Author: Mick Hartley

Hitchens, unsurprisingly, has something to say about Galloway:

For George Galloway…the war would seem to be over. The evidence presented suggests that he lied in court when he sued the Daily Telegraph in London over similar allegations (and collected money for that, too). It suggests that he lied to the Senate under oath. And it suggests that he made a deceptive statement in the register of interests held by members of the British House of Commons. All in all, a bad week for him, especially coming as it does on the heels of the U.N. report on the murder of Rafik Hariri, which appears to pin the convict’s badge on senior members of the Assad despotism in Damascus, Galloway’s default patron after he lost his main ally in Baghdad.

Yet this is the man who received wall-to-wall good press for insulting the Senate subcommittee in May, and who was later the subject of a fawning puff piece in the New York Times, and who was lionized by the anti-war movement when he came on a mendacious and demagogic tour of the country last month. I wonder if any of those who furnished him a platform will now have the grace to admit that they were hosting a man who is not just a pimp for fascism but one of its prostitutes as well.

The perils of dealing with North Korea (via a comment from Martin):

For weeks, North Korea and Hyundai Asan, Hyundai Group’s North Korean business arm, have been at odds over the dismissal of Kim Yoon Kyu, a Hyundai executive accused in August of embezzling money.

North Korea has demanded that Kim be reinstated. It argued that, whatever Hyundai had discovered about him, Kim should be Hyundai’s point man in North Korea because he has had the extremely rare privilege of meeting the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Il, on several occasions.

As the article notes, with some understatement, “the business mind-set of the Communist leaders is out of step with international norms.”

“The North Koreans are very good at talking big, but they seldom keep their promises,” said Chung Se Hyun, a former South Korean cabinet minister who spent most of his government career as a negotiator on North Korea.

“It’s amazing that they don’t seem to realize that what they are doing is damaging their international creditability.”

What’s perhaps more amazing is that a former South Korean cabinet minister still thinks that North Korea has any credibility left to damage – and that the South Koreans still persist in their Sunshine policy despite all the evidence of lack of good faith on the part of the DPRK.

After a gift of 1,001 heads of cattle, the donation of a 12,500-seat gymnasium in Pyongyang and a $500 million cash remittance, North Korea agreed in 2000 to let Hyundai build roads, railways, airports, power stations and dams as well as an industrial park where foreign investors can make use of the cheap labor.

In 1998, Hyundai began shipping South Korean visitors to scenic Diamond Mountain, just beyond the east-coast border of the two Koreas. North Korea has so far collected more than $400 million for admitting 1.1 million tourists.

But for Hyundai, not only were the tours a money-loser, but other projects promised by North Korea in the 2000 deal were slow to materialize, as the country used recurring tensions over its nuclear program as grounds for delaying or canceling contacts with foreign investors.

Only last year did Hyundai open an industrial park just north of the border on the western side of the Korean Peninsula, where 15 small South Korean companies now make lamps, watches and shoes.

Hyundai’s path to North Korea was paved with deals. In 2003, it was revealed by a government-appointed independent counsel that the company illegally sent $500 million to Pyongyang in 2000 to win business rights. Later that year, as prosecutors sought his arrest, Hyundai’s chairman, Chung Mong Hun, killed himself by leaping from his 12th-floor office window.

Kim Yoon Kyu, the former Hyundai executive who was Chung’s deputy, was let go in August after Hyun Jeong Eun, Chung’s widow, took over the company and pledged “transparent and honest management.”

Last Thursday, North Korea said that since the Hyundai executives who had signed the deals with it were no longer available, “there is no reason for us to remain bound” to the 2000 agreement.

