Mick Hartley

On the Carteret Atolls

Dutch photographer Kadir van Lohuizen, December 2015:

[Photo: Kadir van Lohuizen / NOOR]

"On the Carteret atolls, Papua New Guinea , a woman 'harvests' the seeds of water plants to cook them to have something to eat. Inhabitants face more very serious food shortages; malnutrition is common. Due to the rising sea level, sea water intrusion is common and the soil gets saline, therefor crops can not be grown and the water becomes undrinkable. Evacuation is urgent and becomes the only solution."

Upstairs at the Saatchi Gallery there's a joint exhibition by van Lohuizen with Yuri Kozyrev, both members of the NOOR Photo Agency, on the effects on the Arctic of rising sea levels, the exploitation of gas and mineral resources, and the opening of trade routes.  'Arctic: New Frontier' runs till 5th May.

An atmosphere of fear

Hard times now in North Korea, we learn, after the failure of the Hanoi summit to provide any sanctions relief. The National Intelligence Service - South Korea's chief intelligence agency - has information that Kim Jong-un told his Foreign Ministry to appeal to international organizations for help, since the North is suffering a severe food shortage. Some experts estimate that the North's foreign-currency and food and oil reserves are not enough to last even a year.

What North Korea does have though, in abundance, is cheap slave labour:

North Korea is sending tens of thousands of workers to China on temporary visitor visas to make quick cash for the regime now international sanctions ban countries around the world from employing North Korean workers.

The move seems to be a desperate attempt to raise hard currency for the increasingly cash-strapped dictatorship after February's summit with the U.S. collapsed.

One source said the North "is engaging in guerrilla-style cash raids by sending workers to China on two-month visitor visas." China needs cheap labor and the North is more than willing to supply it, with an estimated 70,000 workers heading across the border in search of jobs.

"North Koreans have been sent primarily to China's three northeastern provinces, where they usually work in clothing and food factories as well as construction sites, saunas and restaurants, and as maids and cleaners."

They are paid around US$200 a month, much of which is taken by the regime.

UN member states are banned from issuing new work visas to North Koreans under Security Council resolutions and must also deport current North Korean laborers by the end of this year. But China needs cheap labor to help struggling industries stay afloat and seems willing to bend the UN rules by hiring North Koreans on visitor visas instead of work permits.

Meanwhile, Radio Free Asia reported that North Korean authorities have banned all unauthorized gatherings because it fears public unrest. RFA said even small gatherings are subject to crackdowns and violators are charged hefty fines and face intense grilling by the authorities.

It added that an atmosphere of fear has gripped the entire country.

Wave sculpture

From the AquaViva series, by photographer Pierre Carreau:

[Images: Pierre Carreau]

Some of these are on display as part of the Kaleidosope exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery.

 

The Ukipification of the Tory party

Rachel Sylvester in the Times (£) points out what has been obvious for a while now. Just as Labour has been taken over by the hard left in the shape of Momentum and the Corbynistas, the Conservatives are being hijacked by the hard right, as Ukip infiltrators move in. We're seeing a polarisation of the political landscape:

The greatest irony of the Brexit process is that successive Tory prime ministers have shaped government policy on Europe in an attempt to hold their party together. David Cameron called the EU referendum to try to appease his Eurosceptics and Theresa May has put party unity before the national interest throughout her time in No. 10.

Yet the Conservatives are more divided than ever. “It’s not will we split? It’s that we are split,” one senior minister told me. “I look at Jacob Rees-Mogg, Boris Johnson and Steve Baker and I think: I’m not in the same party as you.”

A battle is under way for the future of the Tory party that is being fought up and down the country in local associations as well as in parliament. With the cabinet riven down the middle too, it will play out in spectacular style during the forthcoming leadership contest.

Just as Labour has been taken over by the hard left, so the Tories are being colonised by a Eurosceptic “Purple Momentum” and, like Jeremy Corbyn, the prime minister has welcomed in the new recruits.  [...]

There are growing concerns that the prime minister’s mantra that “no deal is better than a bad deal” has fuelled public anger and eroded trust in politics. One cabinet source believes that the phrase has been “weaponised by dark forces”, with extremists playing on a sense of betrayal. “It’s the Ukipification of the Tory party,” an MP says. “David Cameron tried to put distance between us and Ukip but Theresa May’s strategy is to reunite the right.”

