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From British daily The Morning Star:

Master of political wit

(Tuesday 22 January 2008)

Gillray’s Legacy
The Political Cartoon Gallery, London WC1

SAVAGE WIT: The “father of the British political cartoon” mocks the rich and famous.

NEIL MUNDY celebrates the 250th anniversary of the birth of James Gillray, the “father of the British political cartoon.”

James Gillray was born on August 13 1756 and not in 1757, as commonly held until relatively recently, in Chelsea, then a small village outside London, where his father served as sexton to the small fiercely evangelical Protestant sect, the Moravian Brotherhood.

This is substantiated by the original register of baptisms and marriages, still preserved and to be seen in the archive of the Moravians in Muswell Hill, north London.

It is now more than ever appropriate to celebrate Gillray’s genius, as he is increasingly recognised as a great artist, one of our greatest draughtsmen and printmakers and the founding father of the modern political cartoon.

His influence on other artists and cartoonists has been enormous. The great 20th century cartoonist Sir David Low hailed Gillray as “the beginner of a new era in political caricature… the first considerable artist who made caricature his full-time occupation.”

According to Low, Gillray was “the first to realise that the principles of art, selection and emphasis could be adjusted to a new balance in a new type of draughtsmanship, neither the representation of reality nor mere grotesque invention, but the discriminating exaggeration of what is true… If Hogarth was the grandfather of the modern cartoon, you were its father.”

Producing well over 1,000 graphic satires in the form of sophisticated copperplate prints, often at the rate of one or two a week, Gillray dominated the golden age of British caricature for 30 years with his savage wit and extravagant inventiveness, often bordering on surreal, comic obscenity and implacable mockery of the foibles of the rich and famous.

He established London as the birthplace of political and social caricature as a popular art form, creating some of the greatest images of the late 18th and early 19th century - Pitt and Napoleon carving up the world between them in The Plumb-Pudding in Danger, Queen Charlotte as a droopy-breasted hag in Sin, Death and the Devil, possibly the most daring satire ever published, a Blair-like William Pitt galloping hell-bent over the advocates of peace in Presages of the Millenium - images teeming with comic invention.

Gillray defined key ideas about our national character and sense of humour, creating comic stock-figures which have lasted to this day - Little Boney, John Bull, The Old Lady of Threadneedle Street.

Although he worked in the age of George III, the Prince Regent and future George IV, of Pitt, Fox and Sheridan, of the loss of the American colonies, the French revolution and Napoleon, his themes of sexual scandals, corruption, excess, intrigue, tyranny and human folly are universal and still the driving force of satire today.

His ideas have continued to inspire and to be reworked by contemporary cartoonists from Illingworth and Vicky to Steve Bell and Andrzej Krauze.

Gillray’s contemporary, Charles Fox: here. And here.

David Low: here.

British cartoonist Tony Hall dies: here.

British cartoonist Ken Gill: here.

From British weekly Socialist Worker:

‘From Russia’ exhibition opens at the Royal Academy

Manifesto of 17 October 1905, painted in 1911 by Ilya Repin, is just one of a host of rarely seen Russian masterpieces being exhibited at the Royal Academy of Art in London from this Saturday.

The scene shows crowds celebrating a proclamation issued reluctantly by Tsar Nicholas II in response to the 1905 revolutionary uprising against him. It promised basic civil rights such as freedom of speech, universal male suffrage and a limited form of parliamentary democracy.

The tsar’s “manifesto” split the opposition against him. The liberal Kadet party celebrated it as a victory, but socialists warned that the concessions were cosmetic, and that ultimate power remained in the tsar’s hands. The socialists were soon proved right.

Repin is considered the greatest of the Russian realist school of painting that arose in the late 19th century. Many of his works depict scenes from Russian life documenting both the everyday lives of peasants and the political turmoil of the times.

His painting of October 1905 captures the political ambiguities of the period. Does it celebrate the crowd’s revolutionary spirit, or endorse its patriotic fervour?

In fact Repin disapproved of the successful 1917 revolutions that overthrew the tsar and he spent his remaining days in Finland. His realist style fell out of favour with a new wave of artists that explicitly aligned themselves with Bolshevism and modernism.

From Russia: French and Russian Master Paintings 1870‑1925 opens on Saturday 26 January and runs until 18 April. For more details go here.

Since the late 1920s, Repin became a major inspiration for the “socialist realist” tendency in Soviet art.

Pictures of this exhibition: here.

This Italian music video is called Fabrizio Moro: Pensa (anti mafia song).

From British weekly Socialist Worker:

How capitalism created the Mafia

The Mafia have been glamorised in film and TV, but their dominance in Sicily, Italy, has been opposed by grassroots movements, says author Tom Behan

The Sicilian Mafia and its US cousin are no Robin Hoods robbing the rich to feed the poor. They are all about personal enrichment. The Mafia were and remain a bunch of selfish, violent murderers.