Engage link to an article by Eric Reeves, Professor of English Language and Literature at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, who’s spent the past six years working full-time as a Sudan researcher and analyst:

A series of extraordinarily dire warnings have recently been issued by various UN officials, a last desperate attempt to force the international community to take urgent cognizance of Darfur’s deepening crisis. Full-scale catastrophe and a massive increase in genocidal destruction are imminent, and there is as yet no evidence that the world is listening seriously. The US in particular seems intent on taking an expediently blinkered view of the crisis (see forthcoming analysis by this writer at The New Republic [on-line], www.tnr.com). But European countries and other international actors with the power to speak the truth are little better; the absence of an effective voice emerging from the Blair government is especially dismaying in light of British willingness to intervene in Iraq.

Even so, there is no possible escape from the most basic truth in Darfur: Khartoum’s National Islamic Front, ever more dominant in the new “Government of National Unity,” is deliberately escalating the level of violence and insecurity as a form of “counter-insurgency” warfare, with the clear goal of accelerating human destruction among the African tribal populations of the region.

In failing to respond to this conspicuous and now fully articulated truth, the world is yet again knowingly acquiescing in genocide.

Hamburg-based author Matthias Küntzel, wandering round the Frankfurt Book Fair, came across the Iranian stand (via):

[I]t is well known that the Iranian leadership is dedicated to wiping out the existence of a state member of the United Nations, namely Israel. And it is also well known that to this end, Tehran exports a crude anti-Semitism throughout the world.

Nonetheless, I was astonished how openly this occurred at the Book Fair.

I am not talking about the some hundreds of meters of shelves of Iranian literature that were set up in Hall 5. I am talking about the brochures that Iran presented here in English – not in order to promote the country’s own literature, but rather to disseminate anti-Semitism of European and American provenance.

There was, for instance, under the heading “Jewish Conspiracy”, the text that influenced Hitler’s anti-Semitism like no other work: The “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”, here in an edition published by the “Islamic Propagation Organization” of the Islamic Republic of Iran….

A second notorious classic of anti-Semitic literature was also available. A 200-page abridgment of Henry Ford’s The International Jew:The World’s Foremost Problem was presented and sold in Hall 5 of the Frankfurt Book Fair “in the name of Allah the Beneficent, the Merciful”. The publisher of the edition is the “Department of Translation and Publication, Islamic Culture and Relations Organization” of the Islamic Republic of Iran. In the preface, the editor writes:

The grip of the Jewish parasitic influence has been growing stronger and stronger ever since [Henry Ford’s time]. The Jewish danger – now called Zionism – is not only threatening one nation. As a matter of fact, it is directed against the entire humanity. […]

Could it really be the case that nobody else caught sight of these brochures, which could hardly be missed on even just a cursory visit to the Book Fair? What about the employees of the Deutsche Welle or of the German Foreign Office, for instance, who also had stands in Hall 5? They were just a few steps from the Iranian exhibitors. At the Book fair, the Deutsche Welle offered itself as a “bridge to the Islamic World”. The Foreign Office distributed its “Dialogue with the Islamic World” pamphlet, in which one can read: “Peace-building, too, may require dialogue with extremists”.

Did anybody speak with the Iranian exhibitors about their presentation of this Nazi-style anti-Semitism? Or did one – yet again – keep both eyes tightly shut?

I was going to post something on the latest Galloway revelations, but I thought I’d check Harry’s Place first. You know, just in case they’d thought it worth commenting on…

t breeding ground for organised crime.

One of the premises of the current South Korean government’s policies is that they will help achieve a “soft landing” for North Korea. But eight years after the declaration of Sunshine, the North continues to grow markedly poorer, hungrier, and more miserable, and the cost of eventual reunification continues to rise. Among the costs that appears in relatively few estimates for rejoining North and South into a single nation is the North Korean regime’s progressive psychological and social destruction of those whom it does not succeed in destroying physically.

heir brutality, there are people who ask: ‘Was the victim covered [by a veil] or not?’ If she was covered up, [the question arises:] ‘Who let her go out of the house at such an hour?’ In the event that your husband is the one who broke your ribs, [people will say] that no doubt there was good reason for it.

