Thursday, July 22, 2021

Video: One year on - Hope Probe takes UAE’s space journey beyond Mars

A special report on the first anniversary of the mission launched on July 20, 2020

Published: July 19, 2021 1
One year has passed and Hope Probe is currently orbiting the Red Planet to create a complete picture of the Martian atmosphere.Image Credit: Supplied

Dubai: July 20 — in the early hours of this day last year, the UAE’s dream of reaching for the stars was realised. Hope Probe, the first Arab interplanetary mission, was successfully launched from Tanegashima Space Centre (TNSC) in the Kagoshima Prefecture of southwestern Japan at 1.58am (UAE time) on July 20, 2020.

One year has passed and Hope Probe is currently orbiting the Red Planet to create a complete picture of the Martian atmosphere. “The mission has not only performed nominally across all areas, but has exceeded its anticipated performance, encompassing a range of additional activities and freeing up valuable resources to perform additional observations,” said the Emirates Mars Mission (EMM) on the eve of its first anniversary.

‘From strength to strength’


Omran Sharaf

EMM project director Omran Sharaf said on Monday: “We’ve had quite a lot of ‘wiggle room’ in addition to our planned parameters and our confidence in our spacecraft has gone from strength to strength, to be honest. We were able to cut the number of trajectory correction manoeuvres, perform additional observations during our flight to Mars and now have added a whole area of scientific study to the mission that I can only describe as a ‘bonus’. It has been a very busy year indeed for Hope Probe.”

‘A day full of pride’

Recalling the historic moment, Sharaf said in an earlier interview with Gulf News: “It was a day “full of pride, happiness and positivity. Yes, it was a very busy, intense and stressful day; but personally, I was confident about the teamwork and spacecraft design.”

Hope Probe journeyed over 493 million km to reach the Red Planet. The original seven Trajectory Correction Manoeuvres (TCMs) was cut to four because of the spacecraft’s outstanding performance during the Launch and Early Operations Phase (LEOPs). This conserved resources and allowed the EMM team to perform a series of observations en route to Mars.

Then came the most critical part of the mission — the Mars Orbit Insertion (MOI). Worried, scared, but confident — it was definitely a mixed feeling for Sharaf and his team who have reached that point — the farthest that any Arab would go in the universe. They only had one shot and with only 50 per cent success rate — it could go either way: failure or accomplishment.

Entering Mars

On February 9, Hope Probe entered the Mars orbit. Sharaf told Gulf News: “After we arrived, the stress went away. The feeling was very difficult to describe. For the first few minutes, I was still in shock. The past seven years (from Hope Probe announcement in 2014), went really fast in front of me. It took me a while to realise our feat and it was a good feeling. Now, the load is still high but the stress level is significantly less.”

EMM’s Emirates Mars Ultraviolet Spectrometer (EMUS) instrument was activated during Hope’s cruise to Mars and used to image Mars’ exospheric hydrogen.Image Credit: Supplied

Members of the EMM then worked on calibrating Hope Probe’s scientific instruments to make sure the Martian atmospheric data that will be collected were accurate as they shifted to to Science orbit.

Cruise to Mars

EMM’s Emirates Mars Ultraviolet Spectrometer (EMUS) instrument was activated during Hope’s cruise to Mars and used to image Mars’ exospheric hydrogen. The instrument was also cross-calibrated with the PHEBUS spectrometer aboard the European Space Agency’s BepiColombo spacecraft, itself en route to Mercury. “These experiments were possible simply because Mars Hope was in such good shape,” Hessa Al Matroushi, EMM’s Science Lead, recalled.

Because resources were available and the spacecraft performance so exceeded planning scenarios, the dust tracking feature of Mars Hope’s star tracker instruments was also enabled, allowing measurements of interplanetary dust in the wake of Mars as it spins around the sun.

WHY STUDY MARS

EMM has repeatedly answered the question — why study the Red Planet. It replied: “Mars has captured human imagination for centuries. Now, we are at a junction where we know a great deal about the planet, and we have the vision and technology to explore further. Mars is an obvious target for exploration for many reasons. From our pursuit to find extraterrestrial life to someday expand human civilisation to other planets, Mars serves as a long-term and collaborative project for the entire human race.”
As the first weather satellite of Mars, Hope (Al Amal in Arabic) is the first probe to provide a complete picture of the Martian atmosphere. It will help answer key questions about the global Martian atmosphere and the loss of hydrogen and oxygen gases into space over the span of one Martian year.

Specifically, Hope Probe will help humans “understand climate dynamics and the global weather map through characterising the lower atmosphere of Mars; explain how the weather changes the escape of hydrogen and oxygen through correlating the lower atmosphere conditions with the upper atmosphere; and understand the structure and variability of hydrogen and oxygen in the upper atmosphere, as well as identifying why Mars is losing them into space.”

Hope Probe transitioned to its unique 20,000-43,000km elliptical science orbit, with an inclination to Mars of 25 degrees. In this orbit, the is orbiting of the Red Planet every 55 hours to capture a full planetary sample every four orbits or nine Martian days.

Hope probe’s three instruments were activated on April 10 then a period of commissioning and testing followed, before the mission’s Science phase formally commenced on May 23. It was during this period that the EMM science team first made the stunning observations of Mars’ discrete aurora that have electrified the global Mars science community, releasing the first global images of Mars discrete aurora in the far-ultraviolet, and providing new insights into the discrete aurora phenomenon in Mars’ nightside atmosphere.

The mages of a ghostly glow known as Mars’ Discrete Aurora taken by Hope Probe’s EMUS instrument were released by the Emirates Mars Mission (EMM) on June 30. His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice-President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai, also tweeted about the Martian phenomenon and said: “The UAE’s Hope Probe, first-ever Arab interplanetary mission, has captured the first global images of Mars’ Discrete Aurora. The high-quality images open up unprecedented potential for the global science community to investigate solar interactions with Mars.”

Revolutionary scientific implications

According to EMM, the images taken by Hope Probe “have revolutionary implications for our understanding of the interactions between solar radiation, Mars’ magnetic fields and the planetary atmosphere.”

