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Okay.
I can't
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Welcome to Sputnik orbiting the world
with me, George Galloway, and me,
Gayatri. The pen is mightier than the
sword, and the cartoonist's pen can be
the sharpest of them all. Over the last
30 years, the likes of Spitting Image
and Steve Bell have reduced one
political leader after another to
ridicule, and it worked. Few now see
David Steel as other than a pocket
handkerchief. Mrs. Thatcher as a
monocular maniac, John Major as other
than a pair of gray wrons, Tony Blair
morphing into Mrs. Stature and so on. A
new generation of savage penmen. And
they are almost all men is emerging. And
one of the sharpest of those is Darren
Cullen, a political satirical artist
whose work is featured in the
prestigious Victoria and Albert Museum
and at the brief but glorious family
theme park unsuitable for children,
Banksy's Dismaland. Talking of
unsuitable for children, let's take a
quick look at some of Darren's best
work.
So to get your
Kick kick.
Action.
Action man. Battlefield casualties
for PTSD. Action man. Danger laughs at
every return.
He never feels safe. Not even in his own
home.
Do what you can to block out the
memories. Look, look. With no support
from HQ, it's up to you to find a way.
Looks like we're on our own.
PTSD Action Man now comes with thousand
yard stare action. With time running
out, only you can stop the
Let's get out of here.
Action, man. That's absolute genius.
I've got to tell you, it's the modern
equivalent of Billy Connley's old gag.
Join the army, visit exotic places, meet
all kinds of different people, and kill
them. Uh but this of course focusing on
the way in which soldiers are abandoned
after they're no longer any use to the
killing machine. Uh you made it for a
veterans group, didn't you? Yeah, it's
Veterans for Peace UK and made it with
the director Price James and we did it
as part of a a kind of a campaign to
draw attention to the fact that the UK
is the only country in Europe and only
one of 19 countries worldwide that still
recruits 16 and 17 year olds into the
armed forces. It's one of these things
where we we kind of lecture the rest of
the world on uh like child soldiers in
Africa and and things like this when
we're uh systematically targeting and
recruiting children into our own armed
forces. Oh, the British Army actually
has its own range of toys. Uh HM armed
forces. Toys? Yes. Aimed at ages four
plus. They have a a small Now that's a
boy soldier. No, no. So I don't take my
boy to the to show. So you can just get
it at the toy toy store. Yeah. In the
Argos catalog, they have a full page of
advertising it and they to inculcate the
military spirit in our children. Yeah.
Yeah. Thinking on a long-term strategy,
governments and corporations have
similar idea, which is if they want to
protect their uh future, then they've
got to capture the imaginations of
children. And um the there's a the the
army's head of recruitment strategy
actually said that it starts with a
seven-year-old seeing a parachute is an
air display and from then on it's drip
drip drip steady um kind of um pushing
the idea that the military is just a fun
kind of action-packed way of spending a
few years of your life even if it ends
like PTSD action man this question of uh
advertising is is particularly
important for us at the moment. We've
got a young child who spends a lot of
time, too much time, watching Peppa Pig.
Other cartoons are available. Uh and uh
in between each episode are screeds of
advertising aimed at a 2-year-old child,
aimed at the very smallest of children,
so that they'll ask their parents,
I I want that. Can I have the who of
course will say no? But the funny thing
is that these ads are in the same mood
and in selling basically the same
products as in my during my childhood.
It's amazing how they can just reproduce
that. Yeah. And there's the thing is
that a child isn't aware that when
they're being advertised to as well. I
think it's only about the age nine or
something that children actually can
tell the difference between an advert
and a regular program or a film. and
they don't have any kind of um
psychological u self-defense against
these manipulation tactics uh which are
being created by really intelligent and
uh uh people with massive budgets in
these advertising companies. Um and I
think basically no advertising should be
targeted at children whatsoever. In Keep
the Aspadistra Flying, one of George
Orwell's best novels, uh he has a
character Gordon Comtock, who's an
advertising man, who describes his work
as legalized lying. You just escaped
that because if I'm not wrong, you
intended to go into that snake oil
business. When I was younger, I thought
that advertising was just would be a
good way of of coming up with ideas for
a living. And it wasn't until I went to
art school in Glasgow that uh I started
hanging around with with people who
started kind of talking about these
ideas about how advertising was actually
really uh dangerous um and destructive
um influence on society. If you look at
um everything from um the skyrocketing
rates of like anorexia, bulimia, status
anxiety and depression, you can trace a
lot of that to advertising as being a
constant psychological assault on the
population. Um and even things like uh
global warming, the rates of consumerism
that's feeding into that wouldn't be
possible without advertising telling us
constantly that we're missing something
in our lives. Exactly. And it's
everywhere. Right. This morning I was
filling up a tank and while pumping
while filling this up, I looked at my
pump. There was a bit of space for
advertisement. Yes. Especially when they
say advertise here.