Now that Mrs May has promised to stand down, the Conservatives have to decide what kind of party they now want to be, but the Tory leadership contest is only going to entrench the divisions.

One former minister argues that it would be electoral suicide for the Tories to continue to define themselves as the “party of Brexit” given that the majority of younger voters support remaining in the EU. “We are basically telling everybody except white men over the age of 55 to f*** off,” he says...

What about the Lib-Dems, then, if both the Conservative and Labour parties are being taken over by the hard-liners? Same applies. They used to be moderately useless and irrelevant. They've now become hard-line useless and irrelevant.

The record of the leader himself

After looking at more than 130 cases of antisemitism and antisemitism denial for his report, published last week, Alan Johnson concludes that the Labour Party is institutionally antisemitic. These aren't just fringe elements. The rot goes right to the top:

Many complacently assume that the crisis has been caused by a tiny fringe, easily dealt with. The report warns that is not the case. These rivers run deep.

First, there is the historical context: a long tradition of antisemitism on the left, which these days often comes dressed up as “anti-Zionism”.

Second, the intellectual context, whereby much of the left is in thrall to a simplistic “two-camps” world view that renders the complex, tragic and unresolved national question between two peoples, Israelis and Palestinians, into a morality play peopled only by wholly good and wholly evil people.

The former is romanticised and infantilised; the latter is demonised. Conspiracy theories run amok. This crude world view destroys our left-wing values and leaves the left running around London waving placards that say “We are all Hezbollah Now”. It means Seumas Milne can look at Hamas, a fascistic, Islamist, antisemitic terror gang, and say: “Hamas is not broken and will not be broken.”

A third factor is how the Corbyn surge produced not only a mass membership but also an experienced, hard-left cadre which now stalks party members in ward meetings and on social media. This group boosts the dead-end, two-camps world view, and spreads a trolling and bullying culture. It is a shaming fact that for some Jews who have resigned recently, the Corbyn surge felt like an antisemitic purge.

Fourth, there is the record of the leader himself, and some of his closest aides, of support for what I believe to be antisemitic forms of “anti-Zionism”. In the absence of a fundamental self-criticism of his own appalling record by Jeremy Corbyn, the apologia for that record by party members will go on, and with it the normalisation of antisemitic forms of anti-Zionism in the party. And tomorrow, if in government, also in the country?

April Magnolia

Up on the Heath:

Armed Proletarians for Communism

Ah, those Parisian intellectuals! An amusing tale from Adam Sage in the Times (£):

An anguished debate has erupted among French intellectuals after an Italian Marxist whom they lionised as a victim of oppression and injustice confessed to being a murderer.

Cesare Battisti, 64, a former member of the Armed Proletarians for Communism, embarrassed the French literati who were his most ardent defenders when he admitted last week to a series of killings and knee-cappings in Italy in the late 1970s.

Battisti lived openly in France for 14 years from 1990 despite having been convicted in his absence in Italy of carrying out two murders and aiding and abetting two others. He earned a living as a crime writer, a television scriptwriter and an occasional contributor to Playboy.

When a French court upheld an Italian extradition request in 2004, authors, artists, philosophers and politicians sprang to his defence. They denounced Italian justice as biased, proclaimed his innocence — even though he refused to do so explicitly for many years — and said that he should be able to live freely in France.

Some likened him to Victor Hugo, who was forced into exile in 1851 after criticising the French emperor Napoleon III. Others compared him to Alfred Dreyfuss, the French army captain who fell victim to antisemites in 1894.

They continued to campaign for him when he fled to Brazil, where he was given shelter until the arrival in office late last year of the right-wing President Bolsonaro.

Battisti left Brazil for Bolivia but was arrested there in January and extradited to Italy. Under questioning he not only admitted to the crimes but said that he had “never been a victim of injustice”. He went on to say that his backers had been interested only in his ideology and not in his innocence or guilt.

The publishing house Seuil, based on the Left Bank in Paris, said that it would postpone the publication of Battisti’s latest work, which was handed in by his French supporters after his arrest. Gwenaëlle Denoyers, 38, the head of Seuil’s crime-writing department, said that she had “fallen in love” with the text before seeing that he had confessed. “My jaw dropped,” she said. “It was obviously a shock.”

Laurent Joffrin, 66, the editor of Libération, the left-wing newspaper that campaigned for Battisti, said: “How can we not recognise that as far as France is concerned this campaign, which occupied a large place in the media, had something seriously frivolous about it, or even dangerously naive?”...

