The Adventures of Melanie Pax – anti-militarist comic strip

Good afternoon, radicals and book-lovers…

Thought we’d give you something a little different today. Here at Pluto we’re not just passionate about books, but about all sorts of things. Lucky for us, those of us interested in politics and activism get to create lovely books during the day that we want to cosy up with at night. I just finished reading Donny Gluckstein’s A People’s History of the Second World War, which was ace. and I’ve now moved onto Nick Robins’ Corporation that Changed the World and Alice Rothchild’s Broken Promises, Broken Dreams. (Even better, I get to read them for free because I work here…)

But we also like to share free things with others too. I recently spent a couple of weeks toiling away on a comic strip for Stop the Arms Fair coalition – a campaigning group that is filled with amazing people doing wonders to try and shut down the arms trade and its biannual presence in London’s Excel Centre, (the DSEi arms fair.) We’ve now got hundreds of copies printed on nice recycled paper, thanks to the legends at Calverts Co-operative. But why not share it more widely, I thought? So here it is, a FREE comic strip that’s GUARANTEED to be the most ATTRACTIVE PROPAGANDA you’ve ever seen… and if you’re not immediately convinced of the merits of anti-militarism, why not check out Vijay Mehta’s book, The Economics of Killing as well…

CB

 

National Gallery ends financial partnership with Italian arms company Finmeccanica

Disarm the Gallery: A lovely tale of campaigning success

Chris Browne

 
A couple of days ago I left for work early, cycling with my friend in the tepid autumn sunlight to Abney Park Cemetery in North London. Outside my work at Pluto I occasionally take photographs of things for campaigning organisations, and both my friend and I have been involved for the last year or so in ‘Disarm the Gallery’ – an offshoot of the larger Stop the Arms Fair Coalition (STAF).

We’d made a pit-stop at Abney Park on my usual cycle through Stoke Newington, with our panniers containing my camera and a few home-made zombie limbs – papier-mâchéd and painted green, their humorously skeletal fingers protruded out of our bags, inviting double-takes from bus drivers and pedestrians making their way along Church Street.

Walking through the cemetery, which is the overcrowded and overgrown resting place of nearly two-century’s worth of political and religious non-conformists, we pitched up at a number of particularly choice gravestones and plonked the zombie arms into the earth in a series of different poses. The idea was to take pictures of zombies rising up out of the ground, ready to join the ranks of the righteous, anti-militarist undead who were planning to swarm on the National Gallery at Halloween. The anti-militarist undead would be the giddily excited (because facepainted), but nonetheless pissed off activists from Disarm the Gallery. The pictures were intended as social media buzz-generators for what promised to be the latest in a series of creative, high profile actions against the Gallery because of its links to the arms trade.

A little context then. The campaign’s genesis was in September 2011, during last year’s DSEi arms fair, when arms dealers were invited to a special event inside the National Gallery, where wine and nibbles would be consumed in opulent surroundings, and perhaps deals might be discussed. They didn’t know we knew about it and so we had a lot of fun on the day. However, it later transpired that this was no one-off liaison between one of our most famous public institutions and the nefarious, venal world of gun-running.

Finmeccanica, Italy’s largest arms manufacturer, had at that point nurtured a 5-year old relationship with the Gallery, where it gave them an annual £30,000 in exchange for the use of the Gallery as a function space throughout the year. Disarm the Gallery’s intent was to embarrass and shame the Gallery publicly until this relationship became untenable. In March a number of us had dressed up in stereotypical French painter garb (think berets and paint-covered smocks) and spelled out the message ‘disarm the gallery’ across 18 identical easels. Some clever people even made a video of it.

On a later day of action, small groups of us broke off inside the Gallery and wrote similar messages on sketch pads in the larger rooms, then donned the same berets – by now an entrenched visual signifier of our group – and held up our messages until security kicked us out.

The zombie demo was going to be the biggest and best action by far. We’d heard that Finmeccanica were hosting an event in the Gallery on October 31st. Made ebullient by the fact that this most sinister of industries was turning up on Halloween, of all days, we had quickly waved away any lingering concerns about the doubtful connotations of invoking the ‘undead’, and shoe-horned the fun, if not-quite-relevant idea of a zombie protest onto the agenda. There would be choreographed ‘Thriller’ flashmobs, hoards of groaning, staggering protesters outside the gallery, and (we hoped) lots of media ready to lap up the highly visual escapades.