Hope Probe has a two-year mission to map Mar’s atmospheric dynamics.
Image Credit: Supplied

Al Matroushi noted: “These unique global snapshots of the Discrete Aurora of Mars are the first time such detailed and clear observations have been made globally, as well as across previously unobservable wavelengths. The implications for our understanding of Mars’ atmospheric and magnetospheric science are tremendous and provide new support to the theory that solar storms are not necessary to drive Mars’ aurora.”

EMM Deputy Science Lead Justin Deighan added: “We have totally blown out ten years of study of Mars’ auroras with ten minutes of observations. The data we are capturing confirms the tremendous potential we now have of exploring Mars’ aurora and the interactions between Mars’ magnetic fields, atmosphere and solar particles with a coverage and sensitivity we could only previously dream of. These exciting observations go above and beyond the original science goals of Hope Probe.”

Sharing Science data with the world

Hope Probe has a two-year mission to map Mar’s atmospheric dynamics. According to EMM, the first Science data from the mission will be released globally with no embargo, following a period of validation and checking, on October 2021. “Hope Probe is the culmination of a knowledge transfer and development effort started in 2006, which has seen Emirati engineers working with partners around the world to develop the UAE’s spacecraft design, engineering and manufacturing capabilities,” EMM noted.

Beyond Mars

Hope Probe’s historic journey to the Red Planet coincides with a year of celebrations to mark the UAE’s Golden Jubilee. According to EMM, “beyond the scientific objectives of Hope Probe are its strategic objectives that revolve around human knowledge, Emirati capabilities, and global collaboration.”

The mission will achieve beyond data and results. It will improve the quality of life on Earth by pushing our limits to make new discoveries; encourage global collaboration in Mars exploration; demonstrate leadership in space research; build Emirati capabilities in the field of interplanetary exploration; boost scientific knowledge because a sustainable, future-proof economy is a knowledge-based economy; inspire future Arab generations to pursue space science; and establish the UAE’s position as a beacon of progress in the region.





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THE BEGINING OF THE END OF THE VIETNAM WAR

Thich Quang Duc and the Power of Political 

Self- Sacrifice



by David Richards 7/4/2021

David Richards is an English teacher at an international school in Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City), Vietnam. 

Malcolm Browne's photograph of Thic Quang Duc's political self-immolation, June 11, 1963.

 

 

Throughout history, various communities have wondered how to fight back against overwhelming force. Those in control are the masters of war and encourage physical opposition to themselves. They cannot be conquered by traditional physical nor democratic means. In such cases only the unexpected can overturn these advantages.

One strategy that has been utilized is political self-sacrifice, which is an act of suicide designed to make a political intervention (Fierke, 2013). The most famous case of political self-sacrifice is the self-immolation of Thich Quang Duc, a Vietnamese Mahayana Buddhist monk who took a stand against the oppressive government of South Vietnam. The case illustrates what can make political self-sacrifice so effective. I will recap the event, and then provide three reasons why it had such a big impact.

South Vietnam, 1963

The young state of South Vietnam was in crisis. The South Vietnamese leader, Ngo Dinh Diem, was the head of a Catholic minority that was persecuting the nearly 80% Buddhist majority. Diem had dedicated Vietnam to Jesus and the Catholic Church, and held public ceremonies displaying crosses. The top positions in government were given to Catholics and they kept the bulk of foreign aid.

Matters came to a head when a law against the flying of religious flags was selectively invoked. The Buddhist flag was banned while the Vatican flag was displayed. A protest involving thousands of Buddhists took place in the city of Hue, and the military were sent in to break up the protest. At some point, a bomb went off and in the ensuing chaos soldiers opened fire on the protestors. When the smoke had cleared, nine people lay dead, including two children who were crushed under armored personnel carriers.

The Buddhist community saw that their protest had failed. They needed to up the ante and make a decisive intervention, and found a solution in their tradition. Self-immolation has a long history in Mahayana Buddhism, which is the predominant school of Buddhism in Vietnam. While suicide is prohibited in Buddhism, self-immolation is, in the exceptional case of the bodhisattva (or enlightened one), understood as an offering and sacrifice to the Buddha.

Buddhist monks and nuns organised a march in downtown Saigon, the capital city of South Vietnam. Quang Duc, together with two other monks, emerged from the car leading the procession and removed a 5-gallon can of aviation fuel. He sat down on the pavement in a lotus position on a busy Saigon street and stared quietly ahead. The fuel was poured over his head and he struck a match to set fire to his robe. He was surrounded by a shield of monks and nuns, which made it impossible for onlookers to extinguish the fire. The monk remained in peace as the flames engulfed him. He never yelled out in pain. His face remained calm until it was so blackened by the flames that it couldn’t be made out anymore.

Quang Duc left a note for President Diem: “Before closing my eyes and moving towards the vision of the Buddha, I respectfully plead to President Ngo Dinh Diem to take a mind of compassion towards the people of the nation and implement religious equality to maintain the strength of the homeland eternally.” The self-immolation was designed to heighten the power of this message. The Buddhist monk and scholar Thich Nhat Hanh (1967) explained in a letter to Martin Luther King that Quang Duc’s act was not suicide or even a protest, but an act of speech:

‘To burn oneself by fire is to prove that what one is saying is of the utmost importance. There is nothing more painful than burning oneself. To say something while experiencing this kind of pain is to say it with utmost courage, frankness, determination and sincerity.’

The photograph caused a sensation around the world. It forced the United States to reconsider their support for the Diem regime. The event left an “indelible stamp on America’s collective consciousness and rudely awakened the Kennedy administration to the gravity of the Buddhist crisis” (Jones, 2003).

The monk’s act also fanned public resistance in Vietnam, involving not only monks and nuns but, for the first time, ordinary citizens. This widened the circle of people willing to support, identify with, or even die for a movement to end the Diem regime.  There were large-scale student protests, and two more monks followed Quang Duc’s lead by committing self-immolation.

