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Back to North Carolina with Marion Post Wolcott – November 1939. "General store. Zebulon, Wake County, North Carolina."

[Photo: Shorpy/Marion Post Wolcott for the Farm Security Administration]

Don McCullin

Compare and contrast that last image with the bottom one here of the same steelworks, taken by Colin Jones in 1963.

McCullin is famously averse to digital photography, developing all his prints in the old way – in the dark room:

McCullin is a skilled printer and all the black and white photographs of this retrospective were printed by him. The dark tonality of the printing is part of their expressive force. “Darkness, to me, is energy. When I energize my prints in the darkroom, I inject more and more darkness into them,” he says. “But I don’t consider it to be darkness. I consider it to be strength.” 

tyle=”font-size: 11pt”>This week, history is repeating itself. Eight weeks ago, an Antwerp court sentenced Assadi and his three co-conspirators to between 15 and 20 years in prison. This was the first conviction of an Iranian official for terrorism offences since the 1979 Islamic revolution. Yet this week, the European powers pressed ahead with direct negotiations with Tehran in Vienna, aimed at expunging all trace of the Trump years and restoring the nuclear deal. By all accounts, progress was swift: a few days of discussions resulted in a ‘roadmap’ that could lead to a new agreement in as little as two months.

The Ayatollahs have never been in any doubt that the Europeans are in the palms of their hands. The only sanctions insisted on by Europe last week were symbolic restrictions on a small number of Iranian officials, a gesture of solidarity for dual nationals held hostage in Iranian prisons. Aside from this, there was simply no disguising the enthusiasm for welcoming the malignant theocracy back into the fold.

The difference now is that Biden is in the White House, and seems determined to once again offer the hand of friendship – so cruelly snatched away by that nasty Trump – to the theocracy in Tehran. Europe, naturally, welcomes such progressive statesmanship. Israel – no so much.

Israel, as the single country most threatened by Tehran (intelligence sources estimate that 80 per cent of threats against the Jewish state emanate from the theocracy) does not, shall we say, buy into the transatlantic policy of appeasement. Last week, Benjamin Netanyahu made his position clear ahead of a visit to Jerusalem by the new US secretary of defence, General Lloyd Austin, a visit designed to calm Israeli nerves over the impending nuclear deal. ‘These type of deals with extremist regimes are worth nothing,’ he said. ‘A deal with Iran that threatens us with annihilation will not obligate us.’

Speaking on Holocaust Remembrance Day, he added: ‘Only one thing will obligate us: to prevent those who wish to destroy us from carrying out their plans.’ On Sunday, an unexplained ‘incident’ occurred at Iran’s nuclear facility in Natanz — which had just started using more advanced centrifuges — taking out its electrical distribution grid.

In sharp contrast with Israel, whatever the opposite of retaliation is, Europe is following that policy. In the somnambulant haze that hangs in the continent’s corridors of power, even a fully armed bomb, built in Tehran and on its way to delivery to a rally of thousands of people in central Paris, is not enough to raise serious hesitations abut the intentions of the Iranian regime. The planned attack in the heart of France was generally viewed, amazingly enough, as an internal Iranian issue. The security services uprooted the spy network, then returned to business as usual. As one source familiar with the matter told me: ‘The plot may have been a wake-up call, but the Europeans tend to wake up from time to time, then fall asleep again.’ And this time, Europe and America are in lockstep. One can only hope that they are not sleepwalking to their own destruction.

of the crime. The law is open to flagrant abuse, however, with allegations used to smear rivals.

Although there's a death penalty for blasphemy, the real danger – as we see here – is that the women will be slaughtered by the mob. The killers will then be lauded as heroes.

Marion Post Wolcott – November 1939. "Runt's pool parlor with poster advertising Tobacco Ball in window. Zebulon, Wake County, North Carolina."

[Photo: Shorpy/Marion Post Wolcott]

For the shorter player.

his extract, to my mind, is “meek as an abused woman.” The narrator is luxuriating in his own fearful, humiliated capitulation.  […]

A transwoman who has previously published misogynist and abusive pornography which treats femaleness as inherently degrading has been shortlisted for a prestigious prize for women’s fiction, and that fact has been triumphantly reported in the national press.

