London murder, and wars

A horrible crime was committed yesterday in London, England. Police still don’t know the identities and backgrounds of the two perpetrators.

Evidently, there should be no premature conclusions. Such reasonable caution, however, seems to be wasted on the British extreme Right. Based on still unclear reports that the crime might have anything to do with Muslims, the neo-nazi “English Defence League” violently attacked police near the crime scene. While fellow Islamophobes attacked mosques which had nothing to do with the London murder.

This video from Britain is called EDL Nazi Salute Compilation.

From BreakingNews in Ireland:

23/05/2013 – 07:04:10

Two men have been arrested after separate attacks on mosques following the terrorist incident in Woolwich.

A 43-year-old man is in custody on suspicion of attempted arson after reportedly walking into a mosque with a knife in Braintree, Essex.

Local MP Brooks Newmark tweeted last night: “Local mosque in Braintree attacked by man with knives and incendiary device. Man arrested. No one injured.”

Mr Newmark added: “Just met with leaders of local mosque in Braintree which was attacked this evening. Thanked local police for their swift response.”

Essex Police said a 43-year-old from Braintree was arrested on suspicion of possession of an offensive weapon and attempted arson after the incident in Silks Way at 7.15pm.

The spokesman added that police were investigating the “full circumstances” and said “it would not be appropriate to speculate at this time”.

Meanwhile police in Kent were called to reports of criminal damage at a mosque in Canterbury Street, Gillingham, at 8.40pm.

A spokesman said a man is in custody on suspicion of racially-aggravated criminal damage. The force has stepped up the police presence after a man was butchered in broad daylight on the streets of London.

Supporters of the English Defence League (EDL) gathered at Woolwich Arsenal train station near the scene and threw bottles at police.

By Lindsey German, of the Stop the War Coalition in Britain:

The lessons to learn from the Woolwich killing are obvious: but not to David Cameron

23 May 2013

Any rational balance sheet of the last decade would show that the ‘war on terror’ has been a failure in its own terms: it has not prevented terrorism but caused it to spread.

The attack in Woolwich yesterday was horrific. There can be no justification for a murderous attack on an individual soldier in the streets of London. It must have been awful too for the local people who witnessed it.

Unlike with most terrorist attacks or indeed other crimes, we have been able to see film footage of the perpetrators, hear testimony from the witnesses who saw or talked to them. So we know what these men say motivated them. They claimed that the killing of the soldier was in response to the killing of Muslims by British soldiers in other countries. One said that the government did not care for people and should get the troops out.

The Boston bombers last month were supposedly similarly motivated. The Woolwich attack, carried out by two men now shot and wounded and under arrest in hospital, appears to represent a phenomenon that was pointed out nearly a decade ago by the security services in Britain: that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq would lead to a growing threat of terrorism in Britain. Those of us in Stop the War have long predicted that these sorts of attacks would happen because of the war on terror.

Unfortunately there is little sign that the government, media and military will draw any of the conclusions that they should from the attack. The instant response was to brand it as a serious terrorist attack, although already many commentators are saying they believe it more likely that this was a one off and isolated incident, and unlikely to be part of a wider conspiracy. David Cameron cut short a visit to Paris in order to fly home.

This reaction is one which manifestly fails to deal with the political causes underlying such attacks. The simple truth is that there were no such cases in Britain before the start of the ‘war on terror’ in 2001, which led to the invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. The consequences of those wars have been devastating for the people of those countries and further afield. Up to a million died in Iraq and 4 million were made refugees. Tens of thousands have died in Afghanistan. Fighting still continues and in Iraq looks like descending into civil war in some parts of the country.

The US and its allies have been involved in bombing attacks on these countries which have been responsible for many thousands of deaths.

A media comment that this was the day Baghdad came to the streets of Britain shows a grotesque ignorance of the country the invasion was meant to rescue for democracy, where daily sectarian bombings and killings are escalating on a scale not dreamt of in this country.

The interventions have spread in the name of ‘fighting terrorism’: drone attacks are taking place in a number of countries including Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. The bombing of Libya by the west in 2011 led to at least 30,000 dead. British troops are aiding the French in Mali. The British are intervening in the war in Syria for their own ends, and want to lift the EU arms embargo there in order to escalate the war and achieve regime change. The US and EU continues to back Israel despite its treatment of the Palestinians, even sending the architect of the Iraq war, Tony Blair, as envoy for peace in the Middle East.

Any rational balance sheet of the last decade and more would demonstrate that the war on terror has been a failure in its own terms. It has not prevented terrorism but caused it to spread.

