Author: Mick Hartley

aw School, asking where Buck Owens got his start”: “Johnny Depp of Paris, France asks, Who was the father of modern Communism? Well, Johnny, Karl Marx was the father of modern communism…”).

The retro feel extends to Dylan’s eclectic taste in music. The emphasis is on old stuff, but it’s not always what you’d expect. Yes, there’s blues from Sonny Boy Williamson, Charlie Patton, Memphis Minnie; country from the Carter Family, the Louvin Brothers, George Jones (“Looking through my record collection the other day, I’ve got about 70 George Jones albums. If you look at ’em all, it gives you a great history of men’s haircuts.”), as well as classic R’n’B, soul, western swing, doo-wop…but then he’ll play “How Much is That Doggy in the Window” from Patti Page, or “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” from Tiny Tim, or Bing Crosby, Sinatra, Dean Martin. And what’s nice is, how good they all sound. If there’s one thing the show’s trying to do, it’s to open ears and tear down musical barriers. One of my favourite revisionist moments was “Jackson”, by Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra, (in episode 20, Musical Map) which I’d always dismissed but is really a superbly witty and well-written song. Then again, some prejudices can’t be overcome: God knows I’ve tried with Tom Waits, but I just can’t get past that absurdly mannered beat-style hard-drinking croak. It’s that old deep male voice thing again, but played the other way, as a mark of outsider hip.

Naturally enough the show concentrates on the US, but Britain creeps in, as does Jamaica. No Beatles, interestingly, but the Stones have had a few plays (and get the honour, I think, of being the only ones referred to as “my good friends”) plus the Kinks, Van Morrison – if he counts as British – Nick Lowe and Dave Edmunds, Squeeze, Elvis Costello, etc.. Jamaican stuff is early only, mainly ska and bluebeat before the Seventies golden age, with Prince Buster, Dandy Livingstone, Alton Ellis, the Melodians, and a very young Delroy Wilson. The only other non-Americans that come to mind are Charles Aznavour, and Kraftwerk [update: no, not Kraftwerk]. Oh, and Celia Cruz gets a play on the double Christmas show.

It’s really worth it though for those obscure oldies: “I Used to Work in Chicago”, by Tin Ear Tanner, Sol K Bright & His Hollywaians, Zeke Manners & His Swingbillies, Little Miss Cornshucks, Eddie Seacrist & the Rolling Rockets – all the glorious byways of American 20th Century popular music.

[For more detail, RightWingBob has an excellent series of posts on the shows]

ed “never again” but Mugabe — and, to a considerable extent, Mbeki — have already been responsible for far more deaths than Rwanda suffered and the number is fast heading into realms previously explored only by Stalin, Mao and Adolf Eichmann.

s the tip of an iceberg:

Ban Ki Moon got off to a good start at the United Nations this week when he declined to criticize the execution of Saddam Hussein. Here’s another way the new Secretary General could outshine his predecessor: Demand that Beijing live up to its international obligations to let the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees help the tens of thousands of North Korean refugees hiding in northeast China.

As a fellow Korean, Mr. Ban has special moral authority to address this little-known humanitarian crisis. A good place to start would be by making a public plea on behalf of six refugees who tried, but failed, to obtain sanctuary in the U.S. consulate in Shenyang, China, last month. The six are in jail in Shenyang, awaiting deportation under China’s policy regarding the North Korean refugees it tracks down.

China’s treatment of the North Koreans violates the International Convention Regarding the Status of Refugees, to which it is a party and which bars “refoulement,” or the repatriation of refugees to places where their lives or freedom would be in jeopardy. North Koreans who are sent home by Beijing face execution or a term in one of Kim Jong Il’s prison camps, which can amount to a death sentence.

The six refugees in jail in Shenyang include two orphan boys, ages 16 and 17; a 22-year-old woman; and three women in their 40s. One of the older women is the mother of a 19-year-old who made it to safety in the U.S. consulate last year and is awaiting resettlement in the U.S. along with two orphan boys — if China lets them leave. One of the women has relatives in Hawaii; another has family in South Korea.

The six were captured just before Christmas along with two Americans who had been sheltering them in safe houses in another city and were accompanying them to the consulate. Their rescuers — young women who don’t want their names used — belong to Liberty in North Korea, or LINK, a U.S. non-profit dedicated to helping the refugees. LINK’s director, Adrian Hong, was also arrested — pulled out of his hotel room in Beijing and taken to a prison cell in Shenyang. The three rescuers were deported this week.

