February 5, 2003
DOES ANYONE EDIT THE TIMES? (part 15,692):
Powell Without Picasso (MAUREEN DOWD, February 5, 2003, NY Times)When Colin Powell goes to the United Nations today to make his case for war with Saddam, the U.N. plans to throw a blue cover over Picasso's antiwar masterpiece, "Guernica."Too much of a mixed message, diplomats say. As final preparations for the secretary's presentation were being made last night, a U.N. spokesman explained, "Tomorrow it will be covered and we will put the Security Council flags in front of it."
Mr. Powell can't very well seduce the world into bombing Iraq surrounded on camera by shrieking and mutilated women, men, children, bulls and horses.
"antiwar"? No sensible person who's read anything about Pablo Picasso or the Spanish Civil War believes Guernica to be antiwar; it is uniformly understood to be Communist propaganda. Even by the low standards of his fellow modern artists and intellectuals, Picasso was vile. In the preface to her delightfully viscious biography, Picasso: Creator and Destroyer, Arianna Huffington says that when she began work on the book she heard that David McCullough was working on a life of Picasso too. She contacted him and asked if he'd mind her competing with him. He told her to go ahead; he was dropping the project because he found his subject too despicable to spend time with.
Now, there were plenty of well-intentioned but misguided souls who were on the wrong side in the Spanish Civil War, the later repentant George Orwell chief among them. But Picasso was still painting portraits of Stalin at the time of that genocidal thug's death. And sixty years after the fact it's obvious that Franco saved Spain from a dire fate and quite possibly prevented Hitler from winning WWII.
Ms Dowd and other uninformed members of the Left likely see themselves as heirs to Picasso, to the extent that they are "antiwar" intellectuals. In fact, they also resemble him in their propagandizing against the West and in defending the opponents of human freedom.
That a Stalinist abomination still hangs in the UN tells us much about the moral blindness of that institution. What American patriot would allow himself to be photographed in front of it, any more than he'd allow himself to be pictured with a swastika in the frame?
UPDATE:
We got an e-mail that makes a good point:
One issue that you might want to consider with regard to Guernica is that, even though Picasso's painting might be regarded as propaganda, it depicts a change in the manner of fighting a war. In the past, countries had generally refrained from undertaking bombing or shelling that was likely to cause a high level of civilian casualties. This "breakthrough" in 1937 led to the acceptability during WW II of the bombing of civilian populations or, at least, military targets that were surrounded by civilian populations. This "collateral damage" became acceptable.Posted by Orrin Judd at February 5, 2003 9:46 AMMs. Dowd is suggesting that the painting should embarrass the United States as it's heading to war while ignoring how much the United States has taken care to adopt methods of attack that minimize collateral damage, namely the use of precision and guided bombs or missiles. The United States should be credited for taking such care and its methods of fighting can not rightly and fairly compared to what Guernica depicts.
George Orwell's essay on Salvador Dali is well worth reading in this context; he superbly communicates how thoroughly debased was the 1930s Dali-Picasso art establishment and its elite clientele who demanded ever more anti-human "art." The same people who gave the world Hitler and Stalin gave us these "artists."
Posted by: pj at February 5, 2003 12:45 PMHere's a link.
Posted by: pj at February 5, 2003 12:47 PMI don't believe the same people who gave the world Hitler also gave the world Stalin, and vice versa, despite the interlude of the Hitler-Stalin pact, a loveless marriage if ever there was one.
So I cannot understand pj's remark.
I agree that Picasso was hardly antiwar, but I fail to understand what the "right" side of the Spanish Civil War was. In 1937, who knew the triumph of the western democracies depended on Moslem mercenaries slaughtering democratic workers in the name of Catholicism?
Harry:
Franco did.
Orwell was extremely put out by the Loyalists for obvious reasons--they tried to kill him and did in a number of his friends--but he was not convinced that he was on the wrong side in that he favored Franco over the Loyalists.
Posted by: Derek Copold at February 5, 2003 4:04 PMHe didn't favor either side at the end. Unless you mean that by withdrawing with Franco ahead, he was giving his blessing by default.
The effort to make Orwell a rightwinger is not going to fly.
When he came home, he abandoned the Labour Party not for the Conservatives or the Nationalist coalition but for the Independent Labor Party. Sort of like the Dems who abandoned Gore for Nader a couple years ago.
Harry -- my remark was not meant literally -- rather I meant that a similar culture animated the people who promoted or allowed tyrants to reach and maintain power in multiple countries. There was at that time a widespread fascination with death, destruction, and life-destroying tyranny. The same callous spirit that is amused by Dali kicking 3-year-old girls in the head, or killing donkeys, is complacent toward holocausts of Jews and kulaks.
Posted by: pj at February 5, 2003 5:39 PMWe're not going to get a bunch of commies and commies-lovers to recognize that Franco saved his country or that innocents butchered by Stalin and Mao are just as dead as those killed by Hitler. The Red revolution in Spain was stopped, as it was in Portugal, Nicaragua and Chile. Te Deum laudamus.
Posted by: Lou Gots at February 5, 2003 6:51 PMOrwell was punished, almost assassinated in Spain, and, later, in England, character-assassinated, because he fought for the POUM, a native-Spanish far-left org. rather than a Comintern sponsored branch of the Loyalists, but he was wounded by the insurgents.
Posted by: Ed White at February 5, 2003 6:52 PMAzana's or more properly Largo Caballero's Spain, would have
been the same type of social
experiment from the people
who brought you, East Germany,
Hoxha's Albania, & probably even
the Khmer Rougr
The anti-Republican movement cost the
lives of 1 in 15 Spaniards, wrecked the
barely functioning economy and denied
liberty to two generations of Spaniards.
It is possible, barely, to imagine something
worse, but not much.
In fact, Francoism was tyranny and of a
sort that has lasted a lot longer, many places,
than any sort of left tyranny ever has.