The Capitalist Origins Of The Oppression Of African Women

Garikai Chengu

Sunday marks International Women's Day, which was founded in 1908 by the Socialist party of America in order to promote the struggle for women's equality. Unbeknown to many, for the vast majority of human history, which took place in Africa, women have been equal if not superior to men.

The world's first civilizations arose from the spiritual, economic and social efforts of African women and African women in turn went on to lead those Matriarchal societies.

Matriarchy in ancient Africa was not a mirror image of patriarchy today, as it was not based on appropriation and violence. The rituals and culture of matriarchy did not celebrate violence; rather, they had a lot to do with fecundity, exchange and redistribution.

Early man was unaware of the link between intercourse and birth, therefore it was thought that new life was created by the woman alone. This belief created the first concept of God as a caring, compassionate, generous, all loving and all powerful Mother, which is the basis of the African matriarchal ideology. 

Historian Cheikh Anta Diop illustrates how as early as 10,000 BC women in Africa pioneered organized cultivation, thereby creating the pre-conditions for surplus, wealth and trade. African women are responsible for the greatest invention for the well being of human kind, namely, food security. It is the practice of organized agriculture that made population expansion, food surpluses and the emergence civilization possible.

Pre-capitalist matriarchal civilizations in Africa included the Nigerian Zazzau, Sudanese Kandake,  Angolan Nzinga, and Ashanti of Ghana, to name but a few. The quintessential African matriarchal system was most evident and most enduring in black Ancient Egypt.  

Women in Ancient Egypt owned and had complete control over both movable and immovable property such as real estate in 3000 BC. As late as the 1960s, this right could not be claimed by women in some parts of the United States. 

A closer look at ancient Egyptian papyrus' reveals that society was strictly matrilineal and inheritance and descent was through the female line. The Egyptian woman enjoyed the same legal and economic rights as the Egyptian man, and the proof of this is reflected in Egyptian art and historical inscriptions. Egypt was an unequal society but the inequality was based much more upon differences in the social classes, rather than differences in gender.  

From ancient legal documents, we know that women were able to manage and dispose of private property, including: land, portable goods, servants, slaves, livestock, and financial instruments such as endowments and annuities. A woman could administer all her property independently and according to her free will and in several excavated cemeteries the richest tombs were those of women.

The independence and leadership roles of ancient Egyptian women are part of an African cultural pattern that began millennia ago and continued into recent times, until Europeans brought capitalism and Christianity to Africa.

In the 1860s, the colonial explorer Dr. David Livingstone wrote of meeting female chiefs in the Congo, and in most of the monarchical systems of traditional Africa there were either one or two women of the highest rank who occupied a position on a par with that of the king or complementary to it.

Professor of Ancient African History, Barbara Lesko illustrates how anthropologists who have studied African history and records of early travelers and missionaries tell us "everywhere in Africa that one scrapes the surface one finds ethno-historical data on the authority once shared by women."

Under colonial misrule, black women suffered double-edged discrimination and dis-empowerment both as women and as black people.

It is difficult for many people to accept that racial discrimination and antagonism, which is such a pervasive phenomenon in the world today, has not been a permanent historical feature of humanity. In fact, the very notion of "race" and the ideology and practice of racism is a relatively modern concept.

For instance, historians recount how the Romans and Greeks attached no particular stigma to the colour of a person's skin and there were no theories about the inferiority of darker skin. Slavery in ancient societies was not defined by color, but primarily by military fortune: conquered peoples, irrespective of their color, were enslaved.

Just before colonisation, African women were largely equal to men. The significant value of African women's productive labour in producing and processing food created and maintained their rights in domestic, political, cultural, economic, religious and social spheres, among others.Because women were central to production in these pre-class societies, systematic inequality between the sexes was nonexistent, and elder women in particular enjoyed relatively high status. 

With the creation of the capitalist colonial economy, the marginalization of women came in several ways:

Firstly, the advent of title deeds, made men the sole owners of land. Consequently, as women lost access and control of land, they became increasingly economically dependent on men. This in turn led to an intensification of domestic patriarchy, reinforced by colonial social institutions.

Secondly, as colonialism continued to entrench itself on African soil, the perceived importance of women's agricultural contribution to the household was greatly reduced, as their vital role in food production was overshadowed by the more lucrative male-dominated cash crop cultivation for the international market. Prior to colonialism, women dominated trade. Markets were not governed by pure profit values; but rather, by the basic need to exchange, redistribute and socialize. Traditional African economic systems were not capitalist in nature.

Thirdly, colonialism brought with it Christianity and a masculine fundamentalism, which is now prevalent across Africa today. The imported patriarchal religion does not allow women to play the leading roles they have in the indigenous African religion.

In Ancient African religions it is not only God who is female, but also the main guardian spirits and sacred principles. Rosalind Jeffries, a historian, documents the concept of the Supreme Mother.  In a paper entitled, “The Image of Woman in African Cave Art”, she shows how African Creation stories focused on the Primordial Mother, creating woman first, then man.

Christianity brought the monogamous nuclear family unit to Africa. Its sole purpose was to pass on private property, in the form of inheritance, from one generation of men to the next. Under capitalism, the modern family unit is founded on concealed, domestic slavery of the wife; and, the modern capitalist society is a compound made up of many individual families as its molecules. 

A glance at the dictionary will reveal that the word family, has rather telling Latin origins. Famulus literally means domestic slave; and familia, which is also the Italian word for family, signified the total number of slaves belonging to one man. Karl Marx lays it bare: "The modern family contains in germ not only slavery (servitus) but also serfdom, since from the beginning it is related to agricultural services. It contains in miniature all the contradictions which later extend throughout society and its state."

Finally, the introduction of wage labour affected women by uprooting men from villages to work in urban areas, causing profound, negative economic impacts on women. Colonial authorities routinely used native African males to impose taxes on women, thereby entrenching male dominance in the Native's psyche. After all, colonialists brought to Africa the concept of the Victorian woman: a woman who should stay in the private domain and leave "real work" to the men. Due to the Victorian concept of women held by all colonialists, African women were excluded from the new political and administrative system, whose sole purpose was to extract raw materials and labour from the colony.

