January 11, 2011 marks the 10th anniversary of the U.S. detention camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The prison was authorized by former president George W. Bush as part of his “war on terror”. In 2005 Amnesty International called Guantánamo the “Gulag of our time“.

"Bagram" - Mark Vallen. Oil on masonite. 2009. 17.5 x 24 inches.

While running for the presidency, Senator Obama said during a CNN televised debate broadcast on 6-03-07; “Our legitimacy is reduced when we’ve got a Guantánamo that is open, when we suspend Habeas Corpus, those kind of things erode our moral claims that we are acting on behalf of broader universal principals, and that’s one of the reasons those kinds of issues are so important.”

In an interview conducted by 60 Minutes and broadcast on 11-16-08, President Obama proclaimed; “I have said repeatedly that I intend to close Guantánamo and I will follow through on that, I’ve said repeatedly that America doesn’t torture and I’m going to make sure that we don’t torture. Those are part and parcel of an effort to regain America’s moral stature in the world.”

Roman Ruins at Leptis Magna, Libya. The site is considered to be the most well-preserved ancient Roman city in the Mediterranean. Photograph: Doug McKinlay/Getty Images

Reports circulated on June 15, 2011 that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) would not rule out bombing ancient Roman ruins in Libya if it knew Muammar Gaddafi’s soldiers were hiding military equipment in them. For those who appreciate the importance of Libya’s Roman archeological sites, the most well preserved in all the Mediterranean, this is worrying news. The gravity of the situation is perhaps best summed up by an online TIME Magazine photo essay originally titled, “See Libya’s Roman Ruins Before Nato Bombs Them“, but apparently quickly changed by the magazine’s editors to the less provocative, “Libya’s Roman Ruins.”

The ancient Roman city of Leptis Magna, 81 miles from the Libyan capital of Tripoli, is identified as an important World Heritage Site by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Irina Bokova, the Director-General of UNESCO, has called on the warring parties to “respect the Hague Convention on the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict” and to “keep military operations away from cultural sites.” Ms. Bokova reminded NATO that of the ten countries involved in the NATO bombing of Libya, eight of them “are party to the Convention” - the United Kingdom is noticeably absent as a signatory nation.

Fighting between Libyan government soldiers and rebel forces has occurred near Leptis Magna, and the insurgents have accused Gaddafi of hiding military equipment, munitions, and troops among the ruins. Oddly, NATO has not verified rebel claims, a simple thing to do with aerial surveillance photography, instead NATO seems to have placed archeological sites in their crosshairs. An unnamed NATO official responded to the rebel allegations by saying “We will strike military vehicles, military forces, military equipment or military infrastructure that threaten Libyan civilians as necessary.”

Located on the Mediterranean coast, Leptis Magna was initially a Phoenician port city and trading center. It eventually grew to be part of the Roman Empire in 146 BC, but attained distinction when Septimius Severus became Emperor in 193 BC. Born in Leptis Magna, Severus developed his home city using all the power and resources available to him as Emperor of Rome, the result was the transformation of Leptis into one of the most important cities in all of Africa, it certainly turned out to be the most significant and beautiful of all Roman cities in Africa. You can get a glimpse of the magnificence of this ancient wonder by viewing this short video. No rational person would dare think of dropping bombs on Leptis Magna, for any possible reason, any more than they would consider dropping high explosives on Egypt’s Great Pyramid of Giza or India’s Taj Mahal - both of which are also UNESCO World Heritage Sites.

Perhaps concerns that war will irrevocably damage or obliterate Libya’s ancient Roman ruins are overheated, after all, President Obama insists he is not conducting a “war” on Libya, just a “kinetic military action.” Accordingly, if Leptis Magna is reduced to nothing by NATO bombs, the history books may read that it was a consequence of an intermittent kinetic military action.