The self-immolation is now regarded as a critical point in the collapse of the Diem regime. Later in the year there was a CIA-backed coup d’état by General Duong Van Minh, and the subsequent assassination of President Diem (Singal, 2008). Robert McNamara, the Secretary of State, in defending Washington’s decision to support the coup, said, “We cannot stand anymore burnings.”

It Gained Worldwide Attention and Sympathy

The famous photograph of the monk is shocking. It was like nothing people had seen before. Quang Duc sits peacefully in the meditative lotus position as the flames engulf him. The image is so perplexing, so contrary to ideas of self-preservation that the audience has to stop and ask questions about what is happening.

The photography elicits sympathy for the Buddhist cause. By inflicting pain on himself, the monk signifies who the oppressors are. The image tells us, “our situation is so hopeless we have to do this.” The strategy of gaining sympathy contrasts with some other forms of political self-sacrifice such as the suicide terrorist, who deliberately takes their own life while killing innocent victims in the process.  

It Inspired the Wider Community

The act resonated with the South Vietnamese populace because it was consistent with their religious and cultural tradition.  Buddhists have a habit of thinking of self-immolation as heroic, which is a cultural value that is understood by individuals in Buddhist countries even if they are not themselves religious (Fierke, 2013). In addition, making a political intervention is part of the religious tradition. Mahayana Buddhism is a progressive school that is concerned with social justice and change, and emphasises active compassion (karuna) and benevolence (maitre) as the most important qualities of the bodhisattva, or enlightened one.

The emphasis on Buddhism, Vietnamese history and tradition worked to associate the regime with a foreign element – Catholicism – and its distance from the people. Catholicism was a French import, and Diem was imported from and backed by the United States.

It Intimidated the Enemy

The self-immolation was a powerful act of psychological warfare. By being willing to make the ultimate sacrifice for his people, Quang Duc showed the strength and immovable will of the Buddhist community. A foe that isn’t afraid of a painful death cannot be bullied and cajoled into submission.

Furthermore, the act appeared to show that Quang Duc, and by extension the Buddhist community, had divine backing. By remaining calm as the flames engulfed him, he seemed to defy the physical laws of reality. The monk had acquired insight into our ultimate nature, so he felt free to use his body to deliver a powerful message. Only those who know (as opposed to believe) have no fear of casting off the physical body.

Whether this is true or not is up for debate. Neuroscientists are beginning to understand potential changes in the brain’s structure and function after numerous hours of meditation that may have enabled Quang Duc to commit the act (Manno, 2019). From the outside though, it seemed that the monk had God (or Gods) on his side. This acted as a self-fulfilling prophecy as the Buddhist protests led to the fall of the Diem regime.

 

Fierke, K. (2008) Political Self-Sacrifice: Agency, Body and Emotion in International Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hanh, Thich Nhat 1967. Vietnam: The Lotus in the Sea of Fire. London: SCM Press.

Jones, Howard 2003. The Death of a Generation: How the Assassinations of Diem and JFK Prolonged the Vietnam War. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Manno, F. (2019) Monk on fire: The meditative mind of a burning monk, Cogent Psychology, 6:1

Singal, J. (2008) ‘Introduction’, in David Halberstam, The Making of a Quagmire: America and Vietnam during the Kennedy Era. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

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Reflecting on the 80th Anniversary of the Nazi Invasion of Russia




by Rick Halperin 7/11/2021

Rick Halperin is director of the Human Rights Program at SMU Dallas.

Heinrich Himmler inspects a prisoner of war camp in Russia, ca. 1941

 

 

 

Eighty years ago last month Adolf Hitler unleashed almost 3 million soldiers along a 1,500-mile front, with the intent to utterly and militarily destroy the Soviet Union.  It was the largest assembled army the world had ever seen. The havoc, destruction, and wholesale slaughter of human beings that ensued in the months and years to come would change the paradigm of World War II and alter world history.

 

Among the death tolls were 2 million Jews and millions of Russian civilians who were murdered. Thousands of towns and villages were destroyed and wiped off the map, art and livestock were plundered and the human psyche scarred forever.

 

The Wehrmacht and Soviet forces both invaded and crushed Poland in Sept. 1939, resulting in the disappearance of that country from the maps of Europe. The Polish capital of Warsaw and the Vistula River marked the border between the two occupying forces. 

 

There were multiple goals linked to the Nazi invasion of Russia: destroy Bolshevism; eliminate the Soviet Union; create “living space” for a new and expanded Germany; annihilate both the Jews and Slavs found inside the USSR. Code-named “Operation Barbarossa” it was designed to drive all the way to the Ural Mountains, the Russian border with Asia, and to secure Germany’s future for the envisioned Thousand-year Reich.

 

Army Group A (North) raced northeast from Warsaw into and through Lithuania and Latvia on the way to Leningrad, a city of 3 million people that Nazi forces would encircle and lay siege to for over three years, causing nearly half the city’s population to starve to death.  Behind the invading forces came the murderous Einsatzgruppen, special action killing squads. They unleashed the Holocaust inside the Soviet Union.

 

Within six months, by the end of the year, 1,000 SS killers had murdered almost 250,000 Jews in those countries, including mass killing sites in both the Ponary Forest in Lithuania and in the Rumbula Forest outside Riga, Latvia. The Nazis declared Latvia to be the first “Jew-free” country under their control, killing over 98 % of that country’s Jewish population.

 

Army Group B (Center) and their 655-member contingent of SS killers raced due eastward to Minsk in Belarussia and beyond, towards Smolensk and Moscow, and murdered almost 70,000 Jews before the end of the year. Army Group C (South) raced into northern and central Ukraine.  The 700 members of the assigned Einsatzgruppen would murder almost 100,000 Jews in six months, including 33,771 Jews at Babi Yar, outside the city of Kiev on Sept. 29-30, 1941; it would be the largest two-day killing spree of the war, and would be a site where eventually over 100,000 perished.

 

Finally, Army Group D and its assigned 600-man killing squad raced into southern Ukraine, the Crimea and the Caucasus regions, and they, along with regular Nazi soldiers, police squads, and collaborators, would kill another 90,000 people in the first six months of the invasion.  