Colonialism replaced the role and status of the pre-colonial, African woman with a landless and disenfranchised domestic slave.

The United Nations Development Program notes that nowadays, African women perform sixty-six percent of the world's work, produce fifty percent of the food, but earn only ten percent of the income and own only one percent of the property.

The greatest threat towards the African woman's glorious future is her ignorance of her glorious past. Armed with knowledge, Africans must now fight to restore women to a position of respect and of economic freedom that exceeds that which she enjoyed before colonialism. 

Germany's Balancing Act

William T. Hathaway

Angela Merkel, Germany's conservative chancellor, is steering a cautious course between two conflicting pressures. On the one hand she must convince the German people to pay -- with their taxes and their lives -- for NATO's Mideast wars. This is no easy task because the sufferings of two world wars have left them with an aversion to military adventures. To motivate them to battle, she and the rest of the establishment are demonizing Muslim fundamentalists as mad-dog murderers who must be stopped before they destroy us. They manipulate German guilt feelings about past atrocities by proclaiming they now have a humanitarian obligation to defeat these new Hitler-like fanatics who threaten the world.

On the other hand she doesn't want to stir up too much anti-immigrant sentiment. Four million Muslims live in Germany, five percent of the population. This high immigration is part of the ruling class's deal with their colleagues in the Muslim countries. Emigration of malcontents relieves internal pressure there, helping prevent social anger from building into revolutionary rage. The anger is an inevitable result of repressive polices that hold the working class in servitude, a necessary condition for high profits. The West also provides these regimes with equipment, finances, and training of military and police there to keep dissent in check.

Immigration provides cheap labor and more consumers here. But it also causes problems. Many malcontents have now seen both sides of the deal and are fighting to defeat it however and wherever they can. The media call this terrorism, the malcontents call it war with the only weapons they have. The Western right wing exploits their attacks in order to drum up xenophobic nationalism. The rulers distance themselves from that because it's a barrier to neoliberal globalization, but they can't sound too pro-immigration because they need right-wing votes. Merkel and other Western leaders are seeking a course through an increasingly polarized environment, trying to maintain balance in a wobbly, unstable system: capitalism.

Europe Blocks U.S. From Racing To War Against Russia

Eric Zuesse

On Friday, 6 March, President Obama placed temporarily on ice his planned increase in weapons and soldiers to help the Ukrainian Government to ‘defend' Ukraine against the ‘terrorists' in Donbass, which is the Ukrainian region that had voted 90% for the President whom the Obama Administration overthrew in February 2014. (Here is where the EU first learned, on 26 February 2014, that the overthrow of Viktor Yanukovych had been a coup instead of a genuine popular revolution.) Obama replaced that Government with a racist-fascist anti-Russian regime, which quickly set about exterminating as many residents of Donbass as possible, as quickly as possible (calling them ‘terrorists,' for their refusal to be ruled by the new Obama-imposed, anti-Russian, Government).

According to German Economic News, Germany's Angela Merkel and France's Francois Hollande are balking at the speed of Obama's rush to war against Russia.

Earlier, some of the smaller national economies in the European Union — the Czech Republic, Hungary  and Greece — dissented from America's effort to increase economic sanctions and military measures against Russia. But there is now increasing pressure upon the leaders in Germany, France, and Italy, also to separate the EU from the American rush to war against Russia.

Here is my translation of the key passage from the article on this matter, dated March 7th, in German Economic News:

"Apparently, the developments have shown that in the Euro-zone the Americans' desire for a full escalation of the conflict against Russia could no longer be accepted without objection by the Europeans. The Americans were apparently informed by Angela Merkel and Francois Hollande that they are concerned about the rise of France's National Front Party: Its chairman, Marine Le Pen, rejects the current EU policy towards Russia. If the National Front comes to power in France, it would be almost impossible for the EU to pursue a U.S.-coordinated foreign policy, such as they both want to do. Therefore, Merkel and Hollande aim to contain the negative economic consequences to their own nations of sanctions against Russia, so as to prevent victory for the National Front.

"Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi has spoken with President Putin in Moscow on a stronger partnership between Italy and Russia. The Italians are feeling the effects of the sanctions particularly strongly, and want to avoid an escalation in any case.

"Greek Foreign Minister Nikos Kotzias also has doubts as to the purpose of the US sanctions policy of the EU.”

Washington criticizes many European politicians for their opposing Washington's anti-Russian policies. In Hungary and France, nationalist political parties offer especially strong resistance, because they oppose their own nation's being ruled by Washington's dictates. Even though Washington backs nazis in Ukraine, some European right-wing (though not nearly as far right-wing as in Ukraine) parties are patriotically opposed to European taxpayers donating to fund Ukraine's fascists. The odd result is that some semi-fascist parties in Europe are especially balking at the extreme fascism, even nazism, that Washington supports in Ukraine. It's too far to the right for them to go; they don't want to be forced to go that far; they don't want their nation to fund Washington's aims.

Obama thus needs to juggle many balls at once in order to keep the Western Alliance together with him in his overriding foreign-policy goal of destroying Russia. 

The 'Democrat' Brzezinski Says Russia's Putin Wants To Invade NATO

Eric Zuesse

Zbigniew Brzezinski, U.S. President Obama's friend and advisor on Russia, is a born Polish aristocrat who has hated Russia his whole life but who hid that hatred until after the communist Soviet Union collapsed and he then publicly came out as hating and fearing specifically Russia — the nation, its people, and their culture. In 1998, he wrote The Grand Chessboard, arguing for an unchallengeable U.S. empire over the whole world, and for the defeat of Russia as the prerequisite to enabling that stand-alone global American empire to reign over the planet.