The Mafia in Sicily emerged with capitalism. The Italian national state only became united in 1861. The various states that had existed prior to that across the Italian peninsula were very weak and they had little interest in remote places such as Sicily.

Feudalism in Sicily was only ended in 1812. Under the feudal system the landowners had their own private armies to manage their estates and were a law unto themselves. Peasants had a very harsh existence.

The landlords were not interested in their estates, apart from as a source of rent. They did not live there or even visit them, but instead resided in the city of Naples or Palermo, Sicily’s capital.

The landowners’ enforcers imposed the collection of rents. The Mafia started to emerge from these people. They began to get money, buy land and to become capitalists on a small scale, inserting themselves into the local state.

Even after unification the new Italian state was weak and reliant on regional powerbrokers. The Mafia benefited from this weakness.

The ruling class tolerated lawlessness and there was as yet no organised working class. This period is brilliantly captured in the 1963 film The Leopard, directed by Luchino Visconti, which is based on Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s novel.

The Mafia acted as a cushion for the ruling class, allowing it to rule in a situation of intense poverty where people were desperate for any tiny improvement in their lives.

Instead of making demands on the political system they went to the local Mafia boss to ask for help in getting a job, a pay increase or even furniture.

The Mafia were seen as the most immediate, powerful force that could help people. For the Mafia’s powerful backers it was very convenient that ordinary people did not fight against the system.

When working class people did fight, the Mafia faced a huge crisis – the best example being the Fasci Siciliani movement of 1892-95. This was a popular movement that threw up democratic organisations. These were finally broken by the state.

But they were so powerful that the Mafia didn’t dare attack them head-on. Indeed many low-level Mafiosi joined the movement, abandoning their gangs.

At the beginning of the 20th century hundreds of thousands of poor people emigrated from the Italian south to the US, where capitalism was expanding rapidly without much regulation.

To some extent the system they left behind in Sicily was reproduced. There was still deference to people “on high” and fear of people who were quick with a gun. Italian migrants were subject to racism and exclusion.

Capitalism

US authorities were relatively happy to allow organised crime to operate on its behalf and to act as an enforcer within the emigrant community.

On the other hand there was also the mass involvement of Italian workers in the great labour struggles and the Industrial Workers of the World militant union in the years before the First World War.

During the Second World War the US military used the Mafia when it invaded Sicily in 1943. The US and Britain wanted to replace the fascist regime of Benito Mussolini in Italy. There was democratic resistance to fascism, but it was left wing and so was opposed by Britain and the US.

They saw there was another structure that was not democratic or left wing and with which they had contacts – the Mafia. US agents admitted meeting Mafia boss Don Calogero Vizzini – who was made mayor of his hometown by the US army.

Charles Poletti, the head of the Allied administration of the island, was very aware of who he was dealing with. His interpreter, Vito Genovese, was a Mafioso who had been deported from New York before the war.

He had made large donations to Mussolini’s fascists and entertained Nazi leaders in his castle in Italy. But he was quick to change sides when the invasion began.

Mafia in Naples: here.

This is an ITN video about polar bear cub Flocke in Nuremberg zoo in Germany.

From British daily The Independent:

US censors Arctic scientists’ findings as it prepares for oil and gas auction

By Daniel Howden, Deputy Foreign Editor

Published: 22 January 2008

The United States has blocked the release of a landmark assessment of oil and gas activity in the Arctic as it prepares to sell off exploration licences for the frozen Chukchi Sea off Alaska, one of the last intact habitats of the polar bear.

Scientists at the release of the censored report in Norway said there was “huge frustration” that the US had derailed a science-based effort to manage the race for the vast energy reserves of the Arctic.

The long-awaited assessment was meant to bring together work by scientists in all eight Arctic nations to give an up-to-date picture of oil and gas exploitation in the high north. In addition to that it was supposed to give policy makers a clear set of recommendations on how to extract safely what are thought to be up to one quarter of the world’s energy reserves.

Speaking yesterday from Tromso, one of the report’s lead authors, who asked not to be named, said: “They [the US] have blocked it. We have no executive summary and no plain language conclusions.”

See also here.

Other dangers for polar bears: here.

New tests on rare polar bear fossil find in Scotland: here.

This video is called Judith LeBlanc [from the USA] Speaks at British Anti-Nuclear [and anti Iraq war] Demonstration.

From British daily The Guardian:

Pre-emptive nuclear strike a key option, Nato told

Ian Traynor in Brussels

Tuesday January 22, 2008

The west must be ready to resort to a pre-emptive nuclear attack to try to halt the “imminent” spread of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction, according to a radical manifesto for a new Nato by five of the west’s most senior military officers and strategists.

Calling for root-and-branch reform of Nato and a new pact drawing the US, Nato and the European Union together in a “grand strategy” to tackle the challenges of an increasingly brutal world, the former armed forces chiefs from the US, Britain, Germany, France and the Netherlands insist that a “first strike” nuclear option remains an “indispensable instrument” since there is “simply no realistic prospect of a nuclear-free world”.

