Mailing List Update – March 2024
PALESTINE
The Zionist myth that Israeli settlers “made the desert bloom” is as inaccurate as the one that Israel was a “land without a people for a people without a land”.
As we can see in Gaza and the West Bank, the process of stripping the land of its people, and reducing cultivated land to slashed and burned wasteland, requires extensive, brutal violence. Olive groves that have been propagated for centuries are torn down by Israeli settlers, water sources are filled with concrete, and farmers are violently expelled from their land.
In the 1948 Nakba, at least half of the Arab population of Palestine, (700,000 people,) were driven from their homes, and forbidden from returning. Villages were razed, and archaeological sites destroyed. There has been a deliberate attempt by the Israeli state to make its claim of a “land without a people” a retrospective reality. As they will attempt to do with Gaza, after this Second Nakba.
According to Decolonizing Palestine: “The vast majority of cultivated agricultural land in Israel today was already being cultivated by Palestinians before their ethnic cleansing… On the eve of the 1948 war, around 739,750 acres of land were being cultivated by Palestinians. These cultivated lands were so vast, that they were “greater than the physical area which was under cultivation in Israel almost thirty years later.” The agricultural core of the Israeli state consists of cultivated farmland that was stolen from Palestinian refugees after their ethnic cleansing.”
Colonial ideology has always needed to believe that conquered peoples were idle, ignorant and backwards, unable to manage their own resources, and always requiring Western intervention to improve and utilize the land beneath their feet. The more we learn about the civilisations that European colonialism has destroyed, the more we discover that we were simply importing our own ignorance into these nations, alongside our violence and disease. The people who lived there before we arrived knew all too well how to live in their own land.
So no, Israel did not “make the desert bloom”, like all European colonial projects, they did little more than pave paradise and put up a parking lot.
FUCKS SAKE
Made some new badges for my shop, so you can constantly be saying your favourite 
catchphrase.
Sort of like an automated email reply but for real life
EVICTION UPDATE
I’ve now had confirmation that I’ll be evicted from my studio/Museum of Neoliberalism by the end of September this year, which means it will be closing around the end of August to give me time to dismantle and move out. Still plenty of time to visit if you haven’t seen it yet!
Luckily I am progressing with plans for a move to a new studio but nothing is set in stone yet, so I don’t want to jinx it! I’m hoping for proper confirmation in the next couple of months.
To help fund the move I’ve been selling off some original artworks, including some 3D works that weren’t previously for sale, such as an edition of Action Man: Battlefield Casualties (be warned however they are not priced like toys!) If you’d like to see the updated catalogue just reply to this email and I’ll send you it over.
MUSEUM OF FREE DERRY
While I was in Ireland recently I visited Derry and the Museum of Free Derry where my Bloody Sunday Bayeux Tapestry is on display. It’s such an honour to have my work here, and it was great to see the museum itself, which is an important and fascinating history of the Troubles and of the anti-Catholic apartheid in the North which was instrumental in triggering the conflict. In many ways the city of Derry is like a microcosm of the colonisation, subjugation and partition of Ireland.
The scale of state violence from the plastic and rubber bullets, chemical weapons, batons with nails driven through them, and live ammunition that were used against a civilian population is hard to get your head around, particularly when this was happening in what is, ostensibly at least, a UK city, and within living memory.
My parents are both Irish, (as I am by citizenship, but not birth,) so I have heard and learned a lot over the years about the history of British violence in Ireland, but I still find myself surprised at horrors and injustices that were perpetrated here, and at the brazen cover-ups, whitewashing and collusion between the British state and Loyalist terrorists.
As our brilliant tour guide around the murals and sites of the Bloody Sunday massacre told us, Derry is perhaps the most rioted city in history, as people who were pushed to their limits, crammed into overcrowded housing and denied jobs, housing, and even votes based on their religion and politics, rebelled against their oppressors and shook the bars of their cages.
While “Free Derry” was a short-lived moment in the history of the struggle, it is an inspiring one and one which links to the struggles of dispossessed and oppressed people the world over. As can be seen with the many Palestine flags that hang alongside the Irish tricolour, it is the same struggle against colonisation, injustice, and oppression from here to there.
“Our revenge will be the laughter of our children” – Bobby Sands
PATREON ZINE
My 64-page 2023 recap zine for my Patreon backers has been mostly shipped now. But 
there are still copies left if you want to sign up for £3.50 a month here and get your copy.
I’ll be doing another post out by the end of the month, then as long as there are some left then every three months new subscribers will get a copy until they run out. Then there will be a new zine for 2024
SALE
I made a bit of a mistake recently and ordered a restock of these Don’t Believe Billionaires 
Mugs when I actually needed Not Piss mugs. So now I have far too many of these mugs and I don’t want to have to move them all to my new studio, so you can get one for a limited time at 20% off. Just use the code BILLIONOFF
Similarly I think I have too many of these Barbenheimer shirts in black and pink while on the 
other hand you have too few of them, so you can get an extra 20% off these by using the code PLASTIC
READING/WATCHING
Last night I watched The Checkpoint (2003) a documentary about IOF checkpoints in the occupied Palestinian territories – its an incredibly moving, infuriating and insightful film.
After my trip to Derry I’m also planning to rewatch Channel 4’s dramatisation of the Bloody Sunday massacre Sunday (2002) which I remember being very good when I saw it 20 years ago! As well as the new documentary on The Troubles, Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland. If anyone has recommendations on documentaries specifically about security service collusion with Loyalist terrorists in the North please let me know.
I’m also currently (slowly) reading:
Nuclear War: A Scenario – Annie Jacobsen
Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions since World War II – William Blum
The Black Jacobins – C. L. R. James
All of them absolutely fascinatingly grim. My favourite!
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