Almost almost every brightly lit object
in the outside world has an advert on it
now. And that's a big problem when it
comes to otherwise it's a waste of
space. Right. Well,
now you you're uh anti- capitalist,
anti-militarist
uh and as I know anti-imperialist
political take uh on things uh that's
going to limit the number of corporate
billboards uh for your work which uh
actually is as good as I have ever seen.
I mean it's world class. You've
obviously consciously taken this
political path. How restrictive is it
proving to finding a mass audience? I'm
not sure. It's it's difficult to say
because it wouldn't be possible to um
make this type of work and do it in a
corporate fashion as well. Uh but when
it comes to uh u things like getting
your work out there, there are ways you
can reappropriate billboards yourself
without having to go through official
channels. you can get your work out
there uh and you have and uh people
should check it out. Uh but getting paid
for it and therefore earning a living
has never been more difficult for
someone like you. That can be tricky.
Yes. One of the many brilliant whises
that you've come up with. Uh you showed
at Banks's uh brief but glorious uh
exhibition in in Somerset. Tell us about
that. It was uh pocket money loans. I I
originally did it in North London. is um
and it was a payday loan shop for kids.
So I was offering children an advance on
their pocket money at 5,000% interest.
And uh when I first did it I had quite a
few people coming into the the shop just
a mixture of outrage and disbelief just
say please tell me this isn't asking you
for a loan. Yes. Unfortunately.
Yeah. I had a few people come in with
their kids wondering if it was possible
to get a loan but out of more out of
desperation I think than anything else.
and the 5,000% interested in put them
off cuz that's normal. As a matter of
fact, that's cheaper. It was at the time
it was cheaper than Wonga. Yeah. Um and
and the the thing is that uh when people
believed it was real, the joke wasn't on
them as so much as it was the joke is
about the fact that this didn't seem
that unusual that that these companies
the only reason that these companies
aren't offering loans to children is
because it's illegal. If they could,
they would. Yeah, they would. And uh you
can be sure of that. And that a lot of
payday loan companies um actually use
very child-friendly advertising imagery.
One guy has adjusted it obviously now.
Well, they they have puppets and you
said that they
but they still but the there's that
technique is is twofold. One is to uh
kind of groom the next generation of of
customers of children to uh and then
also to make the product seem less
threatening to adults as well. If it has
a a cartoon pig on the advert, then it
can't be that dangerous when it actually
is. This uh political take of yours uh
of which I and I think the great
majority of our viewers will applaud. Uh
this puts you into the political orbit
uh like us uh of of Jeremy Corbin. Now
you're performing up in Liverpool next
weekend at the Labor Party conference.
Tell us about that. Yes, there's a
momentum have put on this festival
called the world transformed and uh I've
got some work in an exhibition there
doing a taking part in a discussion and
a few other things and it's um it's a
way really of kind of bringing together
a lot of the ideas and the uh optimism
that Jeremy Corbyn has kind of infused
the Labour Party with. um and kind of
just getting a lot of people together
and see what ideas come out of that and
and seeing what kind of better world. So
where where do people visit that? All
the details are on the world
transformed.org
and uh my exhibition is in the black e
in Liverpool. Um it's a a gallery there
and u but yeah it should be good. I'm
looking forward to And where where do
you display your work generally? You got
a website? Yeah, it's spelling mistakes
costs lives.com.
Absolutely. Uh fantastic. Uh final
question. Uh of all those that have come
before you, who's your favorite?
Do you like Steve Bell's work? I'm a big
fan of his. I am a big fan of Steve
Bell. Um although like yes I think Chris
Morris and Armando Yinuchi is some of my
favorite uh kind of satists uh for like
the he made the thick of it but he can't
make a second series because he couldn't
possibly surpass what has actually
transpired in real life. Life imitated
art in the problem with satire when the
real world gets more satirical than what
you're actually making. is tricky. Put
us out of business.
Darren Cullen, you you really are a
genius and I've never meant it more when
I say to our viewers, please check this
man out. He is a world superstar in the
making. Thanks for joining us on the
sport, Nick. Coming up next, are the
winds of change blowing in Africa again
or is it a scramble for Africa 2.0? Stay
tuned.
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Welcome back to Sputnik. Harold
McMillan, the British Prime Minister in
the 1950s, famously returned from the
African continent, declaring that the
winds of change were beginning to blow.
The European empires were in the retreat
and a generation of mainly progressive,
non-aligned leaders and states emerging.