He now has told the U.S. Congress (on February 6th but not reported until March 6th, when the German Economic News found the clip) that Russia's leader Vladimir Putin “seized” Crimea and that Putin will probably try to do the same to Estonia and Latvia, unless the U.S. immediately supplies weapons and troops to those countries and to Ukraine. Here is his stunning testimony (click on the link under it, to hear it, but the key part is quoted in print below):

http://deutsche-wirtschafts-nachrichten.de/2015/03/06/brzezinski-rede-vor-dem-us-kongress-russland-wird-angreifen/

“I wonder how many people in this room or this very important senatorial committee really anticipated that one day Putin would land military personnel in Crimea and seize it. I think if anybody said that's what he is going to do, he or she would be labeled as a warmonger. He did it. And he got away with it. I think he's also drawing lessons from that. And I'll tell you what my horror, night-dream, is: that one day, I literally mean one day, he just seizes Riga, and Talinn. Latvia and Estonia. It would literally take him one day. There is no way they could resist. And then we will say, how horrible, how shocking, how outrageous, but of course we can't do anything about it. It's happened. We aren't going to assemble a fleet in the Baltic, and then engage in amphibious landings, and then storm ashore, like in Normandy, to take it back. We have to respond in some larger fashion perhaps, but then there will be voices that this will plunge us into a nuclear war.”

He continues there by saying that we must pour weapons and troops into the nations that surround Russia, in order to avoid a nuclear conflict: deterrence, he argues, is the way to peace; anything else than our sending in troops and weapons now would be weakness and would invite World War III. 

He says that American troops must be prepositioned in these countries immediately, because otherwise Putin will think that America won't respond to a Russian attack against those countries.

The most serious falsehoods in his remarkable testimony are three, and they'll be taken up here in succession:

(1) The crucial background for what Brzezinski there calls the “seizure” of Crimea by Russia on 16 March 2014 was an extremely aggressive action by the United States, a violent coup in Kiev that climaxed prior, during February 2014, which used the “Maidan” demonstrations there as a cover in order to take over Ukraine's Government, a violent coup which the founder of the “private CIA” firm Stratfor subsequently (and correctly) referred to as “the most blatant coup in history,” and which the President of the Czech Republic says should not be compared at all to Czechoslovakia's 1968 “Velvet Revolution,” and that only “ignorant” people don't know that it was a coup instead of a revolution. But not only was it an incredibly bloody coup, but the leader of the post-coup Government who became officially designated on 26 February 2014 turned out to be exactly the same person whom Obama's controlling agent on the entire matter had explicitly selected and informed her underling on 4 February 2014 to get appointed to become the new leader; so, she not only knew that the coup would soon be occurring, but she had already selected by no later than 18 days beforehand the person who would replace the then sitting, democratically elected, President of Ukraine. Furthermore, Ukraine is a country bordering Russia, and so this coup was far worse for Russia than even the 1959 communist takeover of Cuba was for the United States. The U.S. many times tried to overthrow Castro — so, how much gall does the United States have today for its refusing even to acknowledge that our extremely violent takeover of Ukraine, on Russia's very border, constitutes an existential threat against Russia? (And even the top EU leadership knows that this was a U.S. coup, not any authentic revolution.) For Brzezinski to say nothing at all about any of this is simply scandalous (an obvious intention by him to deceive), but for the U.S. Senate to invite such a man to address it is even worse: it is as if the U.S. Congress in 1933 had invited Hitler to lecture it about “the Jewish threat.” It's worse than insane; it is bloody dangerous in a nuclear-armed world.

(2) As I recently documented with links to the direct sources, headlining “The Entire Case for Sanctions Against Russia Is Pure Lies,” Gallup polls in Crimea both before and after the 16 March 2014 plebiscite on whether to stay within Ukraine, which Crimea had been part of since 1954, or instead to rejoin with Russia, which Crimea had been part of between 1783 and 1954, showed that by more than 90%, Crimeans wanted to be part of Russia and held both the U.S. and EU in extremely low esteem. Furthermore, because Russia's key Black Sea Fleet had been stationed there since 1783, Russia always had troops there and didn't need to “land military personnel in Crimea and seize it.” There was no invasion, no “seizure” at all. The plebiscite was entirely peaceful, because the public craved it (on account of the recent bloody coup in Ukraine) and because the already-existing presence of Russian troops to protect them to have it so that Ukraine wouldn't send in their army to prevent it, enabled it to be carried out peacefully. There is no military base of any sort from Russia anywhere in Latvia nor in Estonia, nor in any other NATO country. The very idea put forth by Brzezinski, that the two situations are at all analogous, is insane and can be understood only within the context of the bizarre hatred held by this born aristocrat who learned his hatred since birth and who is now obsessed with it in his old age. The very fact that U.S. Senators would invite such a person to testify is scandalous, and is an indication of their ignorance or else of their sharing Brzezinski's rabidly counter-factual and extremely dangerous beliefs. Russia should take that as being a clear indication of hostile intent from the U.S. Congress, because Brzezinski's statements are entirely out of line and an irrational outburst that's based on nothing but hatred and a distorted portrayal of the clearly documented realities to the contrary of Brzezinski's selective and false description of Russia, Ukraine, Putin, and NATO.

(3) The basis of the NATO Treaty is its mutual-defense provision: that all members are committed to the defense of each member. How crazy does Brzezinski have to be to think that in order to prevent Putin from invading NATO, the U.S. must now send weapons and troops in to each one of the 12 NATO member-nations that were formerly Russia's allies? Brzezinski's alarmist and sensationalistic lies and distortions go well beyond standard propaganda into the realm of the insane: propaganda that's directed at fools and yet that's being presented to U.S. Senators. Are they crazy, too?

Russia has every reason to believe that the U.S. Government is set upon surrounding it by armed and dangerous hostile nations and taking it over by force. This isn't at all about Putin; it is about U.S. President Barack Obama, and the U.S. Congress.

For whatever democratic nations that still exist in the EU and NATO not to quit those organizations is for them to consent to being ruled by the U.S. dictatorship, which means that they themselves are dictatorships serving the American aristocracy. This is a dictarorship by America's aristocracy, the very same people who are ruining the United States and who are now determined to take over every other aristocracy in the entire world — determined to reign over the entire planet.

