Mick Hartley

The Greatest Slovak

Slovakia's public broadcasting corporation, the RTVS, have launched a show to find the "Greatest Slovak". One of the contenders: Josef Tiso.

Who? Well, he was the leader of the Slovak Republic from 1939 to 1945, when it was a Nazi client state, and was responsible for the deportation of thousands of Slovak Jews to the death camps. He was executed in 1947 for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Dalibor Rohac:

A Catholic priest-turned nationalist politician, Tiso advocated Slovakia’s secession from Czechoslovakia just as Adolf Hitler was turning up the heat in the Sudetenland. When Nazis annexed the Czech part of the country and turned it into a ‘protectorate’, Tiso became the president of a one-party client state of the German Reich, which then acted as its reliable ally throughout the duration of the war.

Most significantly, Tiso was responsible for the deportations of Slovak Jews to German-occupied Poland, which started in 1942. Out of the 58 thousand people deported in the first wave (mostly young, unmarried women), only 282 returned. Overall, at least 70 thousand Slovak Jews perished in the Holocaust, out of an initial population of around 89 thousand.

At a time when some in Central Europe are seeking to minimize the involvement of local populations in the Holocaust, it bears stressing that the deportations from Slovakia were not a German imposition but resulted from the initiative of Slovakia’s government – and were, in fact, stopped in 1943 after considerable international pressure, including from the Holy See. The Slovak government also reimbursed Berlin 500 Reichsmark for each deported person (around $200, expressed in 1940 US dollars). President Tiso, who was arrested after the war and sentenced to death in 1947 for treason, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, was not timid about his motives:

“I am asking: Is it Christian that the Slovak nation is seeking to get rid of its eternal enemy, the Jew? Is it Christian? The love of self is God’s imperative. That love urges me to purify myself of everything that harms me and threatens my life. And I believe nobody needs convincing that the Jewish element has threatened Slovak life.”

Following public outrage, RTVS decided to exclude Tiso from the poll and to withdraw the promotional materials about him. The show is now also being investigated by the country’s National Criminal Agency for instigating extremism. Yet, the initial inclusion of the wartime politician and the prominence given to Tiso by the show’s producers, are not a fluke but part of larger and worrying project of Slovakia’s nationalists....

Heath autumn

Hampstead, yesterday:

The victory will be yours

Here's Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan - beloved of a startling number of young leftists in America - speaking at Tehran University:

"I am coming to you from the United States of America, that is gloating over the fact that the President of the United States is going to place on the Islamic Republic the most stringent sanctions that have ever been placed on any nation before. […]

"Nothing happens but by the active or permissive will of Allah. […]

"So one who is spiritual, or believers in Allah, might ask the question: Why is Iran suffering so much, particularly from the United States of America? […]

"Is it not true that you have called America the Great Satan? […]

"Well, if you believe what you say, than would not Satan be actively involved in trying to destroy a nation that is set up on the belief and practice of submission to the will of God? […]

"So we should not be surprised at what Satan does to ill-affect the righteous. […]

"All that your elders have sacrificed will mean nothing if you do not pick up the revolution and carry it forward. […]

"America is making it very hard for Iran to successfully carry out its mission. […]

"But if you have the strength to persevere under these hard trials, the victory will be yours."

Chicago River

Ca. 1905. "Twelfth Street bascule bridge over the Chicago River."

[Photo: Shorpy/Detroit Publishing Company]

Bascule bridge? Read all about it.

Bird and prey

A small hawk, with dead mouse, spotted on Hampstead Heath this morning. 

Not being a bird expert, "small hawk" is about the best I can do.

Be Grateful to the Party, Obey the Party, Follow the Party

Nathan VanderKlippe, from Canada's The Globe and Mail, tries to report from the Orwellian police state of Xinjiang:

The white VW kept pace with my rented vehicle for 250 kilometres before it gave way to a police car, two white Volkswagen sedans – following so close they came within inches of slamming into me – a black Buick, a silver Ford, a blue Kia, a black VW and finally another white VW. In total, I was followed and tracked for nearly 1,600 kilometres. At least nine cars and 20 people, nameless and dressed in plainclothes, kept watch across freeways, city streets and desert roads. At night, they posted hotel lookouts.