The failure of politicians and military to face up to this has further damaging consequences: if the government refuses to change its own policy it has one simple solution — ‘blame the Muslims’. Muslims are expected to condemn any such attack whereas no such demand is put upon people of other faiths when a killing is carried out by Christians. Muslim is also equated with black or Asian, as when one television reporter described the men as of ‘Muslim appearance’.

Again, atrocities by white gun men, in Norway and the US for example, which are often highly politically motivated, are not regarded as needing to be defined by race. They are also rarely described as terrorism, but as the acts of fanatics or madmen.

It is an integral part of the war on terror that the invasion and occupation of mainly Muslim countries abroad has to lead to the dehumanising of the victims of the wars: so Muslim comes to equal extremist and terrorist. Racists like the EDL turned up in Woolwich to try to further foster Islamophobia. But this treatment of Muslims goes to the top of government and is spewed out daily in the press.

Similar views of the Irish were much more common in the 1970s and 80s when the IRA had a major bombing campaign in Britain. In the end there had to be a political solution which recognised genuine grievance.

In the end there has to be a political solution to terrorism. But it can only start with recognition of the disastrous effect of western foreign policy in the Middle East and South Asia for decades now, exacerbated by the consequences of 12 years of wars. That means acknowledging that those of us who said these wars were not the answer and would make things worse were absolutely right.

UK soldier killed in London in reprisal for Afghanistan and Iraq wars: here.

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David Attenborough opens wildlife park on rubbish dump

This video from Britain is called Sir David Attenborough opens the new Thurrock Thameside Nature Park.

From the BBC:

Tuesday 14th May 2013

David Attenborough opens wildlife park on rubbish tip

We’re used to seeing wildlife expert David Attenborough doing really exciting things like reporting from the Arctic or the middle of the jungle.

So what if we told you his latest project was a load of old rubbish… literally!

He’s helping to transform former rubbish dumps into beautiful wildlife parks.

Nel went to take a look at one in South East England…

The Thurrock Thameside Nature Park

The Thurrock Thameside Nature Park in Essex lies on top of 50 years of waste from six London boroughs, which has been restored to grasslands, woodland, ponds and reedbeds.

It’s one of the largest restoration projects ever made by the Essex Wildlife Trust, turning what was a rubbish tip into a haven for bees, birds and reptiles.

Sir David, president emeritus of the Wildlife Trusts, said: “This is the beginning of a new chapter in the history of this part of the Thames Estuary.

“The area has had its ups and downs. This wonderful nature area and the extraordinary new centre stand where there were once 230 Saxon dwellings – but in between times the waste of six London boroughs has been brought here.”

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17th century British revolutionary gets monument

Thomas Rainsborough (1610-1648) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

By John Rees in Britain:

Resurrecting Rainsborough

Friday 10 May 2013

History isn’t meant to happen this way in Gove‘s Britain. A young Muslim woman local councillor and the left getting together, to raise a memorial to a Leveller leader in a revolution the Tory right would rather forget, certainly isn’t on his agenda.

But that is how it’s happening in the London borough of Tower Hamlets on Sunday when Tony Benn, Councillor Rania Khan, Jeremy Corbyn MP and I unveil a plaque to Leveller leader Colonel Thomas Rainsborough of the New Model Army, a long-time hero of mine.

Researching his funeral procession for the book The People’s History Of London, I discovered that it turned into a huge Leveller demonstration which came from Tottenham via the City and ended in St John’s Church, Wapping.

The original church is long gone, as is its replacement, but the churchyard where Rainsborough was buried remains.

Rania Khan and I had met in Stop the War Coalition and I’d been part of the campaign that got her elected as a Tower Hamlets councillor. We met again at one of the meetings to launch the People’s History Of London and we talked about how great it would be if there were a plaque to Rainsborough in St John’s churchyard.

She said she would see what she could do and was as good as her word.

A few months later, a Tower Hamlets council officer from the parks department got in touch and we chose the location for the plaque and agreed the wording, based on a Leveller leaflet that was issued on the day of the funeral in November 1648. The new National Civil War Centre at Newark, due to open next year, lent its support.

The Rainsborough Regiment of the Sealed Knot re-enactors are sending a file of musketeers to fire the salute on Sunday. Their ensign will be there with the regiment’s flag, wholly appropriate since some accounts say that the sea-green ribbons that the mourners wore that day and which were to become the Leveller movement’s badge were torn from the regimental banner of the same colour.

On the day of the original funeral the royalist press complained that the crowd contained a ragtag of “Tom the tapster” and “Dick the doorsweeper.” On Sunday at 1pm we hope that some of their 21st-century counterparts will return the Levelling spirit to St John’s churchyard to honour the man who, at the Putney debates a year or so before his death, spoke these never to be forgotten words: “The poorest he that is in England hath a life to live as the greatest he … I think it’s clear, that every man that is to live under a government ought first by his own consent to put himself under that government and I do think that the poorest man in England is not at all bound in a strict sense to that government that he hath not had a voice to put himself under.”