Testimony such as Brzezinski presented to the U.S. Senate yesterday is shocking and damning against the Senate itself. Brzezinski accuses Russia of planning to invade NATO when instead the United States has been surrounding Russia by formerly-Russian-allied nations, which are new members of America's anti-Russian military club, NATO. The preparations for an all-out nuclear war have begun. The U.S. aristocracy definitely started this incipient war; for them, it's a war of choice. It's not a war of choice for anyone in Russia. (Ukraine's oligarchs, especially the White-House-connected Ihor Kolomoysky, are ripping off everything they can from it.) The significance of the Ukrainian conflict is that it's the beachhead to take over Russia. And the Ukrainian post-coup leadership have stated proudly, many times, that this is their ultimate aim. It clearly is Obama's.

Why are Americans not marching by the millions against this rogue government in Washington? How much longer will the American people continue to tolerate it — an affront against not only the American people but the entire world?

Brzezinski's testimony to Congress on March 5th was so brazen because he's like he describes Putin as being: he does what he can get away with doing. It's way over the line. If there is no public revulsion expressed against it, then we are all heading into danger that's unprecedented since 1962's Cuban Missile Crisis, when the shoe was on the other foot and the United States was the country facing the existential threat.

Russia has already let things go too far, with 12 former Warsaw-Pact allies already being members of the NATO alliance against Russia. If Putin doesn't draw the line at Ukraine, as being over the line, then he might as well do everything that America's President demands him to do. But America's Presidency no longer represents the American people; it now represents the American aristocracy. So: for the welfare of everyone except America's aristocrats, Putin should stand firm. But the danger of America to the world exists no matter what he does.

Images of War—Sensory War 1914-2014: An exhibition at Manchester City Art Gallery

Margot Miller

Around 1,500 people passed daily through the doors of Manchester City Art Gallery in the last few months to visit its powerful Sensory War 1914-2014 exhibition.

Held to mark the centenary of World War I, the gallery assembled both contemporary and historical art, adding to its already substantial collection of WWI art exhibits from the following countries: Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, the US, Canada, Japan, Vietnam, Algeria, Ireland, Iran, Israel and Palestine. The exhibition is part of the WWI programme coordinated by the Imperial War Museum, London, in galleries and museums across the country. It was presented in partnership with the city’s Whitworth Art Gallery and the Centre for the Cultural History of War at the University of Manchester.

Visitors were able to view the works of artists as divergent as British artists CRW Nevinson and Paul Nash and German artists Otto Dix and Heinrich Hoerle, both of whose works were banned by the Nazis as decadent. Six heart-rending woodcuts by Kathe Kollwitz are on display beside the fragile depictions from Japan by the Hibakusha (the survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs). The latter have never previously been seen in the UK.

The exhibits were organised non-chronologically, in themes that relate to the sensory impact of war on the artist—hence the somewhat puzzling title of the exhibition. For example, the themes were titled Pain and Succour, Rupture and Rehabilitation, and Shocking the Senses. This is a weakness in the exhibition, because it detracts from a historical understanding of the economic and political conditions that produced two world wars separated by a mere 21 years, and the succession of regional wars in Vietnam, El Salvador, Yugoslavia, Africa and the Middle East.

The viewer is invited to regard war-torn scenes ripped from their historical context, from the standpoint of the individual and how it makes him or her feel, with the reality ultimately too horrible to comprehend. The words “imperialism” and “capitalism” are absent from the captions accompanying the artworks. Despite the significant gap, the exhibition is memorable and moving.

In the first section of the exhibition, the text explains the global nature of WWI, with 4 million soldiers enlisted from the colonies. The war was fought, not just in Europe, but wherever the imperialist powers had colonies in the Middle East and Africa. Ten million soldiers and 7 million civilians died.

In another section, the text emphasises the scale of the slaughter in World War II, which amounted to the death of 2.5 percent of the world’s population. A total of 24 million military personal and 55 million civilians died from the war, disease and famine, including 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust. The exhibits are testimony to this devastation.

In Futurist style, official British war artist CWR Nevinson engraved Returning to the Trenches (1916), a small print showing a column of French soldiers returning to the front. Expressing the dehumanising effect of war in which men are just cogs in the war machine, clamouring billie cans, rifles and legs become a blur as the men march in lock-step back to battle.

CRW Nevinson: The Harvest of Battle (1918) (Art.IWM ART 1921)

By 1919, Nevinson had adopted a more realistic style to paint The Harvest of Battle. This is a painting of epic proportions in colours of mud brown and khaki, reminiscent of the dreaded mustard gas employed by both sides. Nevinson had joined the Friends Ambulance Unit and later worked for the British Red Cross at Dunkirk. He travelled to Ypres, Belgium, the site of the Christmas Truce between German and British soldiers in 1914, and was there at the beginning of the battle known as Passchendaele, one of the most intense and sustained battles on the Western Front. The barren landscape is dark, dismal and muddied, covered with stagnant pools under menacing skies. Weary stretcher-bearers tramp through the mud carrying the wounded. There is a corpse in the foreground, its mouth agape as if screaming, one arm raised in rigor mortis.

Writing to his wife from Ypres in 1917, British surrealist painter and war artist Paul Nash commented, “I am no longer an artist interested and curious, I am a messenger who will bring back word from the men who are fighting to those who want the war to go on for ever. Feeble, inarticulate, will be my message, but it will have a bitter truth, and may it burn their lousy souls.”

Paul Nash: The Landscape: Hill 60 (exh.1918 Pen and black ink, watercolour and coloured chalks on grey paper: Manchester City Galleries

No life exists in fields of mud and shell holes. The sun fails in the grey, mud-coloured sky. A ruddy pool in the centre of the picture suggests death.

In another Nash painting, Wounded, Passchendaele, he departs from his usual depiction of war-ravaged landscapes without figures. The colours evoke the horrors of gangrene and mustard gas.

The large painting L’Enfer (Hell) (1921) by French artist George Leroux depicts the slaughter at Verdun in northeast France, where the French army lost a half-million men fighting the German army in 1916. One peers as if through fire and smoke and finally discerns the dead, who have become the colour of mud, in the mud.