Over roughly 80 hours in Xinjiang, I received three police escorts, had pictures deleted from my camera twice and was threatened with arrest several times. I was accused of fleeing the scene of an accident and, separately, of breaking highway rules before being informed I had done neither. Once, as I typed notes in my car, police advanced on me as if I were a wanted criminal. Two officers held up anti-explosive shields, while a third grasped his gun, ordering me to place both hands outside the window.

This was all in a place Chinese media proclaim is “peaceful and serene,” where “people dance in the squares in the afternoon, and the lively night fairs make people stay for a long time.”

And that was before he tried to get near to a detention centre:

Chinese authorities have called such facilities ”employment and vocational training centres,” describing them as friendly places where people learn skills and play sports. But that description is hard to square with the prison-like mien of those I saw: high walls, floodlights and, at one, a big-character sign demanding those inside “Be Grateful to the Party, Obey the Party, Follow the Party.”

It was only when I approached those centres that the followers ceased being passive monitors.

Near one, they leapt from their car to form a human wall, blocking me from getting closer. At another, men with guns and anti-ballistic vests seized my phone and camera, refusing to let me go until I deleted pictures. Near a third, traffic rumbled past as a propaganda official told me road construction made it impossible to proceed closer.

“We are not hiding anything,” she said. Seeing the centre is just ”not necessary for you.”

Despite the obstacles, VanderKlippe did manage to talk to a few Uighurs:

The heavy surveillance made independent reporting difficult since, according to many accounts from residents who have left Xinjiang, local authorities are suspicious of contact with foreigners. Uyghurs living outside China say relatives in Xinjiang have cut communication to avoid falling under suspicion.

As a result, The Globe spoke with only a few Muslims in Xinjiang, a group that includes ethnic Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz and Hui, and is withholding their identities out of concern for their safety.

Those who did answer questions described fear of practising their religion both in public and in private. State surveillance and the threat of detention in centres for political indoctrination and skills training keeps them away from mosques, even the ones that remain open.

“I don’t go,” one restaurant owner said. “We can’t go,” said a woman in a village in eastern Xinjiang, before declining any further questions. The situation, her son said, has grown too “intense.” A few minutes later, six police entered the village on motorcycles, some of them bearing large black metal shields.

Throughout the region, authorities equipped mosques with cameras to watch entrances and ID scanners with facial-recognition systems to document each person who walks inside.

As far as the young man in Urumqi can tell, almost no one is taking that risk.

In Xinjiang, he said, “You can believe. But you can’t tell anyone.”

With their skates on

Russell Lee, April 1941. "Instructors in roller skating at the Savoy Ballroom in Chicago." 

[Photo: Shorpy/Russell Lee]

Left antisemitism

James Polite is a black leftist activist accused of arson and anti-Semitic vandalism in New York. 

Liel Leibovitz:

Earlier today, the New York Police Department arrested the man suspected of vandalizing the Union Temple in Brooklyn by scrawling “Hitler” and “Die Jewish rats” on its wall. The man, James Polite, is also being investigated for allegedly attempting to set several Jewish institutions throughout the city on fire.

Polite, 26, is not a white supremacist. He is African-American, was raised in part by Jewish foster parents, and was sent to Brandeis University with the help of a charity run by The New York Times. He was a Democratic party activist, a protégée of former City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, and a one-time City Hall intern who, according to the Times, worked on “initiatives to combat hate crime, sexual assault and domestic violence.”

But Polite’s journey through so many of contemporary liberalism’s most vaunted paths—academia, politics, activism—and the kindness shown him by Jews were apparently not enough to prevent him from contracting the mind-numbing virus of anti-Semitism.....

