Art?
Aussie Dave | Mar 16, 2010 | 9 comments
Just when you thought Roseanne Barr dressed as Hitler was as disturbing as you could get, along comes someone to outdo it.
And there’s more, such as baby Idi, baby Khomeini, baby Mussolini, and baby Saddam (no baby Arafat though).
Leaving aside whether or not this is art (in my mind, the answer is clear), this is highly unoriginal. The palestinians have been doing something similar for years.
About the Author
An Australian immigrant to Israel, Aussie Dave has been blogging since early 2003.Filed Under: General
<img src=http://www.keepaa.com/images/anon/2009/200904/20090412/f13cf4ee68b7541ea1bb5ad6e9931696.jpg>
Juvanya: He appears to be standing in front of an oven. Oy.
BTW, baby Mussolini is the best. At least the artist is admitting that Communist icons like Mao were evil. Most artists (being leftists) would opt instead to whitewash the evil committed by Commie leaders.
There's nothing to whitewash. The West has demonized it's enemies that turned shit into gold.
Would you like me to count up Adam Smith's death toll?
Honestly, you can idolize people who made Hitler look like an amateur, but since there is no practical difference here, I won't push it as far as to how many murders there were. But I've argued with Muslims who insisted that Jews had it good under Islam, and a Catholic who insisted that Jews had it good under Catholicism, and now with someone who said they had it good under Communism.
The fact is that the Jewish Communists, and later Stalin, destroyed the Jewish religion in Russia and the Ukraine. (The Georgians put up more of a fight, although it still wasn't pretty.) Not Jewish culture, relatively minor things like music and poetry and theater (with a Yiddish spelling revised to remove the Hebrew) but the religion. They were Antiochus to Hitler's Haman. Unfortunately, there is no popular comprehnsive study on this in Enlish, but I've come accross countless references to this.
But unlike the Christians and Muslims, there is no longer a direct danger to Judaism from Communism, thnaks to the fall of the U.S.S.R., so it's somewhat irrelevant.
I honestly dont accept the figures push by virulent anti-communists that portray Stalin as worse than Hitler. They add up deaths that are completely irrelevant to Stalin. If a soldier was killed in war, it's blamed on Stalin. If someone died in prison for murder or treason or was executed, it's blamed on Stalin. Meanwhile, Hitler systematically ordered the deaths and eliminations of millions in broad sweeps. Stalin never said he wanted all the Jews dead. He may have been critical of them and suspicious (he was often so against many people and ultimately not that unjustified in it). I plan to put this whole thing together in a book one day when I have the time to do the necessary research.
I've argued with a few Muslims about that also. Life was, on average, better than under Christianity, but even so: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1066_Granada_massacr…
i think I know what you're talking about here. It took me awhile to realize this connection. I have a friend who is a Russian Jew, but is not religious at all and knows no Yiddish, but speaks Russian fluently. Meanwhile, I know a tiny bit of Yiddish and any Russian I know I picked up on my own. The Yiddish was passed down from my great-grandparents who came from Russia before the USSR. It took me awhile to realize that this was because the Jews were broken out of the shtetls and Pale and assimilated and educated. The result is you now have secular or atheist Jews like my friend and Avigdor Lieberman.
I do remember learning in a Shabbat service or something that when Napoleon came to the Pale, the rabbis told the Jews to pray for the Tsar's victory. As bad as the tsar was, Napoleon wanted to assimilate the Jews, which would destroy the culture.
"Communism" sought to make everyone equal and assimilated together, so that is why we have what we have. Whether that is good or bad, is open to debate. I think ideally, the world would be better without religion. But I dont see Judaism as only a religion. Well I see Judaism as a religion, but you can be culturally (or nationally) Jewish, which is what I am, more or less.
I have no idea if this relates to anything at all. All I know is that I would make a good professor rambling on about nothing.
No, you don't understand at all. The Jewish religion was systematically destroyed. The were almost no Rabbis, no Yeshivas, no religious schools. Hebrew was banned, and Judaism is only taught with Hebrew.
I did ask one of my colleagues (and remeber, this was already under Gorbachov), and he said while they were not expressly taught Atheism is grade school, religion (in general) was basically bannned. To me, this IS worse than Hitler.
You are basically justifying the religious persecution of the Jewish people.
BTW, the USSR did continue the Czar's policy of spreading anti-semitism, both home and abroad. I recall that in one European country they actually sued someone in the Russian embassy over anti-semitic tracts that the USSR was disseminating.
This is very strange. I find it simultaneously offensive and hilarious at the same time.
No, it's not art. But it is an illustrative form of the absurd.
And yes, David is right. Where's the baby Marx and Ho Chi Min?
It is rather an illustrative form of stupidity and burning desire to be original. But what do I know from arts?
Hey! You got SPAM!