The memorial ceremony commemorating the life of Thomas Rainsborough takes place at 1pm on Sunday May 12 in St John’s churchyard, Scandrett Street, London E1.

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Save endangered Madagascar fish

From Wildlife Extra:

London Zoo launches worldwide appeal to find and save Critically Endangered fish

Male Seeking Female: Must Want Kids

May 2013. Fish experts at ZSL London Zoo have launched an urgent worldwide appeal to find a female mate for the last remaining males of a critically endangered fish species.

Extinct in the wild – Only captive fish are male

The Mangarahara cichlid (Ptychochromis Insolitus) is believed to be extinct in the wild, due to the introduction of dams drying up its habitat of the Mangarahara River in Madagascar, and two of the last known individuals are residing in ZSL London Zoo’s Aquarium. And as if the situation wasn’t dire enough for this tropical fish species, the individuals at ZSL London Zoo are unfortunately both male.

None known in captivity

The Curator of the Aquarium at ZSL London Zoo, Brian Zimmerman, along with colleagues at Zurich Zoo in Switzerland set about trying to find other Mangaraharan cichlids in zoos around the world – using international zoo and aquarium associations to reach as many experts and aquarists as possible, but had no luck finding surviving females.

Desperate appeal

The team at ZSL London Zoo are now launching a desperate appeal for private aquarium owners, fish collectors, and hobbyists to come forward if they have or know of any females in existence, so that a vital conservation breeding programme can be started for the species.

Launching the appeal, ZSL London Zoo’s Brian Zimmerman said: “The Mangarahara cichlid is shockingly and devastatingly facing extinction; its wild habitat no longer exists and as far as we can tell, only three males remain of this entire species. It might be too late for their wild counterparts, but if we can find a female, it’s not too late for the species. Here at ZSL London Zoo we have two healthy males, as well as the facilities and expertise to make a real difference.

“We are urgently appealing to anyone who owns or knows someone who may own these critically endangered fish, which are silver in colour with an orange-tipped tail, so that we can start a breeding programme here at the Zoo to bring them back from the brink of extinction.”

ZSL London Zoo is asking anyone with information about the cichlids to email the team at fishappeal@zsl.org.

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American Indians, George Catlin paintings in London

This video is called George Catlin: American Indian Portraits (Trailer).

From The Art Newspaper:

Painter of a vanishing and vanished world

“George Catlin: American Indian Portraits”, National Portrait Gallery, London, until 23 June

By John Chu

In the summer of 1830, the American painter George Catlin (1796-1872) embarked upon the first of five journeys deep into the Indian territories that stretched west of the Mississippi River. Having abandoned a burgeoning law career and failed to establish himself as a society portraitist, this Pennsylvanian was busily reinventing himself as an artist-ethnographer possessed of an urgent mission to document the “looks and modes” of the Native American peoples before they were overtaken by the geographic encroachments of the United States. The result was a large body of oil paintings documenting the terrain and rituals of their ways of life, and an even more substantial collection of portraits detailing the continent’s wondrous variety of facial characteristics and tribal apparel— Mandan, Pawnee, Omaha; beads, plumage and face-paint were never arrayed in such dazzling variations as here.

“George Catlin: American Indian Portraits” presents a small but representative sample of this prolific output which now resides principally in the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC. By way of a centrepiece, its organisers have recreated a miniature version of the vast “Indian Gallery” that Catlin toured around Europe in the 1840s, including an initial spell up the road in a cavernous showroom on Piccadilly. Only around 5% of the original 500 exhibits have made it back to London, although many of the returning pictures have been arranged to approximate the dense, grid-like scheme of the Catlin’s travelling show. Stirring and poignant, the “Indian Gallery” was designed to capture the imagination of a wide, ticket-buying audience, and it still packs an impressive punch. A multitude of faces, one after another, attests to the astonishing diversity of “First Nation” culture and the enormity of its destruction.

As well as re-acquainting the British audience with this exotic, yet once-famous, body of works, Stephanie Pratt, a Dakotan and associate professor of the University of Plymouth, Joan Carpenter Troccoli, founding director of the Petrie Institute of Western American Art, Denver, co-curators of the how, and Peter Funnell, the gallery’s 19th-century portraits curator, have succeeded in advancing its claim to more than purely ethnographic attention. By placing the charismatic figure of Catlin squarely at centre stage, a story of artistic and commercial opportunism emerges as surely as his vision of a noble, doomed world.