It took half a century before Belgian,
Portuguese, French, and British
colonialism were finally almost
completely dug out of their profitable
redouts. One by one, progressive leaders
were removed by murder, death, or
disgrace. Africa turned out not to be
poor after all, but vastly rich, and
rich begings began to tempt the old
colonial powers back to the scenes of
their former crimes. Just about the last
of the revolutionary generation clings
on in South Africa and Zimbabwe. But
clinging on is the best you can say. Are
these changes for the better or for the
worse? Helping us through that is
lecturer in African politics at the
School of Oriental and African Studies,
Dr. Alistister Fraser. Dr. Fraser,
thanks for joining us. Let's start with
Southern Africa. uh Zambia, Zimbabwe,
South Africa amongst the last to be free
of colonialism and the aparite uh system
that it left behind. Uh things are not
going so well in southern Africa. Tell
us. I suppose the structural condition
that causes the problem uh for many of
these states is their position in the
the world economy. um that they're
producers uh of mineral resources um
primarily that their economies are
structured uh around the old extractive
colonial um industries and those
products have very unstable prices. Um
so at moments um economic development is
uh booming in the last 10 years. There
have been moments when people have been
very excited about the growth rates in
South Africa or Zambia and have thought
um that wealth is on the way that
democracy is flourishing. Um and then at
other moments um it being a world market
um we see a big slump in the metals
prices uh and economic crisis, people
thrown into unemployment uh and very
little uh in the way of diversified
economies to kind of take up the slack.
Um when we see these economic crisis,
you also see uh political crises. So um
all three countries uh in some sense
have multi-party democracies um in all
of them and there is some degree of
competitiveness, some degree uh of civil
liberties. People are able to organize
and press um to overcome the
inequalities and um economic problems
they face. And yet in all three
countries there are different degrees of
authoritarianism,
repression, uh media houses closed down,
opposition leaders imprisoned. So uh
it's a mixed picture. I don't think we
should be um constantly depressed about
the state of Africa. Africans have um
organized themselves since independence
uh have resisted the pressures that they
find themselves in both locally and
internationally uh and are constructing
a complicated contradictory political
and economic order just like we've got
ourselves just like we've got ourselves.
It's been very common in African studies
to assume that we need very special
tools um to understand African politics
that is somehow this is a colonial
construction right that that it it's uh
everybody is either involved in some
religious or ethnic belief system that
makes it almost impossible to understand
what's really going on. Um but in my
view if you develop um the kinds of
ideas we have about politics sometimes
grown in the west um we can learn a
great deal about African politics. If we
think about African politics, we can
often learn quite a lot about what's
going on here. Um I've been looking at
at Zambia quite a lot for the um the
last 10-15 years. Uh and in the mid
2000s, you saw a big populist moment um
in Zambia, a kind of reaction uh against
the neoliberal system that had been put
in place there. um against new Chinese
investments in the mining sector,
against um the informalization of work
uh and a critique of a kind of
technocratic style of politics emerged
and centered on one particular
individual,
Michael Saturn. And you can look at that
moment and say, well, this is a very
strange African development. And this is
an African form of populism that has
something to do with the dominance of
international donors with the um World
Bank and IMF imposing very technocratic
systems. And that's broadly how I
analyzed it. And then suddenly you have
the Greek crisis, you have the rise of
Trump, and you go, oh, this
tool of analysis thinking about what it
takes to organize a populist
mobilization, it helps to explain what's
going on in Zambia. It's pretty good if
you're trying to understand what's going
on in the west where our tools of
analysis assuming that politics is
divided between left and right don't
really get us very far in understanding
lots of the political developments that
are going on here. So um I don't think
these political systems or these
countries are alien or difficult to
understand. No, I agree with that and
populism gets a bad press in in my
opinion. But as you've raised Zambia and
I raised Zimbabwe in South Africa once
we had this triumvirate of Kenneth
Kawunda the great independence leader
whom I met many times uh Robert Mugabi
in Zimbabwe and Nelson Mandela and his
immediate successors uh leading the ANC
government in South Africa. All three of
these liberation movements are now in a
a pretty powerless uh condition. The ANC
is beginning to lose elections. Nelson
Mandela's own home area was lost to the
opposition in the recent elections
there. Mugabi has lived far too long at
least in power. Uh and Kawunda left in a
way in disgrace. Uh and Europe, his
party barely exists. Barely exists.