Particularly emotive are six black-and-white woodcuts in a series entitled The War, by German artist Kathe Kollwitz, which evokes the grief and anguish of civilians in WWI. A testimonial to her son Peter who fell in the war, this series was first exhibited in 1924 at the newly founded International Anti-war Museum in Berlin. Kollwitz was already established as an artist who portrayed the poverty of the working class and peasantry in Germany. In The War: The Parents, the grieving parents are “entwined in mutual loss.”

Also exhibited are works by two other significant German artists, Otto Dix and Heinrich Hoerle. There are four black-and-white etchings from Der Krieg (The War) series by Otto Dix. These took inspiration from Goya’s The Disasters of War, which recorded the horrors of the Napoleonic invasion of Spain and the Spanish Wars of Independence in 1808-1814. In Seen on the Escarpment at Cléry-sur-Somme, painted in 1924, a soldier slumps, dead so long that a bird has made a nest in his gaping skull. His comrade with his lower jaw blown off appears to be laughing. In the picture The Mad Woman of Sainte-Marie-a-Py, a mother driven mad by grief amid the ruins of her house bares her breast as if to feed her dead baby.

Constructivist artist Heinrich Hoerle, who was involved in the Dada movement, which believed art should serve the cause of revolution, createdThe Cripple Portfolio in 1919. This series of 12 lithographs were first published in Cologne, inspired by the 2.7 million disabled war veterans, of whom 67,000 were amputees. Hoerle explored the psychological repercussions of the trauma the veterans suffered in life and even in their dreams. In Das Ehepaar (The Married Couple), painted in 1920, a couple embrace. Their furrowed foreheads are pressed together; she is clutching his prosthetic arm that ends in a hook.

Among the other notable works dealing with WWI are nine charcoal drawings by the lesser-known Italian artist Pietro Morando. A volunteer in the Italian Elite troops, he drew on anything he could find. His work has a startling immediacy, such as 1916’s A Remnant of the Last Action, which shows a soldier leaning in death on barbed wire. The artist was captured in 1918 and imprisoned in Nagymegyer, Hungary, where thousands of Italian civilians were interned and died. Morando sketched the torture, starvation, cholera and executions in the prison camp.

Two paintings bear witness to the Holocaust by artists commissioned to record the liberation of Bergen-Belsen.

In Belsen camp: The Compound for Women, painted by Leslie Cole in 1945, the nightmare that greeted the liberators is portrayed—10,000 unburied corpses, emaciated inmates in blue-striped pyjamas wandering forlorn.

In Human Laundry (1945), Doris Zinkeisen shows barely alive female survivors lined up in beds being washed and deloused in the section of the camp known as the Human Laundry. Their skeletal frames contrast pitifully with the rounded figures of the orderlies administering to them.

Introducing the Haunted Memories of the Hibakusha, the exhibition explains that at 08:15 on August 6, 1945 (when the Japanese high command were negotiating surrender, although this is not mentioned), a US bomber dropped an atomic bomb nicknamed Little Boy on the city of Hiroshima. Between 70,000 and 80,000 died from the initial blast and many more died later from their injuries and radiation sickness. On August 9, a second, even more powerful bomb was dropped on Nagasaki.

Gisaku Tanaka (age 72 at the time of drawing) Lights blinking on in the atomic desert (1973-4 Watercolour © Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, Japan)

In 1974, a 77-year-old man named Iwachi Kobayashi gave a local TV station a drawing of the scene around the Yorozuya Bridge at about 4 p.m. on August 6, 1945. Inspired by this image, the TV station made an appeal to survivors to submit their memories of the atomic bombing. The response was overwhelming. Shown in this exhibition are 12 delicately constructed pictures portraying the horrific aftermath. Lights Blinking, by Gisaku Tanaka, was the artist’s view from Hijiyama Hill after the blast. The Red Cross hospital was painted by Fumiko Yamaoka, aged 47, in 1973-1974, when he committed his memories to watercolour.

Fumiko Yamaoka (age 47 at the time of drawing) Red Cross Hospital (1973-4 Watercolour © Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, Japan)

These pictures deserve a wide circulation, a reminder of the unspeakable horrors of nuclear war at a time when US imperialism seriously contemplates engaging in a new war against China and Russia and is fomenting war on many fronts.

More-contemporary works include three anti-war pieces by Nancy Spero, one of which shows a fleeing woman cradling her child, in the context of the death squads and the “disappeared” of El Salvador in 1986.

The image of a black, hooded figure in Abu Ghraib is an indictment of the torture carried out by the US army and CIA in the Iraq war that began in 2003. Created in 2004 by Richard Serra, there exists a larger print with the words STOP BUSH.

Problematic is the juxtaposition in the Art Gallery of Sleeping Children (2012), by Sam Saimee, with the official UK war artist for the Iraq war John Keane’sEcstasy of Fumbling (Portrait of the Artist in a Gas Alert) (1991). In just a few hours on March 16, 1988, 5,000 Kurdish civilians were killed by mustard gas, and the nerve agents sarin, tabun and vx, in an attack ordered by then-Iraqi president Saddam Hussein. The dead children lie as if sleeping. This horrific slaughter of civilians took place during the Iran-Iraq war, when the Western powers supported and armed the Iraqi suppression of the Kurdish uprising in the north, which was backed by Iran.

Without explaining this, or the causes of the first Iraq war, placing this painting next to embedded artist John Keane’s work lends justification to the US “Desert Storm” war against Iraq in 1990-1991. The UN investigation into Iraq’s supposed stockpile of weapons of mass destruction, used to justify the invasion of Iraq in 2003, concluded that by 1991 Iraq had destroyed its chemical and biological weapons and had no WMDs.

Another controversial painting is a large 1994 canvass by Peter Howson called Croatian and Muslim. It portrays the rape of a Muslim woman during the Bosnian war. The Imperial War Museum, which commissioned the work, refused to show it because Keane had learned of the incident from the victim’s accounts—i.e., he wasn’t an eye witness—and it is today owned by the singer David Bowie. The artist came back from Yugoslavia traumatised.