“Imagine you’re a woman whose husband breaks her nose, arm, or leg, and you go to the Qadi to lodge a complaint. When the Qadi asks you about your complaint, and you say, ‘He beat me,’ he responds reproachfully ‘That’s all?!’ In other words, [for the Qadi], beating is a technical situation that exists among all couples and lovers, [as the saying goes]: ‘Beating the beloved is like eating raisins.’

A BBC4 programme last night, on the great British seaside holiday, featured that classic joke, courtesy (I think) of Donald McGill:

Man to female shop assistant: “Excuse me miss, do you keep stationery?”

“Well, sometimes I wriggle around a bit.”

Sadly I’ve been unable to find a picture of the actual postcard. Googling for saucy postcards produces this, from a later period when they were just plain crude. Googling for “do you keep stationery?” comes up with other later versions, like this:

While vacationing in the hills of Arkansas, the big city man discovered he had no writing paper at all for his personal correspondence.

He went into the small town near-by and found only an old-fashioned country store. Behind the counter was a really nice looking young lass, quite obviously a local farm girl.

He asked, “Do you keep stationery?”

“Well,” she giggled, “I can…until I have an orgasm, then I just go plain wild and crazy!”

Laugh? No, I didn’t.

Then I googled “wriggle around a bit”. Don’t ask (nsfw).

And no, I didn’t mean “wiggle around a bit”.

Oh well. I still think it’s funny.

it, who are we to complain? But we do, of course, because there’s a part of the equation that’s missing. Art isn’t a term that can just be co-opted like that. It has connotations. There’s more to it than simply a term for what artists do, as journalism, say, is a term for what journalists do. To call something a work of art is to praise it in some way. Clearly we’re not going to able to reach an agreement that satisfies everyone as to what exactly those connotations might be – something to do with skill, personal vision, beauty, passion maybe – but the bottom line is that art is something that people will want to go and see, and find in some way inspiring. The connotations, in short, are positive. And confronted with Tracey’s bed, or Stanley Braun’s filing-drawer, the reaction, at least from us new philistines, is, I’m sorry, this may be Art, but it isn’t art. This is a con. This is a game which certain people have learnt to play, and certain other people for their own reasons claim to appreciate, but it’s got nothing to do with the business of human creativity which is what we understand to be implicit in the term art. Come up with a new term – call it Concept Realisation for Art Professionals, maybe – and we could all agree, yes, Tracey’s bed is a classic piece of CRAP; the filing-draw is another piece of CRAP….but art? No. Art isn’t a term that’s there for redefining. We all own it.

There’s another side to this: the artist’s ego. For Jeanette Winterson, there are “millions of people with unmade beds and obsessive notebooks filled with sketches and jottings. Tracey is different because she has transformed the personal into the public.” Well yes, but what’s so special about that? Why is the idea of exhibiting your unmade bed such a breakthrough? Most people wouldn’t have thought of it – didn’t think of it – not because they lacked artistic vision, but because they failed to see why anyone could possibly be interested in their unmade bed, and in what possible sense it could be seen as art. It takes a remarkable level of self-obsession to present the detritus of your life as a work of art.

I posted a while back on the Joseph Beuys exhibition at Tate Modern. He was one of the founders of conceptual art, “one of the most influential artists of the 20th Century”, to quote the exhibition catalogue. I argued then that his appeal could only be understood as a sort of cult – the cult of the artist. His works were of interest only because they were made by him, by Beuys, by a self-proclaimed genius. In the absence of any agreed criteria for great art, this is what we’re left with: those who shout the loudest are the ones who get heard.

It’s all beginning to fall apart, though. If even the art critics are starting to see through it, the days of CRAP are coming to an end.

Such forthrightness occasionally gives the impression of one-sidedness….

Stephanie Merritt, on the Observer’s paperback of the week, Pinter’s “Various Voices: Prose, Poetry and Politics”.