Paweł Michał Bartolik: Apology of the Maiming Criticism

We are all Palestinians – at least all who understand anything about contemporary
world, who doesn’t present old answers to the new problems and who are not
“forced” to close their eyes due to their own interest or illusion of interest.

That’s because the Palestinians are the “Jews” of today – the wretched people of the
earth in the world in which the unimaginable wealth and unimaginable poverty
polarize, and in which the word “freedom” means the freedom of the few “chosen
nations”, or rather their higher classes and strata, to dominate over the rest of ill-
starred fellows.

Model Aryans

Like in a commix? Maybe. Brazilian drawer Carlos Latuff embraced the matters
almost as if the world were a commix. Grim, grey figure, sitting in a cabinet, in a
chair near a window, with back to the table, answering the telephone; on the head, a
hat colored like a flag of USA – and on the table... a taken out drawer, with
inscription “done” on it, and inside, skulls with engraved names “Palestine”, “Iraq”,
“Afghanistan”; on the drawer, the next, with inscription “to be done” on it, and inside,
the cards with the names “Iran”, “Cuba”, “Venezuela”, “Bolivia”. Recent US
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, offering the US Army uniform to some psycho:
“We need your skills in Iraq, Dr Lecter.” George W. Bush, looking like the successful
businessman and jumping like a monkey, calls for increasing the production: the hand
of the Iraqi resistance tends a meat-grinding machine to which parachutes with US
soldiers are falling – luncheon is being packed to the coffins with the US flag. US
macho jerking off on a bogs, making a fetish of a doll – undressed Condie – salivating
and guffawing: “Waaaaaaaaaaaaaar!” Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz, equally
stirred with the slaughter of Lebanese civilians.

Drastical? Distasteful? Outrageous? Rather, typical to Latuff. This turpism, emanating

with ugliness and sometimes also vulgarisms, this apparent primitivism is essentially
the constitutive attribute of the one of the most intelligent contemporary campaigns of
protest against the brutality and soullessness of the world imperialism. Sharp
contrasts, vivid colours, distinct contours: it’s not – or not only – the distinguishing
mark of the Brazilian author of satirical drawings. It’s finally the distinguishing mark
of the world in which Israeli is the model Aryan.

To speak with an image, one must think with an image – with a movie image, not just
a photography, one needs to understand the things with their development, not in their
static situation. The official elites of this world do exactly the opposite: they
understand things in their static situation, not in their development. As if in the old
joke: “I’m going to the war. I’ll kill one or two and I’ll come back.” “And what if you
are killed?” “Me? For what sins?” So, even many years after the defeat in Vietnam,
and facing the impossibility of the victory in Iraq and Afghanistan, they can still fancy
they only beat the terrible Chávez or Ahmadinejad in the gob – and then, everything
will be OK. They can still fancy they are strong enough that their might will never
end, that they can grind to achieve this not only the millions of people born in all the
backwoods of this world but also their own cannon food – and this all will effect only
with the debauchery of their orgy of domination.
Talent needs to be supported

The others are just production waste – one needs to force them to consent to utilize
them, to make them think it’s natural and just turn of events, and one needs to be
outraged and stump feet like an aggravated daddy when for unknown reasons they do
not submit to the role of history’s fertilizer. This role is destined to all who are not the
“model Aryans” – and to those who resemble the hero of the Latuff’s artwork, who
like some others before is going with two machine guns to massacre his colleagues
and teachers in the high school; a ruffian in a US uniform tries to stop him, crying out
loud that the guy shound’t waste his talents. Surely, they are so precious for the army
of the Empire...

Two other works of Latuff speak so much about this logic of domination. First of
them presents two poor fellows, hanging on the barbed wire: Jewish prisoner of
concentration camp, and Palestinian from Gaza, resembling the former. Hands and
legs of both of them are shaping the swastika.

One must look at this satire simultaneously with the other bitter satire of Latuff: the
picture which is a quasi-montage of two pictures. “Collective”, i.e., anonymous like
his victims, US soldier, half in the uniform he collectively wears in Iraq, the other half
in the uniform he collectively wore in Vietnam, dying for “god and country” from the
hands of the resistance. It doesn’t only mean that the colonial soldier is another victim
of imperialism – like, to some extent, Hannibal Lecter is another victim of the
collective psychopath, namely capitalism. It also points at the factors of
decomposition – for the decomposition is the form of movement, just like
amorphousness is the form of complexity – which are endemic to the very logic of
domination.

