John Pilger 1939-2023

 

(John Rees obituary)

 

(filmography with additional video links)

 

The Quiet Mutiny (1970)  (His first.. "the first documentary to show the open rebellion within the drafted ranks of the US military [in Vietnam] that led to the withdrawal of the land army in 1973. "When I flew to New York and showed it to Mike Wallace the star reporter of CBS 60 Minutes he agreed. "Real shame we can't show it here"" Pilger said in an interview with the New Statesman.")

 

The Most Powerful Politician in America (1974) (George Wallace) 

Zap! The Weapon is Food (1976) (Kissinger’s policy of refusing aid to countries that do not support his government in the United Nations and the existence of a “Zap Office” specially set up in the State Department to monitor voting patterns...  American Secretary of Agriculture Dr Earl Butts says that he is “not very sympathetic with the food needs of a nation where their governments and their leaders are constantly demeaning the United States”.)

 

Do You Remember Vietnam? (1978) 

 

Year Zero: The Silent Death of Cambodia (1979)

 

The Mexicans (1980) (Stark assessment of the Mexican economy during the CIA-backed administration of the PRI's José López Portillo)

 

The Search for Truth in Wartime (1983) 

 

Nicaragua: A Nation's Right to Survive (1983)

 

The Secret Country: The First Australians Fight Back (1985) 

 

Japan Behind the Mask (1987) 

 

War By Other Means (1992) (Third World debt)

 

Death of a Nation: The East Timor Conspiracy (1994) 

 

Apartheid Did Not Die (1998)  

 

Paying the Price: Killing the Children of Iraq (2000) (Effects of sanctions) 

 

The New Rulers of the World (2001) (IMF, World Bank, WTO) 

 

Palestine is Still the Issue (2002)  (Updated with Ilan Pappé conversations)  

 

Breaking the Silence: Truth and Lies in the War of Terror (2003)

 

Stealing a Nation (2004)  (Britain's removal of the Chagossian peoples from the Chagos Islands)  

 

Latin America: The War on Democracy (2007) 

 

The War You Don't See (2010)  (War propaganda)

 

Utopia (2013) (Indigenous Australians)

 

The Coming War on China (2016) 

 

"The Coming War - It's Time to Speak Up" (2023 editorial):  "Post-modernism is in charge now.. Democracy is notional now; there is the all-powerful elite of the corporation merged with the state and the demands of “identity.”.. The rise of fascism in Europe is uncontroversial..."

Prabha Atre 1932-2024

Les McCann 1935-2023

 

Rufino Tamayo, The Watermelons, 1977

Mary Bauermeister 1934-2023

 

Square Memories, 1965
ink, glass, glass lens, wood, stones, paper collage, graphite, felt-tip pen, painted canvas and painted wood construction
18 5/8 x 18 5/8 x 6 1/2 inches / 47.3 x 47.3 x 16.5 cm 

Do try to catch "the first public exhibition of Bauermeister’s earliest mature body of work, a series of abstract, psychedelic pastels dating to the 1950s... ..Bauermeister’s limitless imagination ... would soon nurture the environment where the first Fluxus happenings took place between 1960 and 1961 in her Cologne studio. The avant-garde that gathered there included John Cage, Christo, Merce Cunningham, Nam June Paik, David Tudor, and others who would go on to form a vanguard scene of musicians, dancers, and performance artists who thrived in New York throughout the 1960s, a milieu now known as Neo-Dada" at Michael Rosenberg Gallery, 100 11th Ave at West 19th Street, til January 20th.

 

Fuck the System (Dürer Madonna), 1972
18 5/8 x 18 5/8 x 6 1/2 inches / 47.3 x 47.3 x 16.5 cm 

“I could never execute the Madonna picture if I titled it in German—the work is named Fuck the System—that doesn’t work in German but in American English it’s more casual, and the Madonna personifies ‘fuck the system.’ She is the first iconic, revolutionary feminist whose immaculate conception we still celebrate today; she is a glimpse into the future, she is a woman of the future…”
—Mary Bauermeister

 

 

Antonio Negri 1933-2023

Reality is always ordered toward the infinite determination, but the converse also is true: This tendency toward the infinite must also invert itself, expressing itself as a plural determination of things produced, without which the infinite world would be seen as divisible.  The ontological totality is the endpoint of the spontaneous expression of reality; reality is the product of the spontaneity of the infinite totality. To the spontaneity of existence corresponds the spontaneity of production. The spontaneous and complete correspondence of the singular existence and the total existence, within the tension of expression as well as within the nexus of production, is the beginning and the end of philosophy.

Philosophy speaks because being is not mute. Philosophy is silent only where being is mute. [Spinoza's] Ethics, I, D1: "By cause of itself I understand that whose essence involves existence, or that whose nature cannot be conceived except as existing." D3 "By substance I understand what is in itself and is conceived through itself, i.e., that whose concept does not require the concept of another thing, from which it must be formed." .... Being tells of its necessary correspondences.

(L'anomalia selvaggia, 1981, tr. Michael Hardt, pp. 45-6)

Refaat Alareer 1979-2023

 

Rise! Rise!
No matter how neglectful you are,
You will remain in my eyes and flesh an angel.
And you remain as our love wants you to be:
Your breeze is amber, 
Your land bliss— 
And I love you more. 
Your hands are trees
But I do not sing
Like other nightingales.
The chains teach me to fight and fight,
Because I love you more. 
My singing is daggers of roses,
My silence the birth of thunder,
And a lily of my own blood.
You are the soil and the sky
And your heart is evergreen.
Your love when at a low ebb is a flow; 
How, then, can I not love you more?
And you are as our love wants you to be:
I am your beloved child;
On your sweet lap
I grow, and rise.

 

(Mahmoud Darwish, I Love You More,  translated by Refaat Alareer "with the help of Ghada Ahmed, Sarah Ali, Hanan Habashi and the amazing Mohamed Shamaa)"

“If I must die, you must live, to tell my story.”

- @itranslate123 pic.twitter.com/ZHld8ZPWLy

— Yasser (@Yasser_Gaza) December 9, 2023