Coming, as it does, on the heels of the deadly attack in Pittsburgh, Polite’s case merits a moment of consideration. After the shooting in the Tree of Life synagogue left 11 dead, some pundits pointed out that President Trump bore some measure of responsibility for the attack, if only for fomenting the sort of chaotic atmosphere that empowered and invigorated the alt-right.

It’s a serious accusation, and one well-worth considering carefully and at length.... But in Polite we have an equally terrifying counter-argument, one that suggests that in today’s America, no one side has a monopoly on hate and chaos. When the Democratic Party’s leaders, including a former president and a former attorney general, stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Louis Farrakhan on the stage at Aretha Franklin’s funeral, is it any wonder that some are prone to listen when Farrakhan refers to Jews as termites? And listen they do: Earlier this week, a rabbi, Avram Mlotek, was harassed on the subway in Manhattan by a Farrakhan supporter who blamed the Jews for all the violence directed against them everywhere in the world.

And now, we’ve Polite. If the left is honest, it will spend the coming days and weeks asking how someone educated at a fine liberal university, on a scholarship from a fine liberal newspaper, could graduate from a job with a fine liberal politician—helping curb hate crimes, no less—to trying to intimidate and incinerate Jews.....

Running across Westminster Bridge

Wordsworth composed the famous poem - but did he ever run across the bridge? I think not. Frances Ilott did though, in 1934.

And she was fast:

The challenge was to run over the bridge within the twelve chimes at noon.

To be fair to Wordsworth, Big Ben wasn't built when he was rhapsodising about the view.

Read the twitter thread about Ilott here.

Akin to signing her death warrant

Lawyer Saif Mullook has now left Pakistan - but his client Asia Bibi will not be so fortunate:

The lawyer representing a Christian woman acquitted of blasphemy after eight years on death row has fled Pakistan in fear for his life.

Saif Mulook told news agency AFP he had to leave so he could continue to represent Asia Bibi, whose conviction was overturned by judges on Wednesday.

Officials have since agreed to bar Ms Bibi from leaving Pakistan in order to end violent protests over the ruling.

Campaigners blasted the deal as akin to signing her "death warrant"....

Pakistani Information Minister Fawad Chaudhry defended the government against allegations that a deal reached with an Islamist party was capitulating to extremists.

He said the government would "take all steps necessary" to ensure Asia Bibi's safety.

Mr Mulook, however, called the agreement "painful".

"They cannot even implement an order of the country's highest court," he told AFP before he boarded the plane to Europe.

Mr Mulook said he had decided to leave as it was "not possible" to continue living in Pakistan, adding: "I need to stay alive as I still have to fight the legal battle for Asia Bibi."...

All protesters arrested since Asia Bibi's acquittal will be released, and any violence towards them will be investigated.

The government will also start legal proceedings to put Ms Bibi on a list which would ban her from leaving Pakistan.

Which is, as they say, signing her death warrant. But, as I said before, that's how it works. No one has yet been executed under Pakistan's blasphemy law. The international outrage would be too painful. Instead they leave it to the Islamist mobs.

 

Gathering in the name of jazz

A new book, Art Kane. Harlem 1958, marks the 60th anniversary of the most famous photo in jazz history - A Great Day in Harlem. Fifty-seven jazz musicians assembled outside a Harlem brownstone, to be photographed by Art Kane for Esquire magazine. 

In 1958 Kane, then a fledgling photographer, pitched an idea to Esquire to invite the musicians of New York’s jazz community to come together for one photo. Esquire agreed and Kane sent requests via agents, record labels, managers, clubs, anywhere he could spread the word. Fifty-seven jazz musicians, from the unknown to the world famous, assembled at the unlikely hour of 10am at 7 East 126th Street, between Fifth and Madison Avenues. The group included jazz legends Dizzy Gillespie, Art Blakey, Thelonius Monk, Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Charles Mingus, Gerry Mulligan, and Count Basie (whose hat was repeatedly stolen by local kids until Kane surrendered and put them in the shot, too).

Art Kane: Harlem 1958 assembles, for the first time, virtually every single frame from the historic shoot; the book is the story behind the shot.