Israhell

The victims of that logic will never submit to their “natural” role – resistance is the
natural consequence of oppression. Latuff is one of those seeing Palestine as the lens
of contemporary world – this magnifying glass is also world’s false mirror.

As we have already seen, he is not afraid to compare the logic of the Israeli
domination over the Palestinians to the logic which finally made Hitler and his
acolytes decided for the “final solution” – subordinating of giant military and
technological means to the aim of extermination of all Jews and Gypsies on the areas
destined to provide the “necessary” Lebensraum for the Herrenvolk. Extermination
wasn’t – at least, until it followed its own logic – the aim in itself, but the assumed
mean to realize the specifically understood interests of the ruling nation. That is why
some are feeling cold thrill while hearing about the Israeli priority of “providing
security” to its population – i.e., providing security of the “needed” Lebansraum!

Palestinians, both from the West Bank and Gaza, are often characterized in Latuff’s
artwork as the Jewish prisoners in striped garment – lean, skeletal, unshaven, dirty,
just repugnant for the people from “good society”. Ousted from the Israeli labor
market – like many other Third and Fourth World nations are ousted from the global
labor market – they are virtually only the waste.
While the armies of the allies were liberating the prisoners of another Nazi
concentration camps and death camps at the end of the second world war, one of the
most famous US generals, George S. Patton, expressed his utter disregard for the
liberated. He just couldn’t understand... the deep cultural fall of those people. The
cause is the victors in the name of the struggle with fascism forced to the world the
logic which – while thought to the end – is exactly the logic of fascism.

No one tries the victors. That is also the meaning of Israhell – like Latuff used to call
Israel.

We are all the Palestinians

Extermination of the „obsolete” nations of the Third and the Fourth World is the last
word of imperialist capitalism – and in the same way, extermination of the “obsolete”
Palestinians is the last word of the Zionist colonial rule. The latter is just an element
of the first. Smart Latuff couldn’t miss that. During the last genocidal invasion on
Gaza Strip he not only mocked at the equation of the defense of Palestinians with
anti-Semitism – the equation he of course knows well from his own experience.
Though we “know” from one of his artworks that not only calling Ehud Olmert a
“war criminal” but even calling him an “asshole” is anti-Semitism – it surely wasn’t at
all the ultima ratio of his notorious violating every single rule of “good taste”.

He published in the Internet the series of artworks, presenting a Jew in the Warsaw
ghetto, a Native American woman of Chiapas at the end of the last century, a Tibetan
monk, a Vietnamese civilian, Black woman from the South Africa, and a Native
American and a Black from USA – all of them crying out loud in the face of their
tormenters: “I am Palestinian!”

Some years ago Latuff has drawn George W. Bush, leashing his bullterrier, Ariel
Sharon. No wonder he hadn’t any mercy over quite dull successor of the latter. So,
“model Aryan” Olmert was presented sitting at the table, devouring dollars from the
annual US help for Israel, rinsing it with wine and... farting with mighty fire, reaching
houses from which the terrified inhabitants of Gaza are escaping. Other Latuff’s
artwork points at Arab regimes’ co-responsibility for Palestinian Gehennah: Uncle
Sam, with all his coquettish courtesy he is able to, leads an Arab sheikh through the
burning Gaza, shutting his eyes with dollars.

Uncle Sam is one of the symbolic figures, evenly appearing in the Latuff’s works. The
other is a man with the Earth as a head: world public opinion, made asleep by the
“free world” propaganda. In reaction to the last colonial massacres in Gaza, Latuff
created a picture in which Uncle Sam playing in the swimming-pool, full of red
liquid, which shape resembles the Gaza Strip – while “Earth-head” reads a gazette on
a desk-chair near.

Yes, of course Latuff criticizes the contemporary global social relations in the way
that is the true mayhem – for the bunch of motherfuckers he doesn’t want to satisfy
fully deserved to be torn off of their skin!
A Polish version of this article was originally published in Trybuna Robotnicza
weekly, 19 February, 2009.

http://internacjonalista.pl/artykuy-obcojzyczne/in-english/1311-pawe-micha-bartolik-
apology-of-the-maiming-criticism.html
http://latuff2.deviantart.com/art/Article-on-Internacjonalista-130603624