They've been pocked. uh gone out of uh
out of business more or less to what do
you attribute that? Is that the empire
striking back or is it something
intrinsic within the model that they
followed? I think they're three quite
different cases. I think I think it's
interesting to think about what happens
after a liberation movement and what are
the the kind of problems that are built
in and of course they all got their
independence in quite different ways
that Zambian independence was negotiated
broadly. Um Zimbabwe had a vicious bush
war uh and the South African
anti-apartid struggle was very bitter
but not militarized in quite the same
way um as the Zimbabwean struggle. So I
think you can understand that all three
systems all three party systems contain
ferocious contradictions. Um the ANC
tries to hold together um communists,
the the trade union movement, um
multi-racial liberals, um a very wide
kind of spectrum of opinion, um and is
utterly dominant politically. I mean, we
say it's in crisis. It just won 54% of
the vote, twice as much as the biggest
opposition party. though it's a crisis
relative to ANC total dominance of the
20 years um since the end of apartheid
but it's it's a relative crisis um in
Zimbabwe Zanupf has had to turn to um
very very authoritarian means of
suppressing opposition cheating at
elections in order to cling on to power
um and I think that's understandable not
so much in terms of the kind of broad um
uh the broad range of forces as it's
trying to hold within itself, but partly
as a a a legacy of its militarized
nature. It was always uh an
authoritarian military organization
um that tried to impose order on itself
to discipline the population. um
violence was always at the heart of its
mode of organization and it's difficult
to transform that into a grassroots up
democratic party capable of responding
um to the needs and desires of a
population. You referred earlier to
Chinese investment in Zambia. Uh to what
extent is China uh a genuine competitor
for influence in Africa as against US
and Western uh more explicitly military
uh strategic influence? Yeah. Is China
just business? Uh or do they have
political ambitions in Africa too? I
think it's just business. Um China wants
copper. It wants coal. um it wants to
have reliable long-term access to the
resources that it thinks it needs for
its own development model uh and it goes
about getting them in a way not totally
dissimilar um to western actors. So I
think the best way to think about it is
as a competitor. Um it's also a
relatively minor competitor at least in
southern Africa. We have I think
probably explained by the kind of
anxiety of Western aid donors and
western foreign policy uh elites about
the the bankruptcy of their own model
that they they can't attract loyalty or
desire um to westernize in the way that
they used to think they could. And so
they're terribly anxious about any kind
of competition. Chinese investment takes
up relatively small portions of all of
those economies and yet causes this
terrible anxiety that we're going to be
uh overtaken. I think that tells us
probably more about ourselves than it
does about the Chinese. Africa not as
poor as I said in the introduction as I
was brought up to believe. We used to
collect pennies for black babies. Oh, we
still do. Yes, that's uh what it was
called in the in the in the Catholic uh
millu. Um, it was a a black figurine.
You put the penny in its hand and it
swallowed it. It turns out Africa is
really rich. I assume what you're
getting at is that the resources flow uh
out of Africa, particularly um in terms
of significant debt repayments, in terms
of primary resources being extracted um
in ways that don't leave um as much
development behind as is possible. Um in
that sense um lots of African economies
are the fuel that make um the rich west
rich. Um but of course there is massive
poverty um uh across southern Africa.
Very high percentages of the population
um live in
conditions that we are rightly horrified
by. Um I don't think charity is the
solution. Um I don't think um that kind
of model um is any any longer has much
belief in itself let alone anybody else
believing in it. Um but the situation I
think is already complicated and
difficult. A new leadership Patrice
Lomba come back. Amen. That's what
Africa needs in my view. But we'll have
to continue this discussion another
time. It's been really fascinating.
You're a great guest. Thanks very much
Dr. Alistister Fraser.
[Music]
And now it's your turn to tell us what
you think through the portals of social
media. What's rattling guy? Well,
speaking of satirical artist, I've only
got one thing to say, and that's from
Ricardo Picasso quoting Thomas
Jefferson. Ridicule is the only weapon
which can be used against unintelligible
prepositions. Ah, very good. There's no
doubt that making people laugh at your
enemies is way more effective than
making them merely angry. so much. And
what's happening in southern Africa is
are these winds of change or is it
another scramble for Africa 2.0? Kenja
Rakota says another revolution is
underway. What Africa needs is is a new
generation of leaders uh like the first
like the first but obviously for the
21st century because imperialism knew
what it was doing when it murdered
Patrice Leumba when it overthrew Kwami
and Chroma. Uh it knew what it was doing
when it ensured that one tyrant or
despot or another would rule uh Africa
because that was the way that they could
keep the the money rolling. That's all
the tweets for today unfortunately which
alas means that's the end of the show.
You can stay in touch with us on social
media through Twitter RT Sputnik or
Facebook Sputnik on Russia today. It's
goodbye from me Gatri and from me George
Galloway. It's been marvelous.
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