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[Photos © Ronghui Chen]

There's an interview with Ronghui Chen here, talking about the experience of his first exhibition.

“>Through the visits, officials and working people renewed their pledge to thoroughly implement the important tasks set forth at the historic Eighth Congress of the Party, true to the guidance of the great Party Central Committee leading Korean-style socialism to a new victory.

Oh yes.

Here indeed are some of those visitors, looking at the photos of the respected Comrade Kim Jong Un guiding the fifth and sixth plenary meetings of the 7th Central Committee of the WPK, and recollecting with deep emotion his great devotion and efforts.

as ‘female’ appointments to public boards. Nicola Sturgeon in particular has embraced this ideology with the fervour of a woman who really wants to be called ‘progressive’ by Gen-Z Twitter activists with blue hair. After a number of younger members quit the SNP last week, Sturgeon put out a video pleading with them to ‘come home where you belong’ while the party issued a statement saying: ‘We are sorry that we’ve let you down and today pledge ourselves to change’. This came amid a string of leaks to the grassroots pro-independence blog 'Wings over Scotland' documenting the next stages of what old-guard nationalists consider the woke takeover of the SNP. […]

Under Sturgeon, the New SNP (2014-present) is personality-led, elite-driven, and ruled by a doctrine that cannot be found anywhere in the party’s constitution (yet) but which holds more sway than fusty old rulebooks drawn up in fusty old conference halls and voted on by fusty old delegates.

It is a doctrine I call ‘coercive progressivism’ and is a total ideology of identity, culture and values that places these matters, rather than economic or social affairs, at the heart of politics and seeks to enforce its marginal orthodoxy on the mainstream by way of law, social pressure and institutional capture. It is, at root, a post-liberal and post-democratic movement. And it brooks not a peep of disagreement, which is why the foremost talent on the SNP frontbench is no longer on the SNP frontbench.

More from Katy Balls:

Cherry's sacking comes after weeks of tensions over the transgender debate within the party. The QC has been a vocal critic of the Scottish government’s plan to reform the Gender Recognition Act. This has become more heated in recent days: Cherry's decision to offer a 'gender critical' activist support online led to a backlash from members in the official LGBTQ+ wing of the party.

However, SNP sources suggest that this is about more than the transgender debate. It goes to Nicola Sturgeon's own position. The First Minister is facing renewed scrutiny over her handling of allegations made against her predecessor Alex Salmond. The party leader is facing two inquiries into her conduct around the investigations into her former mentor.

Sturgeon allies worry that they could be used to undermine her position. Cherry is a close ally of Salmond. Tellingly, two other SNP MPs to have been left on the backbench are Kenny MacAskill and Angus MacNeil. Both politicians have in the past been attacked by Sturgeon allies for publicly speculating about her future. With Cherry not planning to go quietly, the SNP's internal war is just beginning.

At the Hill Garden, Hampstead:

ing health or safety concerns which cannot be resolved”. Definitive data on male prisoners housed in women’s estates is difficult to obtain; however, estimates are that 50% of all requests for transfers from men’s to women’s prisons are from sex offenders.

Heather Mason, former Canadian federal prisoner and advocate for women in prison, is slowly compiling data on the number of male prisoners in women’s prisons, and the crimes they have committed. Ms Mason is currently aware of 16 transgender prisoners convicted of sex offences. If these cases are added to the estimated 21 women in prison for sexual assaults, the proportion of convicted sex offenders almost doubles.

In other words, it's all a great big mess.

ugh the material, I came across a document with his signature from 1941 and everything changed. The story of my grandfather was much darker than I had known.

I learned that the man I had believed was a savior who did all he could to rescue Jews during World War II had, in reality, ordered all Jews in his region of Lithuania to be rounded up and sent to a ghetto where they were beaten, starved, tortured, raped and then murdered. More than 95 percent of Lithuania’s Jews died during World War II, many of them killed with the eager collaboration of their neighbors. […]

Lithuania is like many other countries that spent 50 years under Soviet occupation. During this time, there was a deep freeze on the truth: Lithuanians were only allowed to talk about how many Soviet citizens were killed during World War II. References to Jewish victims were scrubbed away by the occupiers. I would like to think that if Lithuania had been a free and independent nation after World War II, it might have acknowledged its own role in the Holocaust.

Correcting historical memory turned out to be dangerous. When I publicly questioned the official story of my grandfather’s life, I was vilified by the Lithuanian community in Chicago and in Lithuania. I was called an agent of President Vladimir Putin of Russia. Lithuanian leaders still believe their country’s identity depends on holding onto its heroes, even at the cost of the truth. […]/p>

Transforming a Nazi collaborator into a national hero requires four steps of manipulation. One step shifts all the blame to the Nazis, even though my grandfather, like many Lithuanians, willingly participated in slaughtering Jews. The second step creates a victim narrative, asking how a Jew killer could be sent to a Nazi concentration camp. The third step discredits counternarratives by labeling them as Communist propaganda told by enemies of the state. The final step refuses to accept that two seemingly contradictory truths can coexist: Noreika bravely fought against the Communists and shamefully participated in killing Jews.