[Photos; Art Kane]

I wrote about this back in 2013, including Gordon Parks' poignant 1996 recreation of the shot with those few remaining musicians still alive. 

Currently only two of the original fifty-seven are still alive - Benny Golson, aged 89, and Sonny Rollins, aged 88.

November sky

Down to the South Bank:

Institutional sexual abuse in North Korea

According to a Human Rights Watch report on sexual violence against women in North Korea, police and other officials routinely rape and sexually assault women over whom they hold power. As noted by Kenneth Roth, of Human Rights Watch, “Sexual violence in North Korea is an open, unaddressed and widely tolerated secret".

From the report summary - “You Cry at Night but Don’t Know Why” [pdf].

Oh Jung Hee is a former trader in her forties from Ryanggang province. She sold clothes to market stalls in Hyesan city and was involved in the distribution of textiles in her province. She said that up until she left the country in 2014, guards would regularly pass by the market to demand bribes, sometimes in the form of coerced sexual acts or intercourse. She told Human Rights Watch:

I was a victim many times … On the days they felt like it, market guards or police officials could ask me to follow them to an empty room outside the market, or some other place they’d pick. What can we do? They consider us [sex] toys … We [women] are at the mercy of men. Now, women cannot survive without having men with power near them.

She said she had no power to resist or report these abuses. She said it never occurred to her that anything could be done to stop these assaults except trying to avoid such situations by moving away or being quiet in order to not be noticed.

Park Young Hee, a former farmer in her forties also from Ryanggang province who left North Korea for the second time in 2011, was forced back to North Korea from China in the spring of 2010 after her first attempt to flee. She said, after being released by the secret police (bowiseong) and put under the jurisdiction of the police, the officer in charge of questioning her in the police pre-trial detention facility (kuryujang) near Musan city in North Hamgyong province touched her body underneath her clothes and penetrated her several times with his fingers. She said he asked her repeatedly about the sexual relations she had with the Chinese man to whom she had been sold to while in China. She told Human Rights Watch:

My life was in his hands, so I did everything he wanted and told him everything he asked. How could I do anything else? … Everything we do in North Korea can be considered illegal, so everything can depend on the perception or attitude of who is looking into your life.

Park Young Hee said she never told anybody about the abuse because she did not think it was unusual, and because she feared the authorities and did not believe anyone would help.

The experiences of Oh Jung Hee and Park Young Hee are not isolated ones. While sexual and gender-based violence is of concern everywhere, growing evidence suggests it is endemic in North Korea.

This report–based largely on interviews with 54 North Koreans who left the country after 2011, when the current leader, Kim Jong Un, rose to power, and 8 former North Korean officials who fled the country–focuses on sexual abuse by men in official positions of power. The perpetrators include high-ranking party officials, prison and detention facility guards and interrogators, police and secret police officials, prosecutors, and soldiers. At the time of the assaults, most of the victims were in the custody of authorities or were market traders who came across guards and other officials as they traveled to earn their livelihood....

Funny How Time Slips Away

Yes I know it's a little disconcerting with all those famous names - Kristofferson et al - just sitting around looking suitably reverential and moved, but still....this is good stuff from the great Willie Nelson. From 1997:

The song's been recorded so often since Willie composed it back in 1961, by so many artists:
Willie himself
Glen Campbell
Elvis
Al Green
Dorothy Moore
even BB King and Bobby Bland
and not forgetting a typically classy version from George Jones.

Teesside dreams

Middlesbrough in the 1970s and 1980s, by photographer Graham Smith - a man with a weakness for a catchy title:

Who She Wanted and What She Got, South Bank, Middlesbrough.

I thought I saw Liz Taylor and Bob Mitchum in the back room of the Commercial, 1984

Working girls, the Zetland, Middlesbrough, 1983

Thirty Eight Bastard Years on the Furnace. Front Mess Room for No. 4 and No. 5 Furnaces, Middlesbrough, 1983

The Junction Pub, South Bank, Teesside, 1981
[Photos © Graham Smith]