 

 The Nazis filed regular reports back to Berlin on their operations inside the Soviet Union and anyone today can follow the killing actions by reading Ronald Headland’s “Messages of Murder: A Study of the Reports of the Einsatzgruppen of the Security Police and the Security Service, 1941-1943” or Yitzhak Arad’s “The Einsatzgruppen Reports: Selections from the Dispatches of the Nazi Death Squads.”   

 

By the time Soviet forces re-grouped in strength and forced the Nazis to withdraw almost three  years later, those 2 million Jews and millions of Russian civilians had been murdered. The towns and villages they inhabited were either gone or plundered.  It is easy today to forget and dismiss the Nazi horrors that were unleashed upon both the Soviet Union and the world beginning on June 22 and continuing until the end of the war. But it is a mistake to do so.

 

The hateful ideology that prompted the invasion eight decades ago in 1941 is alive today in our world and in our country. We must remember the tragedy that claimed all these innocent people just a few generations ago, and commit ourselves to the protection, defense and advocacy of human rights, so that our world and future generations can accept the elementary truth that there is no such thing as a lesser person.

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1920s "Tutmania" and its Enduring Echoes



by Gill Paul 7/18/2021

Gill Paul’s novel The Collector’s Daughter is published by William Morrow on September 30th.

Howard Carter and an unidentified Egyptian man examine the inner coffin of Tutankhamun, 1922.

 

 

 

In November 1922, when newspaper editors heard that an intact tomb full of glittering treasure had been found in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings, they knew straight away the story was going to be massive. It was a once-in-a-lifetime event, with as much interest worldwide as there would be 47 years later when man first walked on the moon.

 

Excitement mounted with each new tidbit of information emerging from Egypt, and some prescient entrepreneurs managed to jump on the bandwagon early and produce Egyptian-style cookie tins and face powder compacts in time for Christmas a month later. Tutmania was well and truly born. But what was it about the discovery of the tomb that fired the collective imagination?

 

The world’s obsession with Ancient Egypt goes back to Roman times, with pyramid-shaped tombs becoming popular after Augustus conquered Egypt in 31BC and tales of Cleopatra’s feminine wiles intrigued the citizens of Rome. There was a resurgence of interest after Napoleon invaded in 1798 and his archaeologists looted the Valley of the Kings, bringing back the Rosetta Stone, amongst many other artefacts. But the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb unleashed a tidal wave of Egyptomania unlike any that had gone before, whipped up by photographs of the treasures making their way back to news desks.

 

In Britain, the story was originally told as one of British triumph, with Howard Carter and his aristocratic sponsor, Lord Carnarvon, hailed as national heroes. Carnarvon was invited to Buckingham Palace with his daughter Lady Evelyn Herbert to regale King George and Queen Mary with all they had witnessed in the tomb. The fact that Egypt had renounced its status as a British protectorate earlier in the year, and was now an independent nation, did not stop them from assuming that a significant proportion of the treasure would end up in Britain. Four years after the horrors of war, it was a wonderful boost to national spirits.

 

The story took a darker turn in April 1923 when Lord Carnarvon died in a Cairo hotel room from complications from an infected mosquito bite. Sherlock Holmes author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was among those who warned of the dangers of a curse descending on any who disturbed the pharaoh’s resting place. It wasn’t a new concept; there had been many stories of curses on Egyptian tombs, including Louisa May Alcott’s 1869 tale “Lost in a Pyramid: the Mummy’s Curse”. In the early 20s, it gave journalists something new to write about and they sensationalized the deaths of anyone who had been associated with the tomb.

 

Mummies were fascinating because, unlike skeletons, they were recognisably dead human beings. You could walk into a museum and stand alongside the body of someone who had died thousands of years ago. According to the Ancient Egyptians, the dead passed to another world, and that’s why their tombs were filled with everything they would need for the afterlife. The thought was appealing to the thousands who were mourning loved ones killed in the war or the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918–19. Spiritualism flourished, and in this climate it didn’t seem far-fetched that an ancient tomb could be cursed.

 

As Howard Carter’s work progressed, and an autopsy was performed on the body in the tomb, they found that the king had only been around nineteen when he died, and foul play was suspected when a head wound was diagnosed. It all seemed to play into the curse story.

 

The appeal of Tutmania was spiritual, but it was also intensely visual. In the early 20th century, a fascination with oriental exoticism had infiltrated art and design styles, and the bright gold and geometric patterns of Egyptian hieroglyphics seemed a natural progression. They were soon being used as a print on fabrics for furniture and clothing, and on wallpaper. The elegant symbols in hieroglyphics, such as the phoenix wings, were translated into the style of architecture that we now call Art Deco, as well as the design of aircraft, cars, and refrigerators.

 

Tutankhamun also invaded the fashion scene. Flappers adopted headbands featuring striking cobras, kohl eyeliner, and snake bracelets that wound up the arm. Cartier made Egyptian-style jewellery; Helena Rubinstein made the Valaze Egyptian Mask; and the bob haircut was heavily influenced by Ancient Egyptian styles.

 

Tutmania seeped into popular culture with the 1923 song “Old King Tut”, a stage magician who called himself “Carter the Great”, and the iconic 1932 horror film The Mummy, written by a journalist who had covered the discovery of the tomb. President Herbert Hoover even called his pet dog King Tut!

 

The newly independent Egyptian nation managed to hang onto their Tutankhamun antiquities, which was a source of great national pride. They allowed some to leave the country for touring exhibitions in the 1960s, the 1970s, and in several shows during the 21st century, attracting millions to see the spectacle – most recently 1.42 million attended an exhibition in Paris in 2019. Coinciding with each show came a revival of Tutmania, with t-shirts, themed candy, and even Batman villains inspired by Howard Carter’s discovery.

 

Tutankhamun was a relatively insignificant Egyptian king, who ruled for only ten years and did not leave an heir, but he died at a high point in the artistry of the ancient culture, and that explains the sheer magnificence of his tomb. A combination of circumstances meant it had lain undiscovered for over three thousand years when Carter came along. And that’s why Tutankhamun is the one Egyptian king everyone can name today, and the only one who has a ‘mania’ named after him.