Fred Vargas, 61, France’s most popular crime writer, who led the campaign for Battisti to be given asylum, said she still believed in his innocence: “People are going to think I’m an idiot again.”

Yep.

Other French intellectuals who backed Battisti, such as Bernard-Henri Lévy, 70, the country’s best-known philosopher, have not commented.

Good Morning, America

British photographer Mark Power, from his new book Good Morning, America, shot mostly in Arkansas and surrounding states:

Lead Hill, Arkansas. October 2016

(Abandoned cotton gin). Elaine, Arkansas. October 2016.

(Tornado damaged house). Ola, Arkansas. 10.10.2016.

(Reeds farm). Marianna, Arkansas. October 2016.

Danville, Arkansas. October 2016.

Dogpatch, Arkansas. October 2016.

Helena, Arkansas. October 2016.

Branson, Missouri. October 2016.

Pine Bluff, Arkansas. October 2016.

(Uncle Jesse's Good Time Dyno-mite Club). Clarksdale, Mississippi. October 2016.

Pine Bluff, Arkansas. October 2016.

(Man waiting). Little Rock, Arkansas. October 2016.

Pine Bluff, Arkansas. October 2016.

(Truck flying a Ku Klux Klan flag). Dogpatch, Arkansas. October 2016.

Harrison, Arkansas. October 2016.

Pierre Part, Louisiana. January 2017.

Pearlington, Mississippi. January 2017.

 

Killeen, Texas. January 2018.

Harlan, Kentucky. December 2015.

Bridgeport, Oklahoma. January 2015.
[Photos © Mark Power | Magnum Photos]

This is Volume One, in a proposed series of five books.

“For as long as I can remember I’ve wanted to explore America, an ambition fueled by a legion of TV shows that crossed the Atlantic in the 1960s,” he writes. “As a young and impressionable child I devoured The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and The Fugitive, but it was the westerns, evoking a landscape altogether removed from the congested English suburbs surrounding me, that I loved most: Bonanza, High Chaparral, The Virginian and in particular Casey Jones, the adventures of a middle-aged railroad driver putting the world to rights.”

His dream became a reality when Power began to travel and photograph the country as part of the Magnum project Postcards from America, a group of photographers working collaboratively and finding innovative ways of disseminating their work. “I began – although I may not have realized it at the time – to search for the America which lived in my imagination, the one generated during childhood, the one that had probably never existed at all.”...

 

North Carolina portraits

From Jack Delano:

May 1940. "Interior of poolroom and general store. Stem, Granville County, North Carolina."

May 1940. "Interior of general store and poolroom at Stem, Granville County, North Carolina."

June 1940. "This woman and her daughter are helping their neighbors plant their tobacco field. The bonnet is homemade. On U.S. 15, about five miles northeast of Durham, North Carolina."

[Photos: Shorpy/Jack Delano]

Playing a poor hand badly

I don't normally read Andrew Rawnsley, the chief political commentator of the Observer, but his headline caught my attention this morning - Theresa May was dealt the worst of hands and has played it spectacularly badly. He makes some very good points.

It was possible for a while to feel sorry for May as she struggled with an impossible task, and with a divided Tory party, but yes, by now it's obvious that she's been a disaster. 

I think we can identify her three most significant strategic errors. The first was to act at the start as if the only people who mattered were the 52% of voters who backed Brexit while treating the 48% as an irrelevance to be ignored or insulted. Where she might have endeavoured to bind together a fractured nation and forge an alliance of the sane Brexiters and the pragmatic Remainers, her language and approaches have further polarised the country and radicalised opinion on both sides. This was compounded by concentrating her energies on trying to please the unsatisfiable subset of Brexiters who wanted the most impossibilist versions of the enterprise....

The second major mistake was to call the hubristic snap general election in the spring of 2017, squander her majority with an atrocious campaign and then respond as if, to use one of her most notorious phrases, nothing had changed....

Her third large misjudgment has been the conduct of the endgame. Once it was very apparent her withdrawal agreement was neither popular in parliament nor attractive to the country, she persisted with trying to bludgeon it through. When it became evident this simply was not going to work, she might have pivoted to another strategy. She could have looked at alternative versions of Brexit. She might have allowed MPs to explore other ways forward, as they are very belatedly doing now. She might have embraced the offer from the opposition benches to allow her deal through the Commons subject to it then being put to the people for the final say in a confirmatory referendum. Fixity of purpose can be a virtue in a leader, but the durable ones are successful because they also understand when it is necessary to flex....