Irresponsible, dangerous militarist machospeak. Continuing George W. Bush’s Plamegate scandal and other lies about the so called “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq, which were not there. And the so called building by Iran of nuclear bombs, as the Bush administration shrilly proclaimed and kept proclaiming… even after its own secret services said that that had been untrue at least since 2003.

When did those NATO big brass ever protest against the real “spread of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction” to India [see also here], Pakistan, Israel, and South Africa under apartheid tyranny (abolished after the fall of the apartheid regime)? Never … as those were buddies of the NATO great powers, and were aided and abetted by them in getting those criminal destructive nuclear weapons.

An “increasingly brutal world”; “thanks” to, to a major extent, NATO great powers themselves.

British daily The Morning Star comments on this:

Genocidal manifesto

(Tuesday 22 January 2008)

THE blood-chilling “manifesto for a new NATO” should remind people why Clemenceau said that war was too important to leave to the generals.

There are too many weak politicians ready to hide behind the bellicose comments of military leaders and to adopt their agenda.

See also here. And here. And here.

Britain: Public Inquiry into legality of Iraq war - our day in court, by Rose Gentle: here.

US steps up pressure on India to wrap-up Indo-US nuclear treaty: here.

The militarisation of the European Union continues to gather momentum. Last week, the European Parliament approved a directive that will remove the essential distinction between weapons and other goods: here.

This video from the USA is called Nazi occupation of Holland - Remembered, Part one.

From Dutch NOS TV:

The International Astronomical Union has called two planetoids after Dutch people. The small planets were called Hannie Schaft and Oranje-Nassau.

William of Orange-Nassau … led the Dutch revolt against Spanish authority in the sixteenth century. Hannie Schaft is better known as ‘the girl with red hair‘. She participated in the communist resistance; just before the end of World War II, the German occupiers shot her.

Until now, both planetoids had been identified by numbers.

Movie about Hannie Schaft: here.

Anne Frank asteroid: here.

This Reuters video is about United States politics and a possible recession.

By Andre Damon:

Threat of US recession panics global stock markets

22 January 2008

Stock prices plummeted worldwide Monday, amid heightened fears of a US recession. While over the course of last week US financial markets suffered the worst fall since 2002, with the Down Jones Industrial Average dropping by 5 percent, many Asian and European indices dropped by a similar amount in just one day. It was the biggest one-day fall in world stock markets since September 11, 2001. Industrial stocks fell together with financial, suggesting that the US credit crisis, hitherto confined mainly to the banking and mortgage sectors, is spilling over into the real economy worldwide.

India was the hardest-hit, as the Bombay Stock Exchange Sensitive Index fell by a record 7.4 percent, despite the Indian stock market’s having fared relatively well over the course of the past two weeks. Some analysts had begun to conclude that India would be resistant to problems in the US economy, but this view that lost credibility as stocks plummeted on Monday.

From the BBC, about Tuesday:

Markets continue to fall sharply

Sydney was one of the exchanges which saw losses on Tuesday

Share prices in Asia continued to fall sharply on Tuesday amid fears that a recession in the US will lead to a global economic slowdown.

Japan’s Nikkei index closed down 5.7%, taking its decline this year to 18%.

Britain: “Liar loans” drive hundreds of thousands into debt: here. Northern Rock cartoon: here. Northern Rock update 18 February 2008: here. Update 18 Match 2008: here; and here. 26 March 2008: here.

US interest cut: here. And here.

While the ranks of the unemployed grow, fired Wall Street CEOs got paid millions more on their way out the door: here.

No crisis for the rich as banks rake in billions: here.

From natural history museum Naturalis in Leiden, the Netherlands:

On Monday 14 January, two sanitation workers of Leiden local authority brought a big piranha-like fish from the Maresingel canal in Leiden to Naturalis.

At ten in the morning, Tino van der Zwan and Martie ten Bloemendaal witnessed a struggle between a grey heron and the fish. The heron threw the fish upwards various times; however, it turned out to be too broad for its beak. … In Naturalis, people will be able to see the 32 cm long piranha relative during the coming weeks.

Though the fish belongs to the same family as the piranhas (Characidae), it is not carnivorous. Based on the shape of its teeth, the fish has been provisionally decided to be a red pacu (Colossoma bidens). This species eats mainly nuts and fruits, using its two rows of sharp teeth in both jaws. It can grow up to 85cm and 20kg. The weight of the Leiden specimen is 750g. …

The Leiden red pacu is very probably an aquarium fish, of which the owner thought it was getting too big, and which was then released into open water. Usually, a tropical fish would die soon in the Dutch climate. However, near the effluents of a gas plant like in the Maresingel, where the water does not freeze and has a higher temperature, it apparently can survive. In Naturalis, people are still investigating what the fish ate before the heron almost ate it. …

Some exotic fish, like the north American pumpkinseed, are doing so well in the Dutch climate that they even reproduce. For the tropical red pacu that is very improbable.