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Anarchism and the Avant-Garde: Félix Fénéon at the Museum of Modern Art



by Sam Ben-Meir 12/13/2020

Sam Ben-Meir is a professor of philosophy and world religions at Mercy College in New York City.

"Félix Fénéon Editing La Revue Blanche", Félix Vallotton 1896

 

 

The Museum of Modern Art is currently presenting Félix Fénéon: The Anarchist and the Avant-Garde – From Signac to Matisse and Beyond, examining the immense influence of this art critic, editor, publisher, collector and anarchist. Fénéon (1861-1944) saw the critic as a channel between the artist and the public – a role which had particular significance because art could further the cause of social justice and harmony. As Paul Signac would proclaim: “Justice in sociology, harmony in art: same thing.”

The exhibition includes several of Georges Seurat’s paintings, and begins with a study for “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte” (1884), his famed masterpiece, which was featured in its ultimate, monumental (10-foot wide) iteration at the 1886 exhibition of the Impressionists. That same year Fénéon would coin the term Neo-Impressionism to identify the revolutionary innovations that Seurat and Paul Signac were pioneering – which included the pointillist technique that Fénéon would contrast with the ‘blink-of-an-eye’ effects of the Impressionists. For Seurat and Signac, pointillism was a science-based approach to color, based on the application of tiny, juxtaposed dots of multi-colored paint, which were blended in the viewers eye, rather than physically blended on the canvas.

The show includes paintings by Maximilien Luce, such as “Man Washing” (1887) which depicts a man standing over a wash basin, as he cleans the back of his neck. The scene underscores the simple, daily routines of the working-class and their humble, domestic interiors: a small mirror hangs on the wall behind him; his jacket lies draped over a chair, which casts its shadow over his black boots and the hexagonal terracotta tiles of the floor. There is a tough, primitive ruddiness to Luce’s representations of the working-class, a quiet dignity in the subject’s thin but taut, muscular frame.

Luce was a fellow anarchist with whom Fénéon would form a close friendship. A spate of political bombings in 1894 would lead to the so-called Trial of the Thirty; and while Fénéon was ultimately (and narrowly) acquitted, both men would find themselves at Mazas prison – a notorious, twelve-hundred cell panopticon. A lithograph by Luce depicts Fénéon at Mazas, standing within a long, narrow outdoor corridor, flanked by a looming guard tower which could see into every cell.

 

"Félix Fénéon at Mazas," Maximilien Luce, 1894



One of the exhibition’s standout paintings is Signac’s “Demolition Worker” (1897-99) – a monumental allegory about delivering the “forceful blow of a pickaxe to the antiquated social structure.” One is reminded of Mikhail Bakunin’s famous dictum “the passion for destruction is a creative passion too.” But the painting is more than a plea for bringing down the present social order: it is an anarchist’s call to take up the struggle for a modern, egalitarian society in which manual laborers are treated with fairness and respect – a testimony to the inherent nobility of man and of the human form.

“In the Time of Harmony: The Golden Age Has Not Passed, It Is Still to Come”, Paul Signac, 1896



“In the Time of Harmony: The Golden Age Has Not Passed, It Is Still to Come” (1896), is meant to offer a glimpse of Signac’s utopian vision, his dream of what the future society might look like. Anarchism was not about the fury of political violence for its own sake, nor was it about dismantling social structures so that lawlessness and chaos might prevail. In Kropotkin’s words anarchism was about “well-being for all” – and “well-being for all is not a dream. It is possible, realizable, owing to all that our ancestors have done to increase our powers of production.” The Neo-Impressionists recognized that well-being also meant the liberation of our aesthetic sensibilities, and the realization of our true self through the freedom to create and recreate. As Signac would observe: “When the society we dream of exists, the workers freed from the exploiters who brutalize them, we will have time to think and to learn.” Signac’s figures dance, paint, exercise and read; they bathe and recline, they sing and play. Men, women, and children are all a part of Signac’s paean to a world in which social disparities are overcome, and positive freedom – the freedom to, as opposed to mere freedom from – is finally our guide.

The social theory of the Neo-Impressionists was a combination of anarchism and communism; and was chiefly inspired by the writings of Russian exile Pierre Kropotkin, as well as the work of Jean Grave and the Belgian geographer Elisée Reclus. They agreed with socialists in their vision of economic communism and equality of social conditions – including collective ownership of the means of production, the abolition of private property, and the dissolution of class hierarchies. A crucial feature of anarchism is the emphasis on the individual as the fundamental building block, the essential point of departure for any human association whatever. The individual was characterized by Grave in 1899 as a social creature who should be “left free to attach himself according to his tendencies, his affinities, free to seek out those with him whom his liberty and aptitudes can agree.” What the anarchists yearned for was a harmonious relationship between the individual and society as a whole – and this social ideal found its aesthetic representation in Neo-Impressionism. As D.D. Egbert observed in Social Radicalism and the Arts (1970): “… The very technique that the Neo-Impressionists employed, with its strongly accentuated individual brush strokes, which nonetheless are brought together in harmony to form the picture as a whole, paralleled the individualistic yet communal spirit of communist-anarchism.”

It is notable that in general, the Neo-Impressionists rejected overtly political subject matter – “stylistically innovative art, by its very freedom from convention, was necessarily revolutionizing.” They saw no need to embrace proletarian subject matter or anything like the ‘social realism’ which would characterize visual art during the Soviet era. As Pissarro observed in 1895: “Every production which is truly a work of art is socialist (whether or not the creator wishes it) … This work of pure beauty will enlarge the people’s aesthetic conceptions.” The fundamental idea here is that aesthetic form itself is the bearer of art’s radical potentialities, and beauty is inherently a kind of protest against an unfree world.