The manifest struggle to transcend an extremely limited technique is itself a point of considerable fascination (Catlin was a virtual stranger to chiaroscuro, glaze-work, and convincing figure drawing). Indeed it appears to have been thanks to a mixture of chance and sheer, bloody-minded persistence that moments of pictorial grace did occasionally shine through in his profuse outpouring. Catlin’s approach is most successful when, paradoxically, a composition remains incomplete. In the masterpiece of the show, La-dóo-ke-a, Buffalo Bill,

sic; Buffalo Bull

a Grand Pawnee Warrior, 1832, a virtually unworked background allows the explosion of the sitter’s hairstyle to pop off the canvas, along with the starkly outlined buffalo heads that stain various parts of his body. In Hee-oh’ks-te-kin, Rabbit Skin Leggings, a Brave, 1832, the inscrutable, hieratic mask of a painted face dissolves into vague, fly-away wisps of hair and fringing, as if the whole confection might at any moment be carried off on a breeze.

The subject of this exhibition raises a host of cultural and political questions that easily exceed the capacity of a three-room gallery. Perhaps wisely therefore, the organisers have opted to broach the complex politics involved in the Western representation of indigenous cultures in a substantial catalogue and in an associated programme of events.

In the particular context of the National Portrait Gallery, it seems, however, a little perverse not to address this oeuvre’s peculiar contribution to the history of the painted likeness as part of the main presentation. I wanted to know, for example, what Catlin’s subjects might have made of this entirely foreign yet peculiarly intimate act of representation. In Europe, could a phenomenon so comprehensively removed from the early 19th-century business of commission and polite self-presentation have been unquestioningly understood as portraiture? Or was something more generically ambiguous in play? And what can portraiture’s dominant role in this episode of proto-anthropology tell us about its documentary authority at the dawn of the photographic age? With different outcomes and at vastly contrasting stakes, Catlin’s art bears witness not to one, but to two visual cultures on the brink of transformation.

John Chu is studying for a PhD at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, writing his dissertation of 18th-century genre painting.

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Marcel Duchamp exhibition in London

This video from the USA says about itself:

Nov 21, 2012

‘Dancing around the Bride‘ is the first exhibition to explore the interwoven lives, works, and experimental spirit of Marcel Duchamp and four of the most important American postwar artists: composer John Cage, choreographer Merce Cunningham, and visual artists Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg.

By Christine Lindey in England:

The Bride And The Bachelors: Duchamp With Cage, Cunningham, Rauschenberg And Johns

Barbican, London EC2

Saturday 04 May 2013

A Marcel Duchamp exhibition shows his continuing influence in questioning exactly what ‘art’ is

Born into a notary’s family in provincial France, Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) headed for Paris to study art in 1905. By 1912 he had challenged not only academic naturalism but also the orthodoxies of the avant-garde. Impatient with the latter’s obsession with formal innovations Duchamp gave up what he called “retinal painting” in favour of returning art to the realms of the mind.

His first love had been Symbolist art and poetry and elliptical, speculative appeals to the imagination continued to be the key to his life’s work. His irreverent, iconoclastic works and actions questioned the fundamental processes, techniques, materials and skills upon which Western art had rested since the Renaissance.

Duchamp redefined the artist’s social role from brilliant creator to provocateur. This had a major influence on Western art yet the validity of his legacy remains controversial.

In 1914 he bought a mass-produced bottle rack, inscribed it with a now forgotten title, signed it and called it a “ready-made,” thus questioning the traditional assumption that art consists of individual objects made by the artist.

The best known ready-made is the urinal which he titled Fountain. He signed it R Mutt and submitted it anonymously to an independent exhibition in 1917.

Defending it in his radical magazine Blindman, Duchamp wrote: “Whether R Mutt, with his own hands, made the fountain is of no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view – creating a new thought for that object.”

In choosing commonly seen, industrially produced, non-emotive and “aesthetically neutral” objects, Duchamp questioned existing aesthetic criteria and heightened awareness of the everyday.

Equally radical was The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even (1915 -1923), known as the Large Glass. Using non-traditional processes and material it consists of two panels of glass encased in a tall, free-standing aluminium stand.

Motifs are represented on its transparent surface with lead, silver foil, varnished dust and drilled holes – with some of their forms generated by chance rather than by aesthetic judgements.

Its complex content can only be decoded by referring to The Green Box, in which unpaginated notes name its various characters and describes the actions of the bride, alias “motor-desire,” the bachelors, the nine metallic moulds and the oculists’ witnesses.

Devoid of a single, linear narrative the Large Glass’s content nevertheless suggests tales of frustrated sexual desire. Its open-ended, allusive meaning leaves room for the spectator’s imagination to soar. Or to scoff.

So radical were his innovations and so indifferent was Duchamp to careerism that he only became influential when rediscovered by the 1950s avant garde. This Barbican exhibition considers his works along with those he inspired in the American vanguard – composer John Cage, choreographer Merce Cunningham and the artists Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns.