Our sojourn into Abney Park was, it turns out, time wasted. By the time we got home I’d whittled the number of potential images down to about 20 and was about to edit them when I heard the brilliant news.

Though they were still embargoing it at this point, the Alternative Nobel Prize winners, Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) had got an email from the National Gallery telling them that their long-standing sponsorship arrangement with Finmeccanica had ended, over a year early. The next day the press-release went out, with the sad caveat that there would be no mass mobilisation of the undead on October 31st:

A Gallery spokesperson told CAAT that Finmeccanica had “exercised their right to terminate” the agreement, but refused to disclose what discussions had preceded this decision.

Italian weapon manufacturer Finmeccanica has been one of the National Gallery’s ‘corporate benefactors’ since 2006. The contract was due to run until 1 October 2013.

In the wake of this campaign victory (what a beautiful word that is…), Sarah Waldron, a member of Disarm the Gallery who works at CAAT, gave me the following quote:

This was such an inspiring campaign to be part of: it was a fantastic joint effort with so many different groups and individuals coming together with passion and creativity. We’re glad that this energy and commitment has paid off – with a result that we hope will form an important part of a wider challenge to the arms trade in society and will help other campaigns against unethical corporate sponsorship in the arts. This is only the start!

Shiv Malik also wrote a piece in the Guardian last night, highlighting the campaign’s success.

Leaving aside the disappointment of the cancelled demo, there are some serious reflections to be made. At a time when the government continues to slash and burn all that’s best in our society; when corporate and political unaccountability runs rampant; when what little hope we kindle of our own democratic power to right such monumental wrongs seems all but spent, a win like this can’t be overestimated.

The sums of money involved – £30,000 a year – may seem scant compared to the money Oil continues to pump into the arts, and positively minuscule when we step back and examine the scale of corporate/political incest, but it is a decisive moment in our history. It is a moment when another finger was prised away from the arms trade’s iron grip on its own public image. It is a moment that will reverberate along the corridors of power where men make decisions they would rather others didn’t scrutinise. Most of all it is proof that together we can say No to something, and if we persist that ‘something’ will stop.

We shouldn’t get ahead of ourselves of course. This is a stepping stone, and a victory that will allow us to refuel our batteries and stave off burnout for another year. In 2013, DSEi, the world’s largest arms fair, is returning to the Excel Centre in London. Here the world’s most repressive regimes will come to strike deals with companies only too happy to sell them weapons. And it is here that we focus our attention once more. This is a much more formidable opponent, but there is surely a great deal more conviction and hope floating around today than there has been for some time.

Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) wins the 2012 Alternative Nobel Prize

Good news everyone! Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT), one of Britain’s most tireless, essential and all-round loveliest organisations has won the 2012 Right Livelihood Award – perhaps better known now as the Alternative Nobel Prize – along with three other recipients.

The award comes attached to the very handsome sum of €150,000, a huge amount to a small campaigning organisation on a very modest budget. CAAT was recognised for its ‘innovative and effective campaigning against the arms trade’. This work has historically encompassed governmental lobbying; freedom of information requests; publishing detailed analytical reports of arms companies and the effects of their trade on conflict zones; and supporting a variety of campaigns, including Stop the Arms Fair Coalition – working to shut down the bi-annual DSEi arms fair in Newham’s Excel Centre – and Disarm the Gallery – putting pressure on the National Gallery to stop taking money from Italian arms dealer Finmeccanica.

They are hugely creative, wonderfully non-hierarchical, and completely necessary in our political culture – in which the military industrial complex has taken deep root.

This year’s group of four Laureates highlights the essential conditions for global peace and security: effective nonviolent resistance, a recognition that the arms industry is part of the problem, human and women’s rights, and the preservation of our precious ecological resources.

To find out more about the Alternative Nobel Prize, check out the Right Livelihood Award’s website. To learn more about CAAT and the work it does (perhaps you might feel moved to donate a few pence of your own…?) then click here.

Vijay Mehta’s ‘The Economics of Killing’ reviewed

Vijay Mehta’s latest book, The Economics of Killing: How the West Fuels War and Poverty in the Developing World (Pluto, 2012) has been reviewed this week in Spectrezine, a journal of the radical left that purports to ‘haunt Europe’.