This, to my mind, is blatant power play. Women have been abused, bullied, no-platformed, hounded out of their jobs, threatened and in some cases physically assaulted for putting forward civilised measured arguments against self-identification, and for explaining patiently and politely why biological sex sometimes matters, and even for writing accurately on the relevant law. Most of the mainstream feminist organisations and too many prominent individual women have capitulated and are obediently trashing women’s protections and reciting the mantra “trans women are women.”

This outrage – and others like it – feels like part of a victory parade: the more flagrant the outrage that we can be terrorised into ignoring, the more complete – meek as abused women – our capitulation.

Good to see the old Sunday football back in action:

e media was that McGowan launched into a transphobic tirade. In particular, the US Women’s March organization denounced her within the day. Women’s March stated that “denying trans women’s identities is never okay,” in a tweet that also linked to trans activist Katelyn Burns’ interview with the agitator, a trans-identified male named Andi Dier. Dier claimed that those who identify as trans women are more oppressed than women, saying “When someone pulls down her pants and sees a v-gina, she won't be murdered for it. That is not something she fears. That's why she's cis.” The headline for the interview, “Rose McGowan Broke Down in a Transphobic Rage”, intentionally depicted McGowan as hysterical.

The bookshop audience’s instinctive support for McGowan gave way to a long line of commentators condemning McGowan and offering support for Andi Dier. The headline of an article for Slate read, “Rose McGowan’s Anti-Trans Bias Weakens Her Feminism,” and several other major media outlets joined in, including The Independent and Variety. As a result of the corresponding backlash, McGowan cancelled the rest of her book tour, stating that “every person sitting frozen in their chairs” had “a weakness called complicity.” In a video published by PinkNews the following year, McGowan issued an apology, stating: “I didn’t have the correct language… had I said ‘cis women’… now I understand that that’s what I should have said.”

It turns out, though, that this Andi Dier – this trans hero – has a long and deeply troubling history of preying on teenage girls, and involvement in so-called sissy pornography (basically, the fetishisation of being humiliated as a woman) – as Gluck exhaustively demonstrates.

Her conclusion to the whole sordid episode:

Rose McGowan was responsible for bringing to light systemic sexual abuse in Hollywood, and in particular for emboldening victims of film producer Harvey Weinstein. Despite this, she was publicly shamed for defending herself against verbal harassment, her book tour was cancelled, and worst of all, a man with a rape fetish who is clearly engaging in predatory behaviour was defended by a major women’s organisation ahead of her. A reversal achieved simply through gender ideology, which grants any male who claims a female identity the authority to speak over women. 

The manipulation of language at the core of gender ideology is essential to its capacity for silencing victims. It is impossible to defend women’s rights if we cannot define women. It is impossible to fight against sexism if we cannot say that sex is real. We certainly cannot protect children from male sexual abusers if we are too afraid of appearing cruel to predators to name them as the men they are.

As for Rose McGowan. She provided two lessons as to the systemic nature of male power.

She was silenced by an abusive, predatory man and his enablers in the media. They said, “it must never happen again”.

And then, almost immediately, it happened again.

Religiously motivated violence? Ah yes – that'd be the Jews:

The Netherlands’ foremost philosopher called the dispersal of Jews in the Diaspora a “blessing” because it prevented them from achieving the power they have in Israel today that has resulted in “religiously motivated violence.”

Hans Achterhuis, the first recipient of the prestigious and royally recognized title of “thinker of the Fatherland,” made the remarks in an interview on the role of religion in the modern state for Trouw, which the paper published on Thursday, Israel’s national Holocaust memorial day.

“As terrible as the story of the Jews has been, it was still in a certain sense a blessing that they were dispersed in the Diaspora. They had no power and therefore no possibility of exercising religiously motivated violence. And one sees how it can go wrong if that power does exist, in the State of Israel,” Achterhuis said.

His comment provoked outrage by Jewish community representatives and Israel’s ambassador to the Netherlands, Naor Gilon, who wrote on Twitter: “Shameful article in @Trouw on the day we remember the 6 million #Jews murdered in #Europe. History taught us that having a Jewish state – #Israel is the only way to survive #NeverAgain.”

Ah, where would we be without philosophers?

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[Photos © Zeno Watson]

Watson is interviewed at Flashbak.