The show includes a number of works by the still underappreciated Félix Vallotton, including “Félix Fénéon at La Revue blanche” (1896) – a painting of Fénéon hunched over his desk, working assiduously late into the night, illumined by the glow of an electric lamp. It is a portrait of dedication – the image is reduced to its essentials, and intentionally slight on details to avoid distracting us from the portrait’s central theme. In other words, the concentrated focus of Vallotton’s subject is reproduced in the formal qualities of the painting, by eliminating everything extraneous to the image of a man wholly committed to his work.

In 1906, Fénéon joined the prominent art gallery Bernheim-Jeune, owned by Gaston and Josse Bernheim, two brothers who inherited their father’s business in the early years of the twentieth century. They are depicted in a 1920 painting by Pierre Bonnard, one of the Post-Impressionist, avant-garde artists to whom Fénéon gave his unflagging support. Fénéon also signed contracts with Kees van Dongen and Henri Matisse. Struck to see a well-known anarchist installed at an established and fairly conservative gallery, one contemporary observed that “A good anarchist, [Fénéon] planted Matisses among the bourgeoisie from the back room of Bernheim-Jeune as he might have planted bombs.” The comparison is a telling one because it underscores that, for Fénéon, all genuine art was necessarily subversive, an “indictment of the established reality” (as the philosopher and critical theorist Herbert Marcuse would later put it) – and by championing modern art he was, in his way, serving the cause of social revolution.

 

Italian futurists Luigi Russolo, Carlo Carrà, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Umberto Boccioni and Gino Severini, Paris, February 9, 1912



One of the most notable exhibitions that Fénéon organized was that of the Italian Futurists in February 1912 – which included paintings by Umberto Boccioni, Giacomo Balla, Gino Severini, Luigi Russolo, and Carla Carrà, among others. Emphasizing speed, technology, political radicalism and violence, Fénéon’s exhibition served to propel the Futurists to the front ranks of the European avant-garde. Boccioni was the first artist to be associated with the movement – and the show includes his painting “La risata” (1911, The Laugh), regarded as his first indisputably Futurist work, and an expression of the artist in his full maturity. From the gaudy, theatrical woman smiling in the upper left-hand corner, to the conspicuous men on the far left and right sides of the painting, to the many other faces and objects that have been worked in, Boccioni presents us with what is at once a simple dinner party, and at the same time a multi-dimensional conjunction of people and things, a fragmented reality, quasi-cubist, semi-abstract and inexhaustible in the relationships it conjures.

The sampling of Futurists includes Carrà’s painting memorializing the “Funeral of the Anarchist Galli” (1910-11), who was killed by police during a strike in Milan in 1904. The funeral itself became violent when the police refused to let mourners enter the cemetery, and Carrà’s painting captures the chaotic scene with sharp, slashing lines, aggressive brushwork and intense shades of red.

Félix Fénéon was not an artist, but an art critic; a bridge as it were between the artist and the public – and yet he was also so much more, because he recognized his significant social responsibility to find and champion those artists that were worthy of the public’s attention. That is perhaps the most important duty of the critic, and also the most difficult of the critic’s tasks; as it is in the very nature of genius to elude us, to transgress our settled categories of comprehension; and this is most true of the avant-garde artist who defies convention, who creates in effect a new vocabulary of seeing, and in the process reshapes and redefines our aesthetic sensibilities, our understanding of what is beautiful, and what the very aim of art is or should be. Fénéon’s influence was immense and due, in no small part, to his eye for genius; and because he recognized that while a painting may not, in itself, start a revolution, it can transform the way we see the world – and that is the beginning of all meaningful change.

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Anarchists to Disney: Cruella de Vil Can’t Sit With Us

GET IT RIGHT

Prominent on the poster for the new “101 Dalmatians” prequel: an “A” in a circle. It is not going over well.


Kelly Weill
Reporter
Published Feb. 18, 2021 


Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast / Photos via Getty/Disney

Cruella de Vil is stylish, a new Disney film’s ad campaign suggests. She’s rich. She skins dogs for clothing. She’s an anarchist.

Hang on, actual anarchists say. WTF?

Disney’s forthcoming film Cruella is a live-action prequel to 101 Dalmatians, an animated classic about a deranged villain who kidnaps puppies so she can wear their skins. Starring actress Emma Stone, the movie attempts to explain what, exactly, Cruella de Vil’s problem is.

Prominent on the poster is a common anarchy symbol: an “A” in a circle.

The Anarchist Neighborhood of Athens
DREAM OF NO NATION
Cara Hoffman


That’s unwelcome news to anarchists, who say their movement is vocally in favor of animal liberation. While no one wants to be associated with puppy-hunters, the association is an extra slap in the face to people who say they actually go considerably out of their way to advance animal rights.

Ryan Only, a longtime vegan and member of the anarchist public relations group Agency, told The Daily Beast veganism is common in the political movement.

“For many anarchists, practicing veganism—abstaining from supporting the exploitation or use of animals for food or other purposes—is seen as a baseline for living an ethical life,” they said, suggesting it was “in a similar spirit that one practices a commitment to anti-racism, or anti-sexism.

“It’s about walking the walk, a consistency of means and ends,” Only added. “If we believe in a world without oppression, we need to dismantle and disengage from the systems that are responsible for it.”

Only pointed to a long tradition of vegan zines and potlucks in anarchist spaces, alongside participation in actions against fur and animal-testing facilities.

Anarchists oppose hierarchies: most famously governmental and class disparities, but often those between species, too. That can make eating steak—much less culling puppies—a controversial act in the movement.

The Metropolitan Anarchist Coordinating Council, a New York City-based collective, told The Daily Beast its members wanted nothing to do with the Disney villain—or, for that matter, Walt Disney himself.

“The figure of Cruella, a narcissist and a sadist obsessed with the airs of wealth and luxury, stands in direct contrast to the anarchist principles of collectivism, anti-capitalism, and care for life in all of its forms (human, animal, and ecological),” MACC spokesperson Keira Anderson told The Daily Beast. “We also direct our critique toward Walt Disney himself, a corporate oligarch who held anti-unionist, sexist, and racist views and is rumored to have been a Nazi sympathizer. As committed antifascists, we condemn the misuse of anarchist symbols and the misrepresentation of our social and political orientation in this film project.”