In so doing, it explores the impact of several threads of Duchampian thought such as Cage and Cunningham’s use of chance and of “ready-made” sounds and human movement from everyday life in their music and ballets and Rauschenberg and Johns’s incorporation of mass-produced every-day objects and imagery into works to bridge the gap between art and life.

The exhibition also explores collaborations and interactions between the five artists such as Cage’s scores for Cunningham’s ballets and the references to Duchamp’s works in sets by Rauschenberg and Johns for Cunningham’s productions.

Created during WWI and its aftermath, the emotional disengagement of Duchamp’s work can be partly attributed to sociopolitical revulsion.

That it resonated for vanguard artists in the US of the 1950s can be understood in the context of their nation’s cold war denial of its 1930s socially engaged art. Theirs were creative responses to Duchamp’s legacy.

However, in the mid-1970s and 1980s his rebellion and iconoclasm became ossified by art educational institutions into academic orthodoxy. A misunderstanding of his ideas to mean that anything can be called art has led to an infestation of mindless and sniggering art in recent decades – an unwarranted legacy which has cast a shadow over Duchamp’s own work.

Curated by the contemporary artist Philippe Parreno, this celebratory exhibition becomes a creative soundscape/installation in its own right. It intertwines sound, light, live dance performances and art works. Relatively few and judiciously selected works by each of the five artists are presented with flair and imagination to appeal to the senses as much as to the mind.

Avoiding a stodgy trudge through endless works, the exhibition introduces complex ideas and creative cross-fertilisations carefully themed around key ideas in an elegant and palatable form.

Art in which ideas take precedence over skill and visual responses must be based on ideas with depth of meaning and purpose. Parreno’s exhibition may inspire yet a new generation to engage with Duchamp’s intelligent questioning of preconceived ideas which will bury the puerile and cynical use to which they have been made.

Runs until June 9. Box office: 0845 121-6823.

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Photographer Sebastião Salgado and the environment

This video is called Sebastião Salgado, GENESIS.

By Michal Boncza in England:

Sebastiao Salgado: Genesis

Natural History Museum, London SW7

Saturday 27 April 2013

Images of pristine nature in Sebastiao Salgado‘s Genesis are a reminder of what we could lose, says

It is not perhaps surprising that the photographer Sebastiao Salgado should have refocused his camera away from the human misery inflicted worldwide by unforgiving capitalism towards the environment which has, in the past, been something of an appendage in his images.

As a native of Brazil he has witnessed some of the most appalling and ruthless decimation of nature for profit, often imposed by the murder of those who opposed it, in his homeland.

“Genesis is about beginnings. It is about the unspoiled planet, the most pristine parts and a way of life that is traditional and in harmony with nature,” he says of this exhibition.

Salgado makes clear that he wants people to see our planet in another way, to feel moved and be brought closer to it. “I want them to become more conscious of the environment, to feel respect for nature because this is something that is relevant to everyone,” he stresses.

Spanning 32 countries, Genesis is a project which took eight years to complete. The 200 images on show range from the spectacular to the rather non-descript and at times that dilutes the “wow factor” which can highlight important issues.

Salgado has always eschewed the distraction of the full colour permeating contemporary visual communication in favour of black and white. This has the effect of forcing the viewer into an intimate response to the image in order to discern its meaning.

Time is also a factor in Salgado’s work. By arresting our attention and holding it for longer than the rush of modern life would otherwise permit, mere passing curiosity evolves into an act of discovery.

The large-scale photographs are engrossing and their impact mesmerising. The tail of a whale off the Valdes Peninsula in Argentina floats over half the image area and some of nature’s evolutionary constructs like the scales of the marine iguana of the Galapagos are simply incomprehensible in their ultimate, glittering and metallic perfection.

This is primordial Earth – rock, ice, water and vegetation populated by animals and the occasional humans. The latter’s activities are shown to be entirely symbiotic with nature and its serene beauty is free from the devastation of pernicious human encroachment everywhere else.

Most of Salgado’s arresting style is here in abundance. He grasps confidently that elusive fraction of a second that makes the image that would defeat most of us time and time again. His compositional panache and exceptionally rich tonality, with endlessly tactile textures and intriguing patterns, is evident in The Confluence Of The Colorado And The Little Colorado Seen From The Navajo Territory. It transforms mere documentation into a magnificent tableaux reminiscent of Pieter Brueghel the Elder in his Tower Of Babel painting.

Elsewhere the stern-faced albatrosses of Steeple Jason Island look like they might draw similarly forbidding faces in Latin America as Salgado, perhaps not wishing to offend his hosts, forsakes the entire continent’s preferred name of the Malvinas archipelago for the Falklands.