Silvia Foti's book The Nazi’s Granddaughter: How I Learned My Grandfather Was a War Criminal is due out this spring.

lly, in Kristallnacht. Only geography, not morality, prevented him from being the stormtrooper pointing the rifle at my grandfather on his knees in front of the blackened bricks of his synagogue….

Imagine, therefore, that Schwarzenegger had chosen to compare the storming of the Capitol to, say, the Tulsa race massacre of 1921, a horrific racist rampage where many black homes were destroyed and between 85 and 300 black people died. And now let’s imagine that Schwarzenegger’s father had been not Austrian and in the Nazi party but American and in the Ku Klux Klan; in the Klan, and part of that rampaging mob. Perhaps the comparison would have passed without mention. Or perhaps he would have been condemned on social media for a lack of sensitivity: for failing to understand how a person with such a lineage using that atrocity as an inflammatory reference to make his — valid or otherwise — political point might feel to the minority concerned.

The issue here is not about Schwarzenegger and his family. I certainly don’t believe one should be held responsible for the sins of the fathers. What I’m interested in is the differing progressive reactions to such comparisons. Because I know that if there had been black discomfort over such a thing, it would have been — correctly — respected and listened to, and white allies would have done their best to check their privilege and understand it. Whereas, from the same quarters, a Jew questioning the use of Kristallnacht is — was — mainly dismissed. This is because Jews don’t count.

The new ethnic studies program shortly to be rolled out to high schools in California, where Jews are, as Emily Benedek explains, cleansed from the history of racism, sadly confirms the point Baddiel is making.

Another 1950s billboard from the files of Pacific Outdoor Advertising, with a creepy child determined to get at the goodies. Los Angeles ca. 1956. "Creamiest filling of all … OREO Creme Sandwich."

[Photo: Shorpy/Pacific Outdoor Advertising files]

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Tanganyika (Tanzania), 1958 – Mural © 2021 Todd Webb Archive

face of mockery, denigration, humiliation and discrimination with regards to accessing healthcare and other legal rights. We wish to reiterate as members of the collective that we believe that feminism is a political project that works in service of all of us.

That is, feminism works in service not just of women, but of men too – all those men who just have to claim they're women for us to come running to help them out, the poor dears. 

At the Feminist Library, we believe that feminism is a political framework that we can use to end all gendered violence and transform the world for everyone. There are a number of different kinds of feminism, we hope our archive shows how feminist thinking is beneficial for all. We understand gender and sex as constructed categories with meanings that have changed over time and are dependent on time periods, geographical location, culture, amongst a range of other factors. We wholeheartedly reject any feminist framework that seeks to define womanhood solely using biological essentialism or any feminism that seeks to re-inscribe rigid ideas of sex.

Yes, it's the same old postmodern nonsense, with sex as a "constructed category", and boo, down with "biological essentialism" – or science, as it's otherwise known.

Genevieve Gluck at the Glinner Update:

Essentially, the Feminist Library is publicly denouncing women who understand that the reason for women’s oppression is the commodification and exploitation of female bodies for male use, and suggesting they will be antagonistic towards such women should they enter the building. This is a shocking statement for any library to make, much less one supposedly dedicated to educating women about the history of the feminist struggle. […]

Child marriage, bride kidnappings, rape, forced childbirth, concubinage, the sex industry, foot binding, FGM, and unpaid labor are all forms of subordinating women for male pleasure and use, and in order to extract labor and reproductive resources from women and girls. To deny the reality of the sexed body is to deny the existence of sexism itself, as well as the ability for women to join in solidarity against it.

It turns out that one of the library's co-founders back in 1975, Diana Leonard, was an early disciple of French feminists and of Judith Butler, and is on record as arguing that "'Sex’ is increasingly recognised as a sociohistorical product, rather than a fixed, transhistorical, or taken-for-granted category.” So perhaps the decline and fall of the Feminist Library was inevitable.

Still…couldn't they at least change the name? They're hijacking feminism in the name of a clearly anti-feminist trans agenda.

Last word to Gluck:

It is not possible to defend women’s rights if we cannot claim our material existence independently of men. When women are reduced to a thought experiment, a set of misogynist stereotypes, a feeling in a man’s head, our collective and unique situation in this world is erased, as is our ability to confront the relentless violence against us. Many brilliant and brave women suffered to shine a light on male violence, to illuminate the structures that naturalize our subordinate status in society, and we will not submit to the flattening of our humanity.