The reviewer, Steve McGiffen, also editor of Spectrezine, writes favourably of Mehta’s book, that it offers ‘a theoretically original and empirically rich analysis which gives as much as we are perhaps entitled to ask from any writer in this often bewildering and always rapidly-moving situation’.

The review covers a number of published approaches to what McGiffen describes as ‘the current, ongoing and seemingly insoluble crisis.’ Broadly speaking, he considers there to be two schools of thought about the economic meltdown we presently find outselves in:

The first view is that it is an inevitable product of the capitalist system. This is what is suggested by a strict application of Marxist analysis, and it is also the conclusion one must draw from reading writers such as Fred Magdoff and Michael D. Yates in The ABCs of the economic crisis. The other, promoted by radical left parliamentary parties such as Greece’s Syriza or the Dutch Socialist Party, as well as numerous economists and commentators of the left and the more intelligent parts of the centre-left, is that the crisis was caused by an abdication of governmental responsibility in the face of the power of the financial sector, and is being prolonged by austerity policies.

McGiffen sees himself as tempted by both interpretations, even contradictorily so. He argues that Mehta’s contribution to the debate is both rich and somewhat different to the raft of accusations levied against the financial sector:

A Dictator’s Best Friend: Corruption, War and the West – Vijay Mehta in Ceasefire

Vijay Mehta, author of The Economics of Killing: How the West Fuels War and Poverty in the Developing World (Pluto, 2012), has written a piece in Ceasefire this week where he argues that recent evidence from the Middle East corroborates the analysis he lays out in his book – that Western governments continue to be the best friends of dictators with money to hide.

Mehta writes:

Back in February, we were supposed to let out a collective cheer when European governments said they had “frozen” the assets of Hosni Mubarak, the toppled dictator of Egypt. Switzerland, Britain and other European states said that they had heeded calls from Egypt’s new leadership to seize the wealth Mubarak had hidden in their cities, and to return this money to Egyptian taxpayers.

The British “discovered” assets worth £85 million that Mubarak had hidden in London. These were then “frozen”. But what happened next was depressingly predictable … By September, a BBC investigation had discovered that many of Mubarak’s assets had not been frozen by the British, and that Britain was refusing to hand over the assets they had seized. Assem al-Gohary, head of Egypt’s Illicit Gains Authority, told the BBC that the UK “doesn’t want to make any effort at all to recover the money”. Having accepted Mubarak’s millions on a no-questions-asked basis, the British authorities were suddenly very sensitive to the legal status of the sums involved.

New books from Pluto Press

Paul Le Blanc and Kunal Chattopadhyay edit the latest addition to the Get Political series, Leon Trotsky: Writings in Exile. To mark the release of the book Pluto is launching a new campaign to promote the writings of past revolutionaries amongst today’s activists and radical scholars. Visit the new Get Political website for more details.

Leon Trotsky Writings in Exile Leon Trotsky, edited by Kunal Chattopadhyay and Paul Le Blanc Introduces the writings of Leon Trotsky “Leon Trotsky stands as a shining beacon amid the revolutionary events of our epoch. Out of the vast ideological arsenal he produced, Trotsky always considered that his most important works were those from his years in exile, which remain essential reading for those seeking to bring about fundamental change today. Kunal Chattopadhyay and Paul Le Blanc have done a great service in helping to make available, in a single volume, these texts to new generations of revolutionary activists.” – Esteban Volkow, Grandson of Leon Trotsky and President of the Board, Leon Trotsky House Museum, Coyoacan, Mexico “This bracing book provides theoretical nourishment for our times, just as millions take to the streets worldwide demanding a just economic system. Leon Trotsky hit the world stage as President of the St. Petersburg Soviet in the 1905 Russian Revolution. … Trotsky continues to educate and inspire, his flame refuses to be extinguished.” – Suzi Weissman, Professor of Politics, Saint Mary’s College of California £14.99 only £13.00 on the Pluto site

Vijay Mehta’s The Economics of Killing has picked up a huge array of endorsements from, amongst others, Tony Benn, Deepak Chopra, Bruce Kent, Caroline Lucas and Arun Gandhi. Vijay will be launching the book on the 8th March at the Hilton Hotel Euston in Central London. Visit Pluto Events for more details.