There is of course more to Salgado than these remarkable images. Since the 1990s he has worked with his wife Lelia Wanick Salgado on the restoration of a part of the Atlantic forest in his native Minas Gerais province in Brazil.

They succeeded in turning the area into a nature reserve in 1998 and have planted 1.7 million trees to date. They’ve also created the Earth Institute, an environmental NGO dedicated to a mission of reforestation, conservation and education, and 10 per cent of the ticket sales from this exhibition will go to the institute.

Salgado is rightly disappointed by the widespread indifference to the plight of the environment but applies a questionable logic when castigating such attitudes.

“We can’t just criticise the companies that pollute and destroy nature because we are the ones consuming their products and justifying their activities and through the stock market we are, in the last instance, the ‘owners’ of these same companies,” he states, as if the entire global population were all stakeholders in the neoliberal enterprise.

Yet it is these companies that have hooked us like Pavlov’s dogs on insatiable consumption, increasing the dosage exponentially until – should we fail to detox – the Salgado-immortalised world will sooner rather than later pass away and with it our own species.

Runs until September 8. Box office: (020) 7942-5725.

To coincide with the exhibition Taschen have published Salgado’s Genesis in two formats. Visit www.taschen.com for details.

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London Roman age archaeological discoveries

This video from England is called The Roman gallery at the Museum of London.

From daily The Morning Star in Britain:

Wednesday 10 April 2013

Experts praise big City dig

An archaeological dig in the City of London that has unearthed thousands of Roman artefacts was hailed as “the most important excavation ever held in London” today.

Just yards from the Thames, in what is now the capital’s financial district, Museum of London archaeologists have found coins, pottery, shoes, lucky charms and an amber gladiator amulet which date back almost 2,000 years.

Experts excavating the site, which lies alongside a huge building project for new offices on Queen Victoria Street, have also uncovered wooden structures from about 40 AD around 40ft (12m) beneath the ground.

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Lady Thatcher’s expensive militarist funeral

From daily News Line in Britain:

Thursday, 11 April 2013

Thatcher funeral–a state of siege!

THATCHER’S state funeral on April 17, is to be a Tory state provocation of the working class.

Her coffin is to be carried through the streets of London by 700 troops from units associated with the Malvinas (Falklands) war.

The great leader is so popular that the skies above her coffin will be defended by planes, helicopters and missiles.

All the drains, and other bomb friendly structures along the route, will be searched, sealed and guarded.

Barriers will be in place to prevent trucks or other vehicles being driven into the funeral procession.

Lists are being drawn up of people who have a record of active hostility to Thatcher.

Since large numbers of people are in this category, time is being spent on compiling a list of the ‘most dangerous’.

These are to be got out of the way for a number of days by house arrests, or illegal jailings, in fact kidnappings.

Troops from the SAS and Special Boat Service will be in the vanguard of the security operation, that signifies that the gloves are coming off in the struggle to smash the NHS and the Welfare State.

Special targets of the operation are Irish Republican and left-wing groups.

Detectives are monitoring social media, internet forums and Blackberry messaging networks in the expectation that attempts will be made to halt the funeral.

Yesterday afternoon, PM Cameron put himself forward as the heir of Thatcher and her chief mourner.

…

• Yesterday afternoon it was announced that the proposed one-minute silence at the Reading vs Liverpool football match this weekend to remember Margaret Thatcher was cancelled.

The cancellation came after the Hillsborough Families representative Margaret Aspinall said: ‘To have a minute’s silence for her at any football ground would be an insult to all fans‘.

Minute’s silence for Margaret Thatcher: Hillsborough group says tribute would be ‘insult to fans’; former sports minister warns silence would backfire: here.

This video says about itself:

Brendan Rodgers: Silence for Hillsborough, NOT Thatcher [11.04.2013]

Liverpool manager Brendan Rodgers says the silence ahead of their game at Reading on Saturday is for the victims of the Hillsborough disaster and not for the former Prime Minister Baroness Thatcher.

Reading chairman Sir John Madejski has called for football to mark the death of Baroness Thatcher with a one-minute silence but the Premier League and Football League will not be asking clubs to organise tributes.

Rodgers says remembering the people who died at Hillsborough is “the only remembrance there should be” and it will give Reading an opportunity “to show their support for the families and the 96 supporters who are no longer here”.

From the site of the Socialist Labour Party, the party of Arthur Scargill, National Union of Mineworkers president during the 1984-1985 miners’ strike, bloodily suppressed by the Thatcher administration:

April 2013 – A contrast of London’s historic funerals between those evoking love and admiration and those provoking mass hatred and disquiet.

The City of London is no stranger to large scale funerals for persons who have impacted greatly upon the Country’s historic events.