[Via Joshua at One Free Korea, who speculates that with the very real prospect of a repeat of the Nineties famine in North Korea, China is doing all it can to keep the lid on, especially with the Olympics coming up next year:

China is testing the world’s reaction, and I share China’s confidence that Ban Ki Moon and the U.N. won’t do anything particularly effective to interfere.

Check out also the rather fine response to Reporters Without Borders, and their obsession with Saddam’s execution:

You have ceased to lead in a direction of moral significance. Have the decency to seek gainful employment.

]

One Arab dictator honours another:

Libya has said it will build a statue of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, executed in Baghdad on Saturday.

It would show him standing on the gallows with a Libyan resistance leader who fought Italian occupation, executed in 1931, Libya’s Jana news agency said.

Libya declared three days of mourning after Saddam Hussein’s death and cancelled public celebrations around the Eid religious holiday….

Flags on Libyan government buildings flew at half-mast following his death.

his remarks about Muhammad “a blasphemy,” implying that the founder of Islam must be treated even by non-Muslims in a non-Muslim country as an object not of investigation but of veneration.

To be sure, Redeker’s language had not been gentle. But since when has that been a requirement of intellectual discourse in France? One can often find similarly strong language in, say, Les Temps Modernes, the journal founded by Jean-Paul Sartre and on whose editorial board Redeker has long served. Yet, to judge by the response to his “offense,” large sectors of the French intellectual and political establishment have carved out an exception to this hard-won tradition of open discussion: when it comes to Islam (as opposed to Christianity or Judaism), freedom of speech must respect definite limits.

How did France reach this point?

Well worth a read.

The present generation of Orientalists is omnipresent in the French media, unavoidable on radio and television. They assure the country that the progressive Islamization of European suburbs, plain for all to see, poses no danger. They suggest that the problem with Israel is its very existence. They inspire the open sympathy with Hamas, Hizballah, and Iran that can be found in newspapers like Le Monde and Libération. And they encourage the use of the term “Islamophobia” (a coinage of Iranian clerics) in order to delegitimize all those who might be tempted to disagree with them—individuals like Redeker. […]

When I finally reached Robert Redeker by e-mail a few weeks after he had gone into hiding with his family, he was still astonished by his fate. “I never thought that such a thing could happen in our old Republican France,” he wrote to me in a short, stoic message. Neither did I. But things have changed. What was once unthinkable in France has already come to pass.

An interesting insight into mores in Pakistan:

Ali Saleem may have devised the perfect, if improbable, cover for breaking taboos in conservative, Muslim Pakistan.

In a country where publicly talking about sex is strictly off limits, Mr. Saleem has managed not only to bring up the subject on his prime-time television talk show — but to do so without stirring a backlash from fundamentalist Islamic clerics.

And he has done so as a woman.

When Mr. Saleem takes to the airwaves, he is Begum Nawazish Ali, a coquettish widow who interviews Pakistan’s glitterati and some of its top politicians.

A real woman could not possibly do what Mr. Saleem does. In the unlikely event a station would broadcast such a show, the hostess would be shunned. And taking on the guise of a married woman — whose virtue is crucial to her whole family — would be equally impossible.

But apparently a cross-dressing man pretending to be a widow is another matter entirely.

It is something of a mystery why a man who openly acknowledges he is bisexual is a sensation here. Traditional Islamic teaching rejects bisexuals and gays, and gay Pakistanis have few outlets for a social life. The gay party scenes in Lahore and Karachi are deep underground.

Mr. Saleem has his own theory for his popularity: he thinks Pakistan has always been more open than outsiders believed.

Mohammad Ali Ramin is an advisor to Iranian president Ahmadinejad, and was recently appointed secretary-general of the new “world foundation for Holocaust Studies” established at the Iranian Holocaust Denial Conference in December. This is from an interview he gave last week:

“The Bolshevik Soviet government in Lenin’s time, and later, in Stalin’s – both of whom were Jewish, though they presented themselves as Marxists and atheists… – was one of the forces that, until the Second World War, cooperated with Hitler in promoting the idea of establishing the State of Israel. A book that was published about this… – titled Adolf Hitler, Founder of Israel by Hennecke Kardel, a German born in 1922 – proves that Hitler was Jewish, and that his grandmother was a Jewish prostitute. [Hitler’s] father went by his mother’s Jewish name until he was 40, and later changed his surname to Hitler.

“Adolf Hitler himself developed an aversion to Judaism because his mother was a Jewish whore. He first received [negative] information about the Jews in an Austrian monastery, (the book presents details and pictures of it), and from then on, he [tried] to escape his Judaism.