The Economics of Killing How the West Fuels War and Poverty in the Developing World Vijay Mehta Shows how Western governments are trapping the developing world in a cycle of violence and poverty. “We live in a rich world and yet increasingly people are getting caught in the poverty trap and facing real hardship and pain. Vijay Mehta’s excellent book sets out the problems and solutions, and challenges us all to create the spiritual and political will to implement policies which will bring about real change and give hope to humanity.” – Mairead Maguire, Irish peace activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner. “The Economics of Killing brilliantly links the deepening economic crisis facing the West with the dynamics of militarism that is wreaking havoc on the planet. Everyone who cares about the future must read this groundbreaking book.” – Richard Falk, United Nations Special Rapporteur on Human Rights for the Palestinian Territories, Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University, USA £14.99 only £13.00 on the Pluto site

In Pakistan: The US, Geopolitics and Grand Strategies, Julian Schofield and Usama Butt bring together a range of prominent analysts and commentators, including Pakistan’s former Foreign Minister, to look at Pakistan’s geo-political position within the global order. What makes the book unique is its analysis of Pakistan’s relationship not just with the USA but also with China, India, the Arab Gulf and the European Union.

Pakistan The US, Geopolitics and Grand Strategies Edited by Usama Butt and Julian Schofield “This deeply-researched, well-thought-out and comprehensive book makes an important contribution to our understanding of Pakistani policy and the vexed subject of US-Pakistani relations.” – Professor Anatol Lieven, War Studies, King’s College London and author of Pakistan: A Hard Country “Pakistan’s complex and increasingly stressful relationship with the US cannot be analysed in isolation from its other regional interests, including those relating to China and Iran, let alone India. This wide-ranging study by scholars from diverse backgrounds provides much-needed analysis of this wider context. It is a singularly valuable contribution to a field of study all too often dominated by a particular national orientation.” – Professor Paul Rogers, Peace Studies, Bradford University £18.99 only £17.00 on the Pluto site

In Discordant Development: Global Capitalism and the Struggle for Connection in Bangladesh, Katy Gardner draws on her longstanding research to reveal the complex and contradictory ways that local people attempt to connect to, and are disconnected by, foreign capital. She takes as her main case study the building of a gas plant by a vast multinational close to four densely populated villages in rural Bangladesh.

Discordant Development Global Capitalism and the Struggle for Connection in Bangladesh Katy Gardner Based on extensive field work, looks at the impact of a multinational mining company on four densely populated villages in rural Bangladesh. “Katy Gardner treads a finely judged line, keeping both neoliberal developers and anti-globalisation activists at arm’s length in order to describe relations at a human scale, thereby doing for development what anthropology ought. She addresses a number of highly topical issues include the paradoxical developmental effects of extractive industries, Corporate Social Responsibility as a form of neoliberal governmentality (handled especially well), microfinance and corruption. This is an extremely rare opening up of the world of ordinary people affected by such schemes.” – David Mosse, Professor of Social Anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London £21.99 only £19.50 on the Pluto site

Arms Sales and the Wall Street protests

By Vijay Mehta, author of The Economics of Killing: How the West Fuels War and Poverty in the Developing World (available in February).

Commenting on the Occupy Wall St protests recently, the anti-war activist Matthew Good complained that protesters were wasting their time camping in down-town Manhattan. They should, he argued, be gathering around the Pentagon. After all, the 700 billion dollars that US spent bailing out the bankers is a pittance when set against the annual one trillion dollar US defence budget.

His analysis assumed that the issues of rogue banks and outlandish defence spending were separate. Yet our recent financial crisis was largely created by the global trade in weapons. The acute financial distress and unemployment facing many Europeans and Americans today have their origins in the West’s economic reliance on exporting death.

The arms fair and the media

It has now been six days since the main day of action called by the Stop the Arms Fair coalition against DSEi –the world’s largest arms fair- held in the Excel Centre in East London. The dust will always take a little while to settle after big campaigning days such as Tuesday, but enough of a picture has emerged to process it through the word mill.

Firstly, we were not successful in shutting down the arms fair. If this sounds like too much of a pipe dream to have seriously been considered a possibility, it is always worth remembering that a concerted campaign by peace activists in Australia did bear this very result. Though we are unsuccessful this time around, we can take some comfort from the fact that it has been achieved before, and will be achieved again.