Back in the latter part of 1648, thousands of people marched on foot whilst others rode on horseback as they followed the funeral cortege of the great leveller leader Thomas Rainsborough. He had been assassinated a week before (30th October) at Doncaster, many levellers believing that Cromwell was implicated. They followed the procession going via Islington, St Pauls, Cheapside and through the East End to Wapping where he was interred. He had been the leader of the physical force New Model Army levellers, the Parliamentary naval Vice Admiral and had been a great Civil War commander. The followers wore ribbons of sea green (his own regimental colours) and black. From that time, sea green has been associated as the colour of incorruptibility. Indeed, French Revolutionary leader Robespierre was called the ‘sea green incorruptible’. There was nothing but affection for the deceased shown at this historic event.

Moving on in history, another great funeral took place in January 1806. The naval hero Admiral Lord Nelson had been killed at the battle of Trafalgar on October 21st 1805. Fatal casualties would normally have been buried at sea but in this case, his comrades decided to preserve his body in a barrel of brandy. His ship, the Victory arrived at Portsmouth on December 4th. The preparations for a state funeral were by then underway and the proceedings reached their peak over the days of 5th to the 9th of January 1806. The body was taken up the Thames on one of Charles the Second’s state barges and was eventually interred in St Paul’s Cathedral. Thousands of admirers flocked to the events. A monument to the hero, Nelson’s Column was constructed between 1840 and 1843 and is, of course, sited in Trafalgar Square.

We can compare these two outpourings of natural grief with the imminent event in London next week. Here, the forces and police are being deployed in huge numbers in the Capital and along the route in order to prevent hostilities aimed at the cortege. Already, the secret services are drawing up lists of those to be arrested and prevented from getting anywhere near this exclusive ‘Establishment’ function. Because there are so many hostile parties from throughout the World to the historical memory of the deceased, this is going to prove a very complicated operation. The cost of all the surveillance, logistics and event is going to be huge. The great insult to the British working class is that they are being asked to fund most of this (at a time of supposed austerity). Rarely in World history can we say that military might has been used to prevent a County’s inhabitants from venting their fury at a leader who left office such a long time ago! The irony is that some of this fury will be on public display in Trafalgar Square!

By Roger Bagley in London, England:

Here’s the real state funeral

Wednesday 10 April 2013

Easington Labour MP Grahame Morris told today why he would join an emotional ceremony next Wednesday to mark the destruction of 1,400 local miners’ jobs under vicious Thatcherite policies.

Mr Morris was among a large group of around 100 Labour members who disobeyed party whips and refused to attend today’s gruesome hours-long Commons session to pay tribute to Margaret Thatcher.

While the Establishment will bring London to a halt next Wednesday with an obscene Thatcher funeral spectacular, Mr Morris will be preparing for a special event to mark the 20th anniversary of the closure of his local Easington pit.

The event in Easington Colliery Working Men’s Club is expected to be a moving occasion, with sad memories of the pit jobs massacre mixed with emotional highs as Thatcher’s victims enthusiastically toast her demise.

Closure of the pit with the loss of 1,400 jobs under the post-Thatcher Tory government in 1993 devastated the local community.

Mr Morris said that the effects of coalfield and industrial closures in East Durham were “absolutely dire.”

He declared that it would have been “hypocritical” for him to attend the Commons today in view of the disastrous consequences of Thatcher’s policies for people in his area, including his own family.

Durham Miners chairman Alan Cummings, who will be hosting next Wednesday’s event, told the Star today: “I hated the woman. I think she was evil.”

The special recall parliamentary session today turned into a ghoulish ruling-class theatre of the absurd, in which the venomous and destructive Thatcher was portrayed as a great national figure.

Yawning gaps on the Labour benches took the shine off the event as Prime Minister David Cameron declared that “she made this country great again.”

Labour leader Ed Miliband jumped up on cue to describe Thatcher as “a great and towering figure” even though he “disagreed with much of what she did.”

One of the few dissenting voices was Labour MP David Winnick, who recalled that Thatcher’s “highly damaging” policies “caused immense pain and suffering to ordinary people.”

Former Labour minister John Healey was among MPs who refused to attend today’s parliamentary session.

He accused the Prime Minister of hijacking Thatcher’s death for political gain.

Mr Cameron was using the parliamentary session as “a platform for his party’s ideology, not just eulogy,” complained Mr Healey.

Miners’ MP Ian Lavery also stayed away, declaring: “I feel very personally about what Thatcher did to my family, my friends and my colleagues, not to mention the people I represent in Parliament.”

Another deliberate absentee was left-wing MP Jeremy Corbyn, who declared that the coverage of Thatcher’s death by most of the media was “beyond absurd.”