“Thus… Hitler simultaneously developed both feelings of solidarity with Judaism and feelings of hatred towards it, and this emotional ambivalence shaped his behavior towards the Jews. On the one hand, his entire family, the people who shared his views, and his associates who brought him into power and stood by him to the last – including his lovers and his personal doctor – were [all] Jewish. On the other hand, he welcomed the policy of expelling the Jews from Central Europe for two other reasons: Firstly, the establishment of a Jewish government in Palestine was an aspiration of the rich and influential Jews who surrounded him. Secondly, exiling the Jews from Europe and Germany was a general and historical demand of the Western Christian nations. With the full support of the British, and in coordination with them, Hitler addressed this general demand and [thereby] managed to gain widespread popularity in Europe. Obviously, publishing writings and information of this sort is forbidden in Germany and in the West…

“The Zionists recently… destroyed many documents and papers pertaining to the period before the war, which contained authentic statistics and figures regarding the Jews, such as how many Jews there were, where they [lived] and how they operated. One of the places that was destroyed completely and burned [to the ground] – and which… contained the most valuable documents pertaining to this matter – was the [building of] the newspaper Pravda, which had been published in Moscow for 80 years. On February 10, 2006, the building was set ablaze, and its entire archive, with all its back issues and photographs, was burned and destroyed, and not a trace of it was left. Nobody – not a single news agency anywhere in the world – investigated this historical crime or discussed it extensively…”

From the Korean Central News Agency:

The New Year’s Day of Juche 96 (2007) has come. From the early morning, streams of the Korean people visit statues of the great President Kim Il Sung, the eternal sun of Juche, with floral baskets and bunches of flowers to make a New Year’s bow to him.

Officers and men of the Korean People’s Army, working people of all strata and school youth and children in Pyongyang visit his statue on Mansu Hill with the pride of having adorned the year 2006 with great labor successes. They are full of optimism and firm resolution to perform feats in the hopeful New Year.

Pyongyang is garbed in festive attire.

The streets of the city are festooned with such large slogans as “We Extend New Year’s Greeting to the Great Leader Comrade Kim Jong Il”, “We Sincerely Wish the Great Leader Comrade Kim Jong Il Good Health” and “Let Us Add Brilliance to the Korean-style Socialism with Might of Single-minded Unity” and celebration boards including “New Year 2007” and others. Fluttering on flag poles are the flags of the DPRK….

The working people of all walks of life, school youth and children in the capital city are hardening their mind to vigorously advance forward toward a new victory under the Songun revolutionary leadership of Kim Jong Il this year, too.

In other DPRK news:

Senior party, army and state officials and people from all walks of life visited the Kumsusan Memorial Palace on Monday to pay homage to President Kim Il Sung on the occasion of the New Year Juche 96 (2007). The senior party, army and state officials, chairpersons of the friendly parties, Cabinet members and leading officials of party, armed forces and power organs, public organizations, ministries and national institutions entered the hall where the statue of the President stands.

And this, just in:

Baskets of flowers were placed before the statues of President Kim Il Sung on the occasion of the New Year Juche 96 (2007). Servicepersons, working people from all walks of life and school youth and children in Pyongyang visited the statue of the President on Mansu Hill.

Seen before the statue was a floral basket from Kim Jong Il, general secretary of the Workers’ Party of Korea, chairman of the DPRK National Defence Commission and supreme commander of the Korean People’s Army.

Amid the playing of floral basket-laying music, baskets of flowers, as well as bouquets and flowers, were laid before the statue in the name of party, military and power organs, social bodies, ministries, national institutions, KPA units and institutions of different levels, industrial establishments, farms and schools and others in the city. Also placed was a floral basket in the name of the Pyongyang mission of the Anti-imperialist National Democratic Front.

Written on the ribbons of the baskets were such letters as “The great leader Comrade Kim Il Sung will live forever” and “The great revolutionary exploits of the respected leader Generalissimo Kim Il Sung will be everlasting!”

All the visitors made deep bows before the statue in humble reverence for the President.

The Edge annual question 2007 – What are you optimistic about? Why?

There’s Robert Provine, “Things Could Always Be Worse”, and Susan Blackmore, “Our Civilisation Will Survive the Coming Climate Catastrophe”. Yep, inspiring stuff.

href=”http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-op-hitchens31dec31,0,3101009.story?coll=la-opinion-center”>writes:

Nobody who has seen that footage — of terrified men dragged by goons from the room, while the survivors weep with fear and relief and Hussein indulges in a luxurious cigar — is likely to forget it.