Walt Disney’s relations with Nazis have long been in debate, with him hosting a Nazi filmmaker, but later making anti-Nazi films for the U.S. government. Disney, the film company, did not return a request for comment on whether Cruella de Vil was canonically an anarchist. The company’s official description for the film describes it as “set in 1970s London amidst the punk rock revolution.”

But even if de Vil was a hardboiled ’70s punk in the U.K., she wouldn’t necessarily be a dog-killer.

Joe Strummer, guitarist for the band The Clash and one of the era’s most famous punks, became an ardent vegetarian after witnessing a disturbing scene at a ’70s concert. During the 1971 show, he watched a musician’s beloved pet chicken fly onto a crucifix, which was about to be lit on fire.

“All of us in the audience saw Hector the pet rooster on the crucifix, and yet the roadies are desperately trying to strike their matches in the wind. Everyone started to shout, but the roadies couldn’t hear,” Strummer told interviewers decades later. Eventually the rooster was rescued and his owner made an impromptu speech asking the crowd to remember the incident “the next time you have some Kentucky Fried Chicken.”

The message clicked, and Strummer gave up meat.

Seldom the heroes of big-budget films, anarchists appear to have run especially afoul of Disney in recent years. Falcon and the Winter Soldier, a forthcoming TV miniseries by the Disney-owned Marvel comics, is rumored to center on a conflict between Captain America’s friends and an anarchist group called the “Flag-Smashers.”

The Cruella trailer might have punk-rock aesthetics, but Cruella de Vil probably isn’t interested in non-hierarchical political theory.

“From the trailer, it appears Cruella de Vil is challenging the notion of what it means to be a woman in the world by sowing chaos and wielding personal power,” Only said. “But it’s unlikely the character actually views herself as an anarchist. Instead, she appears to be just one more example where the status quo attempts to dismiss any threat to itself as chaos, and then define chaos as anarchy.”
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Boy's remains found in Etruscan outpost in Campania
Find at Pontecagnano near Paestum 'significant' says dig chief

- RIPRODUZIONE RISERVATA
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Redazione ANSAROME
13 July 202115:06NEWS

(ANSA) - ROME, JUL 6 - The remains of a 12-year-old boy wearing a warrior's bronze belt have been found at Pontecagnano, an outpost of the pre-Roman central Italian Etruscan civilisation in southern Campania, lead archeologist Gina Tomay told ANSA Tuesday.

"It's a find of great significance," said Tomay of the boy, who lived in the IV century BC and was discovered with two cermaic cups at his feet, one for food in the afterlife and the other for the wine that would ensure him a place at the banqueting ceremony called symposium.

Tomay said the boy was the 10,000th find at Pontecagnano, over 60 years of success and good practices "due to study, research and systematic excavations".

The Etruscan colony there reached its peak between the VIII and VII century BC, she said, in an area "particularly well favoured by nature and also close to the sea".

Objects from all parts of the Mediterranean have been found at Pontecagnano, from Greece to Egypt, from the Far East to Sicily and Sardinia.

A few kilometres of farmland and the RIver Sele separate the settlement from the storied Greek city of Paestum to the west, while not too far to the south lies Pompeii, whose origins, according to recent studies led by archeologist Massimo Osanna, also lie with the Etruscans in the VII century BC.

Osanna, the former Pompeii chief who is today the director general of Italy's public museums, said the Etruscan boy and 10,000th find at Pontecagnano "is also an interesting and precious case study".

The finds may draw more visitors to the site, which is heralded in archeological literature but neglected by major tourism routes, unlike nearby Paestum. (ANSA).

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The History of Systemic Racism that CRT

 Opponents Prefer to Hide


by Clyde W. Ford7/18/2021Clyde W. Ford is the author of numerous books including Of Blood and Sweat: Black Lives, and the Making of White Power and Wealth, due out next year from HarperCollins.

Illustration of the importation of captive Africans at Jamestown in 1619, Howard Pyle, 1910. Library of Congress.

 

 

 

Critical Race Theory (CRT) has become a lightning rod for conservative ire at any discussion of racism, anti-racism, or the non-white history of America. Across the country, bills in Republican-controlled legislatures have attempted to prevent the teaching of CRT, even though most of those against CRT struggle to define the term. CRT actually began as a legal theory which held simply that systemic racism was consciously created, and therefore, must be consciously dismantled. History reveals that the foundation of America, and of systemic racism, happened at the same time and from the same set of consciously created laws.

Around the 20th of August, 1619, the White Lion, an English ship sailing under a Dutch flag, docked off Old Point Comfort (near present-day Hampton), in the British colony of Virginia, to barter approximately 20 Africans for much needed food and supplies. The facts of the White Lion’s arrival in Virginia, and her human cargo, are generally not in dispute. Whether those first Africans arriving in America were taken by colonists as slaves or as indentured servants is still debated. But by the end of the 17th century, a system of chattel slavery was in place in colonial America. How America got from uncertainly about the status of Africans, to certainty that they were slaves, is a transition that highlights the origins of systemic racism.

Three arguments have been put forth about whether the first Africans arriving in the colonies were treated as indentured servants or as slaves. One says that European racism predisposed American colonists to treat these Africans as slaves. Anthony and Isabella, for example, two Africans aboard the White Lion, were acquired by Captain William Tucker and listed at the bottom of his 1624/25 muster (census) entry, just above his real property, but below white indentured servants and native Americans.

A second argument counters that racism was not, at first, the decisive factor but that the availability of free labor was. “Before the invention of the Negro or the white man or the words and concepts to describe them,” historian Lerone Bennett wrote, “the Colonial population consisted largely of a great mass of white and black [and native] bondsmen, who occupied roughly the same economic category and were treated with equal contempt by the lords of the plantations and legislatures.”

In this view, slavery was not born of racism, but racism was born of slavery. Early colonial laws had no provisions distinguishing African from European servants, until those laws began to change toward the middle of the 17th century, when Africans became subject to more brutal treatment than any other group. Proponents of this second argument point to cases like Elizabeth Key in 1656, or Phillip Corven in 1675, Black servants who sued in different court cases against their white masters for keeping them past the end of their indentures. Both Key and Corven won. If slavery was the law, Key and Corven would have had no standing in court much less any hope of prevailing.