Parliamentary authorities announced that MPs returning from overseas visits for the Commons tribute to Thatcher would be able to claim up to £3,750 in travel expenses.

Next Wednesday’s costly ceremonial funeral for Thatcher in St Paul’s will be backed by a huge mobilisation of police and armed forces.

The processional route to the cathedral will be lined by personnel from army, navy and air force, with various military bands performing.

The coffin will be draped in a Union Jack and borne on a gun carriage drawn by six horses, while guns will be fired at one-minute intervals from beside the Tower of London.

From the Durham Miners’ Association in England:

After a full year, the miners were defeated but Thatcher did not have long to savour her victory as Prime Minister. Her pigheaded imposition of the poll tax moved a people weary of the politics of greed to revolt. She became an embarrassment to her party and they brutally cast her aside.

When we say we celebrate her death, we are reflecting the deep and lasting bitterness of our mining communities – and felt across the entire working class – at the ravages of her brutal policies which destroyed the lives and prospects of so many people.

Even today, we see the legacy of her policies in the continued vandalism of the Tory-Lib-Dem coalition, this time aimed at dismantling the Welfare State.

Thatcher infamously said, “There is no such thing as society”. She was the person who did her best to wreck it. We are the people who will rebuild it.

From the National Union of Mineworkers in Britain:

DEATH OF THATCHER

Margaret Hilda Thatcher (13 October 1925 – 8 April 2013)

The former UK Prime Minister who held office from 4 May 1979 until 28 November 1990 died 8 April 2013. To her family our condolences.

The legacy of what the Conservative Government did to British Industry under Thatcher is not one to be proud of if you really did want the best for the people.

Of course Thatcher was the symbol of “free enterprise” and set out to serve those whose interests were profit for the few.

The coal mining industry is not on its own in suffering the decimation of a world class industry in the name of the “free market”.

Thatcher lived long enough to see her beliefs demolished when the “free market” collapsed and came running to the State for support.

Unlike the Banks who gambled, cheated and were bailed out – Coal mines were closed and communities were left to suffer.

Margaret Hilda Thatcher is gone but the damage caused by her fatally flawed politics sadly lingers on.

Good Riddance.

Related articles

• In remembrance: Minute’s silence is for Hillsborough victims, not Margaret Thatcher insist Reading (mirror.co.uk)
• Football tribute to Thatcher would be a mistake, says Hillsborough relative (guardian.co.uk)
• Margaret Thatcher funeral: Family should pay bill NOT taxpayers, say three out of five in poll (mirror.co.uk)
• Honouring Margaret Thatcher before Liverpool game would be an ‘insult’ say Hillsborough campaigners (telegraph.co.uk)
• Taxpayers can ‘well afford’ to contribute to estimated £10m cost of Baroness Thatcher’s funeral, says William Hague (independent.co.uk)

London theatre-goers vote Yes for anti-Thatcher song

This music video is the song Merry Christmas Maggie Thatcher, from the musical Billy Elliot.

By Will Stone in London, England:

Billy Elliot audience gives go-ahead to Thatcher song

Tuesday 09 April 2013

Theatre-goers at a West End production of Billy Elliot voted overwhelmingly to keep in a song celebrating Margaret Thatcher’s death hours after she died.

The second act of the musical, which is set during the miners’ strike, begins with the song Merry Christmas Maggie Thatcher, which has lyrics that refer to celebrating the death of the former prime minister.

The audience on Monday night were asked to vote on whether to keep the song in.

Only three people voted against the song being performed.

A Billy Elliot insider said that the vote was taken seriously and debated until it was decided that it would be best to put it to a democratic vote.

“It was a near unanimous verdict to keep the song in and go ahead.

“It was an electric show,” they added.

Merry Christmas Maggie Thatcher contains the lyrics: “We all celebrate today ‘cos it’s one day closer to your death.

“And they’ve brought their fascist bootboys and they’ve brought the boys in blue, and the whole Trade Union Congress will be at the party too.

“And they’ll all hold hands together. All standing in a line cos they’re privatising Santa this merry Christmas time, so…

“Merry Christmas Maggie Thatcher, may God’s love be with you. We all sing together in one breath.

“Merry Christmas Maggie Thatcher, we all celebrate today ‘cos it’s one day closer to your death.”

See also here.

The song is by Elton John and Lee Hall. The complete lyrics are here.

Related articles

• After an Audience Vote, ‘Billy Elliot’ Musical Keeps an Anti-Thatcher Song (artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com)
• Billy Elliot the Musical (en.wikipedia.org)
• Billy Elliot Audience Asked To Vote On Margaret Thatcher Song (contactmusic.com)
• Billy Elliot audience votes on Thatcher death song (itv.com)