Between the Battlefield and the Canvas

http://watchingamerica.com/News/233635/between-the-battlefield-and-the-canvas/

Between the Battlefield and the Canvas
Al-Khaleej, UAE
By Amjad 'Arar
Translated By Joseph McBirnie
27 February 2014
Edited by Gillian Palmer


We have in Arabic the popular saying, “The free (not busy) act as judge.” But in America, it seems the free act as painter. In one of the most ironic perceptions of modern politics, we hear that former U.S. President George W. Bush has turned to painting since leaving the White House. He will display his “art,” which includes 20 paintings, in the April exhibition. So after two terms and two campaigns to occupy Afghanistan and Iraq, “adorned” with his sagas of Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and support for Israel, he, now influenced by Churchill’s 1948 “Drawing for Entertainment,” has begun flirting with brushes and colors.

Thus, history has granted this symbolic event, which moves between the battlefield and the arts. Other artist-politicians have attempted to put a price on their art, ignoring the gruesomeness and blood of the thousands of victims behind their works.

Ehud Barak, for example, plays the piano fluently. But the undeserving Zionist general should be applauded not for his musical “creativity,” but for the “creativity” of murdering Palestinians and the “art” of sniping the heads of their children. His greatest creation was the “defensive shield” which “brightly” outlined the massacres in the Jenin refugee camp and the towns of Nablus and Ramallah.

The examples of painters who mask their ugly politics and vaunt their art and literature to justify their indiscriminate killings under the banners of pro-democracy, anti-dictatorship are too many to name. Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, in addition to his ruthlessness and militarism, made many beautiful paintings between 1908 and 1913 in Vienna. His bright colors certainly contradicted his efforts at ethnic, political and cultural extermination, and only failed to mask his racism.