There were atrocities on all sides in the Bosnian civil war between the rival Croat, Bosnian Muslim and Serbian cliques, following the imperialist-backed dissolution of Yugoslavia. The US cynically employed the pretext of humanitarian defence of the Bosnian Muslims to intervene militarily.

The most moving and accessible art works all tell a profound truth—that it isnot a “sweet and fitting thing to die for one’s country.” In the words of murdered German revolutionary Karl Liebknecht, who was so lovingly portrayed by Kathe Kollwitz, “Ally yourselves to the international class struggle against the conspiracies of secret diplomacy, against imperialism, against war, for peace within the socialist spirit.” With a call to disarm the war-mongering capitalist class, he said, “The main enemy is at home.”

Dawn spacecraft enters orbit around Ceres

Bryan Dyne

NASA’s Dawn spacecraft successfully entered orbit around Ceres on March 6. It is the first spacecraft to successfully orbit two extraterrestrial bodies, enabling it to provide data on two different primordial objects in the solar system.

Ceres was first discovered by Italian astronomer Giuseppe Piazzi in 1801 as part of a broader search for a suspected planet between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. When first discovered, Ceres was believed to be the “missing planet” being searched for. However, as other objects at approximately the same orbit were discovered, it was realized that Ceres, Pallas and other recently discovered bodies were not planets but something much smaller. To classify them, astronomer William Herschel coined the term asteroids (“star-like”).

Artistic rendering of Dawn as it travels from Vesta (left) to Ceres (right).

Despite this, Ceres, Pallas, Vesta and Juno, the first four asteroids to be discovered, were still classified as planets until 1845. They appeared in textbooks across Europe and were even given their own unique symbols. It was only in the late 1840s, starting with the discovery of Astraea and a slew of other asteroids, that it was accepted that they were too small and numerous to be planets. It was around this time that the phrase “asteroid belt” was coined to describe the region between Mars and Jupiter where all these objects were housed. More than 100,000 asteroids have since been discovered.

Since then, asteroids and the larger dwarf planets have been objects of great interest to the astronomical community. Asteroids (and their larger cousins dwarf planets, such as Ceres) do not exist only in the asteroid belt. Some are in Jupiter’s orbit, locked very tightly in place by the gas giant’s powerful gravity. Others have orbits that take them inside Earth’s orbit and there is a possibility for a mission to one of these in the near future.

It is thought that during the solar system’s formation, large bodies such as Ceres acted as embryos for the creation of even larger rocky worlds, including the inner solar system planets, the Moon and the larger satellites of the gas giants. That Ceres didn’t become a planet is most likely due to the gravitational domination of Jupiter, which either caused planetary embryos to collide with each other or ejected them from the solar system entirely. Ceres escaped both of these fates.

A full rotation of Ceres as observed by Dawn from 46,000 kilometers away. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA

Studies of Ceres, Vesta (Dawn’s first target) and other objects in the asteroid belt provide insights into the conditions of the solar system during its formation. Ceres seems geologically unchanged since its formation and its hypothesized rocky core and icy mantle proves true, provide a glimpse of solar system temperatures from 4.6 billion years ago. On the other hand Vesta is more evolved and much more dense, providing insight into the type of primordial material that become the cores of the inner planets, including Earth. By looking at both of these bodies, Dawn allows astronomers to compare the evolutionary history of each and further refine models of the Solar System’s formation.

Both objects are also worth looking at in themselves. Vesta has an unusually large rotation rate, possibly caused by the collision that took off about one percent of its mass. It also is not in hydrostatic equilibrium, meaning that its structure is not stable.

Ceres is even more intriguing. It is the smallest known object in the solar system to have enough gravity to be spherical in shape, rather than oblate. There is a possible atmosphere caused by sublimation of ice on the surface or volcanic activity driven by internal radioactivity that spews out ice crystals. In the approach to Ceres, Dawn photographed two bright spots on the dwarf planet’s surface, which could be mineral flats, plumes of water vapor, or something else entirely. It is also suspected that Ceres may have an ocean of liquid water under its surface, which makes it a candidate for the presence of life.

Two bright spots on Ceres which apparently lie in the same basin. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA

Over the coming months, Dawn will provide a clearer understanding of these phenomena. On approach to Ceres, its three instruments—provided by Germany, Italy and the United States—have already provided image quality exceeding that of the Hubble Space Telescope. No doubt over the coming period, they will continue to uncover more about this rocky and icy world.

It is worth mentioning Dawn’s propulsion system. While the launch was done using a conventional chemical rocket, the engines used to propel it through the solar system are somewhat unconventional ion thrusters. Instead of directing the explosion of a chemical reaction, Dawn accelerates a stream of xenon atoms behind it, slowly but steadily changing its velocity using Newton’s Third Law of Motion. The effect is similar to pushing someone away while ice-skating. With no friction, both people move way from the original point of contact.

This is what has allowed Dawn to visit both Vesta and now Ceres. If normal rockets were used, the weight constraints needed to keep that much fuel around would have been prohibitive. On the other hand, relatively little atomic material is needed to form the thrust that is needed to maneuver a spacecraft using ion propulsion. This has allowed Dawn to change its velocity over the course of its mission by more than 10 kilometers per second, almost twice the previous record. It also means that Dawn will be able to change the size of its orbit around Ceres, which currently stands at 13,500 kilometers. By November, that orbit will be spiraled down to 375 kilometers.

Ion thrusters have been envisioned by astronomers for more than a century. Robert Goddard first postulated the idea in a notebook in 1906 while Konstantin Tsiolkovsky was the first to publish in 1911. Since then, it was realized that such a system would be ideal in a near-vacuum or vacuum environment. While research into it dropped off somewhat in the ensuing decades, both the US and Soviet Union again looked into this idea in the 1950s and 1960s. While research into this technology dropped off in the US, the Soviet Union realized that such engines were excellent at stabilizing and maintaining orbits and so deployed more than 100 throughout the Cold War. It was only in 1992 and the introduction of Soviet science into the Western world that ion thrusters were again seriously considered.

