Is it any wonder, then, that we elected a president who is swayed primarily by the gravitational pull of raucous cable news? And is it really surprising that when our turn came to fulfill our supreme civic duty so many of us ended up voting for the person who’s been chewing the scenery on NBC for 14 seasons? Responsibility, empathy, decency—none of these comes naturally. They are learned, slowly and painstakingly, at home and in school but also by means of a cultural osmosis of sorts, by belonging to a community that sets up standards and insists that we abide or else. But when our entertainment so often implies that those who’ve matured are bores and those who still cry out for attention are worthy of it, when we can think of no other approach to fiction than one that showcases self-centered twits, when the outraged and the outrageous are all you see and hear, the thrust toward maturity stops. Like the young pope and the weepy sleuth, we’re all children now, and the president we elected, like the TV shows we spend so much time parsing, are the ones we deserve.

I'm not sure I'd make quite the same leap to Trump there, but it's at least worth a think.

Back streets

Round Shoreditch:

Lightning clouds

From a small plane over Sochi:

[Photo © Lina Samoukova]

From Blackpool to Norfolk Va.

I posted about Bob Dylan's paintings back in 2011, on the occasion of a show at the Gagosian Gallery in New York. There were accusations - very well founded accusations - of plagiarism. One canvas in particular was a more or less straight copy of a 1915 photo by Léon Busy. As I said of Dylan at the time:

The thing is, he doesn't care. It's how he works. One of the main interests of his Theme Time Radio Hour shows was the way he happily played so many of the songs that he had, in effect, plagiarised during the course of his career. As for this art show, he must have realised that his sources would be unearthed. How could he not?

The quotation waiting in the wings here, begging to be brought out and dusted down, is that old Oscar Wilde chestnut "Talent borrows, genius steals". For Dylan's music I think that's right. He brazenly pilfered from all manner of sources: blues, folk, country. But what he did with it was genius. Finding the original sources may be an interesting game (and it's not hard), but it does nothing to detract from the man's extraordinary achievements. 

His art, though...well, it would be very generous to make any claims of genius. I saw some of his work earlier in the year here in London. It's perfectly competent, pleasant stuff, but nothing at all special. At this level, yes, the kind of plagiarism that's been uncovered here does matter, I think. It's not a huge deal, and if he'd added "after a photograph by Léon Busy" to the title of his "Opium" picture, no one would have been that bothered. But there is an expectation of originality in an art show at a major gallery. 

Well, he's done it again with his latest exhibition of paintings, The Beaten Path. And the victim of his plagiarism? Our very own Diamond Geezer. A photo he took of Blackpool pier has been re=assigned by Bob to Norfolk, Virginia. Read all about it here - and a follow-up post here.

Coal and steel

Old industrial structures, now mostly demolished, photographed by Harald Finster in the early 1990s:

Belgium 1992

Bickershaw Colliery, Leigh, Lancs. 1990

Charleroi, Belgium 1990

Alsdorf, Germany 1991

Donisthorpe Colliery, Ashby, Leics. 1990

Hem Heath Colliery, Stoke-on-Trent, 1990

Charleroi, Belgium, 1990

Deep Navigation Colliery, Treharris, Wales, 1990

Wallers, France, 1993

Sutton Manor Colliery, St Helens, 1990

Coal mining mostly, though that's a steel works at the top.

In the tradition of Bernd and Hilla Becher.

Harald Finster previously.

America First

It's Donald Trump's - President Trump's - catch-phrase. A reminder of its history:

the center of his foreign policy vision, Donald Trump has put “America First,” a phrase with an anti-Semitic and isolationist history going back to the years before the U.S. entry into World War II. 

Trump started using the slogan in the later months of his campaign, and despite requests from the Anti-Defamation League that he drop it, he stuck with it.

Friday, he embraced the words as a unifying theme for his inaugural address.

“From this day forward, a new vision will govern our land,” Trump said on the Capitol steps. “From this day forward, it’s going to be only America First. America First.” 

Those same words galvanized a mass populist movement against U.S. entry into the war in Europe, even as the German army rolled through France and Belgium in the spring of 1940.

A broad-based coalition of politicians and business leaders on the right and left came together as the America First Committee to oppose President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s support for France and Great Britain. The movement grew to more than 800,000 members.

While the America First Committee attracted a wide array of support, the movement was marred by anti-Semitic and pro-fascist rhetoric. Its highest profile spokesman, Charles Lindbergh, blamed American Jews for pushing the country into war.

"The British and the Jewish races," he said at a rally in September 1941, "for reasons which are not American, wish to involve us in the war."

The “greatest danger” Jews posed to the U.S. “lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our government,” Lindbergh said.

It is unclear if Trump is bothered by the ugly history of the phrase....

“It is such a toxic phrase with such a putrid history,” said Susan Dunn, professor of humanities at Williams College and an expert in American political history, in an interview.

Lindbergh and other prominent members of the America First organization believed democracy was in decline and that fascism represented a new future, Dunn said.

Those words “carry an enormous weight,” said Lynne Olson, author of “Those Angry Days,” a book about the clash between Lindbergh and Roosevelt over entering the war.

“That time was strikingly familiar to now,” Olson said. “There was an enormous amount of economic and social turmoil in the country, anti-Semitism rose dramatically as well as general nativism and populism.”