And this seems just right:

One of her few friends once told me that Mrs May approached Brexit as if the country had set her a piece of fiendishly difficult homework.

His conclusion, though:

The Tory party is now preparing to find a new chief for its cannibalistic tribe. It will be convenient for a lot of people, especially those planning to contest for the corroded crown, to cast all the blame for 33 months of unrelenting and still unresolved chaos on the woman who will soon be leaving Number 10. Convenient, but not altogether accurate. The problem with the Conservative party is not Mrs May. The problem with the Conservative party is the Conservative party. The problem with Brexit is not Mrs May. The problem with Brexit is Brexit.

He makes no mention of an election, which May is now apparently threatening. That would be the last straw. We've seen the situation spiralling out of control for weeks, months, now, but this would be a disaster. What could it possibly solve, when the Conservatives are hopelessly split, and Labour doesn't even know what it wants on Europe, and is led by a bunch of unreconstructed hard-leftists whose vision of a good society seems to be something along the lines of Venezuela? Corbyn versus - who? - Boris Johnson? It doesn't bear thinking about. But we may have to think about it if May decides to round off her wretched prime-ministerial career with a fourth "significant strategic error".

Manchester 1963

Dirty, wet, and grim. Bomb sites and run-down terraced housing. Corner shops advertising Senior Service, News of the World, Woodbines, Vimto. The world of the early Sixties, from the Town Hall Photographer’s Collection at Manchester City Council’s Central Library archives - taken by staff photographers recording the work of Corporation and Council departments.

Utilitarian, then, rather than your poncey southern photographers with their airs and graces and artistic pretensions, capturing atmosphere and worrying about getting the perfect composition. What's the state of the road? Point your bloody camera, click the shutter, and get on to the next one. This is Manchester, lad, not London. 

Chomsky’s falsehoods

A review in Tablet of The Lion’s Den, Susie Linfield's new book on the historical antecedents to the left’s Jewish problem, seen through the eyes of a number of prominent leftist thinkers, from Hannah Arendt to Noam Chomsky.

On the latter:

The Lions’ Den is especially good on Chomsky, who is for young people in particular still one of the world’s most influential sources on international politics. Chomsky is a very peculiar case. Though he opposes Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS), the Palestinian right of return, and the one-state solution, he regularly accuses Israel of “moral depravity,” opposes the Oslo Accords and calls the PA’s security forces “Vichy police.” He advocates the breakdown of state authority in the Middle East, which he cheerfully calls the “no-state solution,” oblivious to the fact that such chaos hasn’t worked out very well for the citizens of Syria, for example. Linfield supplies a long litany of Chomsky’s falsehoods about Israel and its enemies, among which the most laughable might be that Iran shares the “international consensus on a two-state settlement.”

Hannah Arendt doesn't fare too well either, by the sound of it.

Kenwood blossom

Magnolia:

With added Barbara Hepworth:

Kenwood House:

Pink jacket:

 

Wildwood Flower

Back to the roots of Country music, with the Carter Family, featuring Maybelle Carter on lead vocal:

With Maybelle's trade-mark Carter scratch, where the the melody is picked out on the bass strings, while rhythm strumming continues on the treble strings. 

The song was originally recorded by the Carter Family in 1928. It's a variant on an old 1860 song "I'll twine 'mid the ringlets", by Joseph Philbrick Webster, who wrote the music, with lyrics attributed to one Maud Irving. 

I'll twine 'mid the ringlets
Of my raven black hair,
The lilies so pale
And the roses so fair,
The myrtle so bright
With an emerald hue,
And the pale aronatus
With eyes of bright blue.

I'll sing, and I'll dance,
My laugh shall be gay,
I'll cease this wild weeping
Drive sorrow away,
Tho' my heart is now breaking,
He never shall know,
That his name made me tremble
And my pale cheek to glow....

Very Victorian. It had to be written by a Maud, with the smelling salts never far away. A most unlikely Country music precursor.

Here's Maybelle at the Grand Ole Opry with Earl Flatt and Lester Scruggs. Better video quality, but it sounds better with all those Carter ladies on harmony.

Hamburgs 10¢, Hot Dogs 5¢

Jack Delano - June 1940. "Diner along U.S. Highway No. 1 near Berwyn, Maryland."

[Photo: Shorpy/Jack Delano for the Farm Security Administration]