Dawn is a remarkable achievement. After more than two centuries of study, internationally organized effort has made the study of some of the oldest objects in the solar system possible. The coming months will see a dramatic increase in our understanding of how the planets came to be.

Workers Struggles: Asia, Australia and the Pacific

WSWS

Asia

Nepalese telecom workers remain on strike

Employees of the privately-owned United Telecom Ltd (UTL) in Kathmandu Valley have been on strike since February 18 over 14 demands. They are ignoring a return to work order while 198 towers and other services for about 600,000 customers in 44 districts have failed. The company tried to use scabs to restore services but workers prevented them entering the communications sites.

The All Nepal Organisation of Bank, Finance Workers’ Union—UTL Chapter said its members would not return-to-work until suspension orders against 10 union leaders were first revoked. The company is demanding that workers end their strike immediately.

The telecom workers want increased wages, the issuing of appointment letters, as per Nepal labour law, to employees who have worked for more than 240 days and for management to withdraw plans to cut 65 jobs. Their action follows protests in January that affected the company’s Kathmandu Valley telecom services, including the international gateway and internet.

Pakistan: Peshawar utility workers walkout

Administrative workers at the government-owned Peshawar Electric Supply Company (Pesco) walked off the job on February 27 and locked several Pesco’s city offices to demand bonus salaries cancelled by the utilities’ management. The strikers protested outside WAPDA House where Pesco administration is located. Protests were also held in Bannu, Hangu and Karak. WAPDA (Water and Power Development Authority) is the national body that maintains power and water across Pakistan.

Pesco administrative workers complained that employees in other WAPDA distribution companies were receiving the salary bonus. The All Pakistan Wapda Hydro Electric Workers Union called off the strike after Pesco management agreed to resolve their issues within a week. Workers reluctantly ended their strike, complaining that Pesco had previously failed to keep promises to resolve the issue.

WAPDA workers hold more protests against privatisation

Following a one-day nationwide protest on February 28, Water and Power Development Authority (WAPDA) administrative workers across Pakistan held a three-day “pen-down” strike on Tuesday against government’s plan to privatise the nation’s power distribution companies. Union leaders told workers that industrial action would be escalated to include WAPDA’s 150,000-strong workforce if the government did not halt the privatisation process.

While the All Pakistan WAPDA Hydro Electric Workers Union and the WAPDA Hydro Electric Central Union have conducted a three-year anti-privatisation campaign, the unions have restricted this to demonstrations and harmless protest strikes. In line with International Monetary Fund demands, the government insists that it will continue privatising state-run utilities.

Tamil Nadu film manufacturing workers protest

Over 300 employees at the state-owned Hindustan Photo Films factory at Aruvangadu, Tamil Nadu demonstrated outside the plant on March 2 to demand last month’s salary. Around 270 employees of the company’s almost 600-strong workforce have accepted termination packages following production slowdowns. The government said it was considering whether to subsidise the company’s production under its “Make in India” program.

Karnataka heavy-machinery manufacturing workers walk out

Workers at the state-owned heavy machinery manufacturing company Bharat Earth Movers Limited (BEML) walked off the job on February 26. Hundreds of workers gathered near the factory in Bangalore and raised slogans calling for permanent employment for contract operators and technicians and other demands. The BEML Contract Workers’ Federation, affiliated with the Centre of Indian Trade Unions, want contract workers’ pay and conditions to be on par with all other company employees doing the same job.

Burmese police arrest striking garment workers

Police in Rangoon Division’s Insein township arrested at least 20 striking workers on Wednesday afternoon. They were part of a group of 200 striking workers from the COSTEC and Ford Glory garment factories in Shwepyithar Industrial Zone who began a sit-in protest after a planned march to Rangoon City Hall was blocked by hundreds of police.

On February 2, about 2,000 COSTEC and Ford Glory employees walked out to demand 80,000 kyat ($US78) per month, up from 50,000 kyat. The factories, which are owned by Chinese and South Korean firms respectively, rejected the demand and offered just 62,000 kyats. While some employees have since returned to work, about 600 remain on strike.

The strikers also want employers prosecuted who violate the law, compensation during negotiation periods and the release of arrested striking workers. The strikers said that they will not return to work until their demand for 80,000 kyat per month is granted.

Cambodian garment workers protest

About 200 garment workers from the Smart Shirt factory in Stung Meanchey district protested outside the Phnom Penh Municipal Court on February 27, after 20 colleagues were locked out of the factory. Management accused the workers of inciting other employees to strike and using violence.

On February 3, about 700 workers at the factory walked off the job demanding that management increase 300 senior employees’ wages by $28, after the government’s decision to increase the monthly minimum wage to $128 in January. While strikers ended the walkout on February 23, following a municipal court order, factory management violated the court order and prevented 20 workers from re-entering the plant.

Australia and the Pacific

Federal public sector workers apply for ballot to take industrial action

The Community and Public Sector Union (CPSU), this week lodged two separate applications to the Fair Work Commission to hold a Protected Action Ballot for industrial action in a dispute over new enterprise agreements covering public servants in the 19,000-strong Defence Department and Geoscience Australia. According to CPSU polling of members in both sectors over 90, percent wanted a ballot for industrial action. The vote will ask members to consider industrial action, including work bans and strikes up to 24 hours.

Defence Department and Geoscience Australia workers rejected so-called pay rise increases of between 0 and 1.05 percent per year over three years in return for a longer working day, the loss of time-off and a slowdown in the rate of progression up the pay scales. Workplace agreements covering 160,000 public sector workers in over 70 departments are up for renewal, with the government making similar low pay offers and reduced conditions. Workers in all departments have rejected the offers.

CPSU members in Centrelink, Medicare and Child Support—part of the Department of Human Services (DHS)—have maintained “low level” industrial action since December in their pay dispute with the government.