Still, a third group stakes out slightly different ground. Separate Africans into two groups: the first generation that arrived before the middle of the 17th century, and those that arrived after. For the first generations of Africans, English and Dutch colonists had the concept of indefinite, but not inheritable, bondage. For those who came after, colonists applied the concept of lifetime, inheritable bondage. Here, the 1640 case of John Punch, a Black man caught with two other white servants attempting to run away, is often cited. As punishment, all the men received thirty lashes but the white servants had only one-year added to their indentures, while John Punch was ordered to serve his master “for the time of his natural life.” For this reason, many consider John Punch the first real slave in America. Or was he the last Black indentured servant?

Clearly these cases show the ambiguity, or “loopholes,” of the system separating servitude from slavery in early America. What is also clear is that one by one these loopholes were closed through conscious intent of colonial legislatures. In this reduction of ambiguity over the status of Africans, the closure of loopholes between servitude and slavery, are the roots of systemic racism.

Maryland enacted a first-of-its-kind law in 1664, specifically tying being Black to being a slave. “[A]ll Negroes or other slaves already within the Province And all Negroes and other slaves to be hereafter imported into the Province shall serve Durante Vita.” Durante Vita is a Latin phrase meaning for the duration of one’s life.

Another loophole concerned the status of children. Colonial American law was initially derived from English common law, where the status of child (whether bound or free) followed the status of the father. But adherence to English common law posed problems in colonial America, such as revealed in the 1630 case of Hugh Davis, a white man sentencing to whipping “for abusing himself to the dishonor of God and shame of Christians, by defiling his body in lying with a negro...” Whipping proved no deterrent for such interracial unions between a free European and a bound African. If English common law was followed, then the child of such a liaison would be free. So, in the years following Davis’ whipping the legislatures in Maryland and Virginia enacted statutes that the status of the child, whether slave or free, followed that of the mother.

But closing this loophole assumes that only the sexual exploits of European men needed containing. The famous, and well-documented case of Irish milkmaid, Molly Welsh, who worked off her indentures in Maryland, shows the reverse actually happened as well. Welsh purchased a slaved named Banna Ka, whom she eventually freed, then married. They had a girl named Mary, who was free. Mary married a runaway slaved named Thomas, and they had a boy named Benjamin, who was also free. And Benjamin Banneker, a clockmaker, astronomer, mathematician, and surveyor, became an important figure in African American history, having authored a letter to Thomas Jefferson lamenting the lofty ideals of liberty and equality contained in the nation’s founding documents were not extended to all citizens regardless of color.

Closing the religious exemption was another way in which colonial legislatures sought to separate Blacks from whites, and force slavery only on people of African descent. One of the reasons Elizabeth Key prevailed in court was that she asserted she could not be held in slavery as a Christian. In fact, there was a widespread belief in early America that Christians holding other Christians in slavery went against core biblical teachings.

Most first generation Africans in colonial America came from the Angola-Congo region of West Africa, first taken there by the Portuguese. Christianity was well-known, and practiced by Africans in these regions as early as the 15th century. So, many Africans destined for slavery, or indentured servitude in America, were already baptized, or were christened by priests aboard Portuguese slave trading vessels.

Colonial legislatures got busy. Maryland updated the 1664 law, cited above, with a 1671 statute that specifically carved out a religious exception for people of African descent. Regardless of whether they had become Christian, or received the sacrament of baptism, they would “hereafter be adjudged, reputed, deemed, and taken to be and remain in servitude and bondage” forever. Acts like this led to a tortured, convoluted American Christianity, developed to support slavery, and this legacy of racism within American Christianity continues to this day.

Apprehension of runaway servants and slaves was still another area in which colonial legislatures targeted people of color for differential, oppressive treatment. While granting masters the right to send a posse after runaways, a 1672 Virginia statute called “An act for the apprehension and suppression of runawayes, negroes and slaves,” granted immunity to any white person who killed or wounded a runaway person of color while in pursuit of them. It read:

“Be it enacted by the governour, councell and burgesses of this grand assembly, and by the authority thereof, that if any negroe, molatto, Indian slave, or servant for life, runaway and shalbe persued by warrant or hue and crye, it shall and may be lawfull for any person who shall endeavour to take them, upon the resistance of such negroe, mollatto, Indian slave, or servant for life, to kill or wound him or them soe resisting.”

Acts like this became the basis for slave patrols, and for the police forces that arose from them. Today, we still deal with the consequences of “qualified immunity,” stemming from ideas like these enacted in 1672, which shield police from prosecution in cases of violence and brutality, especially against people of color.

Protection of southern rights even found its way into the Constitution. The Second Amendment protects the right of militias (a polite term for “slave patrols”) to organize and bear arms. The Fugitive Slave Clause (never repealed) guaranteed southern slaveholders that their slaves apprehended in the North would be returned. Even the Interstate Commerce Clause allowed Southerners traveling North with their slaves assurances those slaves would not automatically become free by setting foot in states that outlawed slavery.

Though enacted centuries ago, the laws cited above are representative of the many laws that came to define American jurisprudence, and have at their core, the repression and oppression of Black Americans, and other people of color. This is why Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, writing for the U.S. Supreme Court in 1857, handed down a 7-2 verdict in the Dred Scott case, with the words that Blacks had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” This is why critical race theory states that systemic racism was consciously created, as these laws and their enforcement show they were.

But this is also why Republican legislators and their supporters lump anything and everything having to do with diversity, equity, and inclusion into the box of critical race theory, then try to keep it out of schools and public institutions. They’re afraid of Americans being told the truth: that the foundation of America, and of systemic racism, happened at the same time and from the same consciously created laws. In this way, these individuals are actually living proof of the validity of critical race theory, because they seek to consciously enact laws today which perpetuate the racial inequality established by laws enacted hundreds of years ago.

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