Despite members’ calls for strike action, the CPSU has limited action to co-ordinated lunchbreaks, reading messages of protest to call centre customers and not wearing the prescribed uniform to work. These harmless protests are aimed at dragging out the dispute and wearing down the resolve of members.

Tamil party in Sri Lanka calls for international war crimes inquiry

S. Jayanth

The Tamil National Alliance (TNA), the party of the Sri Lankan Tamil elite, has expressed “concerns” over the postponement of a report on war crimes in Sri Lanka prepared by a UN-committee.

At Sri Lankan Foreign Minister Mangala Samaraweera’s request, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Zeid Raad Al Hussein, agreed to “suspend” the inquiry report for six months. It was due to be tabled at the current meeting of the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC). US Secretary of State John Kerry gave the green light for the delay after Samaraweera met him in Washington last month.

A TNA delegation, including its leader R. Sambandan, met the visiting UN Under-Secretary General at the Department of Political Affairs, Geoffrey Feltman, in Colombo last Saturday and told him the party had no faith in a “domestic inquiry” by the Sri Lankan government. The TNA cited the broken promises of inquiries by the previous government of President Mahinda Rajapakse.

In requesting the report’s delay, Samaraweera promised that President Maithripala Sirisena’s new government would initiate a domestic inquiry that met “international standards.”

The TNA-dominated Northern Provincial Council passed a resolution on February 11 demanding a continued international investigation. “The UN Security Council should refer the situation in Sri Lanka to the International Criminal Court for prosecutions based on war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide,” it proposed. Alternatively, it urged a prosecution in a country, such as the US, where the courts exercise “universal jurisdiction over alleged events and perpetrators.”

This is the first time that the TNA has made such calls. It is not to champion the democratic rights of Tamil people or seek justice for war victims. Rather, the TNA is attempting to put maximum pressure on Sirisena’s new government to secure a significant devolution of power to the Tamil elite in the administration of the island’s north and east.

The UNHRC decision to delay its report has shattered illusions propagated by the TNA and other Tamil groups that the global powers have genuine interests in pursuing the war criminals and defending democratic rights. Yet again, what has been demonstrated is that war crimes and human rights issues are no more than tools in the hands of the US and its allies to advance their strategic interests.

The UNHRC inquiry was initiated last year via a US-sponsored resolution. Washington backed the military offensive against the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam (LTTE) to the hilt, culminating in the LTTE’s defeat in May 2009. Washington then hypocritically exploited the war atrocities and abuses committed by Rajapakse’s government to pressure it to end its close economic and strategic relations with China.

The Obama administration wanted Sri Lanka to line up behind the US military and strategic “pivot” to Asia, directed against China, along with other countries in the region. Washington was heavily involved, behind the scenes, in the regime-change machinations surrounding the presidential election in January that brought Sirisena to office. The US is now heavily supporting his government.

In its 11-page Northern Provincial Council (NPC) resolution, the TNA summed up the discriminations, pogroms, mass murders and military campaigns between 1948 and 2009 as acts of genocide by Sri Lankan governments. The resolution also noted the continuation of repressive actions after 2009.

The resolution was passed unanimously. Eelam People’s Democratic Party (EPDP) members agreed to vote for it after the TNA removed a section that pointed to the EPDP’s responsibility for war crimes. The EPDP, which was a partner in the Rajapakse government, has expressed support for Sirisena’s administration since the election.

Successive Colombo governments since 1948 have intensified the discrimination against Tamils, deprived them of their democratic rights, instigated communal attacks, killing Tamil people, triggered the war against the LTTE and maintained a military occupation of the north and east. At least 200,000 people were killed during the 26-year war, according to UN statistics, and hundreds of thousands were displaced. Systematic communal attacks on Tamils have, above all, been aimed at dividing, weakening and suppressing the working class, in order to defend capitalist rule.

However, the perspective of the TNA, which formerly acted as an LTTE mouthpiece, has always been to arrange a power-sharing deal with the Colombo ruling elite, and to win the backing of US and India for such an arrangement. In 2009, the TNA entered into discussions with Rajapakse. In the 2010 presidential election, it backed the former army commander, General Sarath Fonseka, even though he oversaw the final offensives that crushed the LTTE, killing tens of thousands of civilians.

Once the US, with India’s involvement, sponsored a regime-change operation to back Sirisena, Rajapakse’s former health minister, in this January’s presidential election, the TNA urged Tamil people to vote for him. After Sirisena’s election, the TNA joined his government’s top advisory body, the National Executive Council (NEC).

Sirisena has taken cosmetic steps to keep the TNA on board with his unstable government, which lacks a parliamentary majority. A civilian governor was appointed to replace the north’s military governor, but the military occupation remains in place.

After the NPC resolution was adopted, Chief Minister C.V. Wigneswaran met with Sirisena and reportedly told him that it was not directed against his government. Wigneswaran asked Sirisena to do something under his 100-day program that would be taken favourably by Tamils. In return, Sirisena promised to release 1,000 acres from the militarised-High Security Zones in Jaffna created during the war by seizing land from Tamil civilians.

The TNA’s stance, particularly the NPC resolution, has been seized on by parties in the Colombo elite, especially Sinhala chauvinist groups, as another occasion to stir up communalism. Opposition leader Nimal Siripala de Silva labeled the NPC resolution a “threat to national security.” A Sinhala extremist party, the Jathika Hela Urumaya, which is a partner in the government, declared it was a “blow to national harmony.” The Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) condemned the resolution as an attempt to “promote communal disharmony.”

Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe and State Minister for Defence Ruwan Wijewardena have repeatedly reassured these elements that the government will not reduce the military’s strength in the north or remove military camps. Thus, the military occupation will continue. Mired in Sinhala chauvinism, the Colombo establishment is hostile to making any major concessions to its Tamil counterparts, let alone to the democratic rights of working people.

At his meeting with Sirisena, Wigneswaran said the resolution was an “expression of the emotions and feelings of the Tamil people” and his party wanted to keep the Tamil question on the “international radar.” In other words, the TNA is raising the war crimes issue to deflect the anger among Tamil people while seeking the support of the international powers to advance the interests of the Tamil elites.