Article I of the U.S. Constitution states that Congress is solely responsible for declaring war, but Congress never authorized military action against Libya, and President Obama never asked Congress to do so. Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon plunged the United States into a catastrophic land war in Vietnam without congressional authorization; each president escalated the conflict, despite the war’s staggering unpopularity and the absence of a formal declaration of war. The U.S. Congress responded by passing the War Powers Act in 1973. Largely thought of as a means to prevent future Vietnam-like wars, the act requires a president to obtain congressional approval for armed intervention within 60 days of a conflict being initiated, and if such approval is not obtained a president then has an additional 30 days to cease fighting.

On June 15 President Obama sent a 38-page report to Congress arguing that U.S. involvement in Libya falls short of “full-blown hostilities.” Mr. Obama insists he can go on attacking Libya without Congressional approval since what the U.S. military is doing there does “not involve sustained fighting or active exchanges of fire with hostile forces, nor do they involve U.S. ground troops.” Mr. Obama contends that he is only “supporting” operations being carried out by NATO, and his actions are not in violation of the War Powers Act. These are simply weasel words from the president.

On June 9, 2011 the Financial Times obtained and published a U.S. Defense Department memo having to do with U.S. contributions to NATO’s “Operation Unified Protector” military operations against Libya. The document stated U.S. military action in Libya is costing approximately $2 million per day. The Financial Times article also revealed the U.S. as the largest single contributor to NATO military operations in Libya, having conducted “70 per cent of the reconnaissance missions, over 75 per cent of the refuelling flights and 27 per cent of all air sorties.” Moreover, “the U.S. has about 75 aircraft, including drones, involved in the operations and since the end of March has conducted about 2,600 aircraft sorties and about 600 combat sorties.” In his final address before retiring this month, Defense Secretary Robert Gates noted the U.S. pays 75 percent of NATO defense spending. I would also add that U.S. Navy four-star admiral James G. Stavridis, is the Commander of NATO central command.

Mr. Obama’s kinetic military action in Libya certainly looks like a U.S. war to me.

In his report to Congress contending the U.S. is not at war with Libya, Mr. Obama conceded that the first two months of military operations against Libya have cost the Pentagon $716 million. By the end of September U.S. military operations will have cost the U.S. taxpayer at least $1.1 billion - at the “current scale of operations.” What the cost of military operations will continue to be after September is anyone’s guess, but I am reminded of former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell quoting the so-called pottery barn rule when advising former President George W. Bush in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq - “You break it, you own it.”

In all fairness, President Obama does have his supporters when it comes to flaunting the U.S. Constitution and the War Powers Act. The former Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the Bush administration, John Yoo, author of the infamous memos that determined waterboarding was not torture but a legal form of interrogation, expressed praise for President Obama’s Libya war strategy. In a Wall Street Journal opinion piece titled “Antiwar Senator, War-Powers President“, Mr. Yoo wrote:

“President Barack Obama has again flip-flopped on national security—and we can all be grateful. Having kept Guantanamo Bay open, resumed military commission trials for terrorists, and expanded the use of drones, the president has now ordered the U.S. military into action without Congress’s blessing. Imagine the uproar if President Bush had unilaterally launched air attacks against Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi. But since it’s Mr. Obama’s finger on the trigger, Democratic leaders in Congress have kept quiet—demonstrating that their opposition to presidential power during the Bush years was political, not principled.”

While it is uncertain whether or not President Obama is pleased to have Mr. Yoo’s backing, there is little doubt that he has disdain for the views of Dan Simpson, a former career U.S. diplomat. Simpson was the Ambassador to the Central African Republic (1990-92), Special Envoy to Somalia (1995-98), and Deputy Commandant of the United States Army War College (1993-1994). Now an associate editor at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, he characterized Mr. Obama’s war on Libya in the following manner; “We as a people are acting in Libya like some maddened pit bull that just has to attack something. It is shameful.” Simpson went on to say:

“Mr. Obama is moving ahead even though he is in clear violation of the terms of the U.S. War Powers Act. So what is behind his adherence to a policy of pounding Libya? It is oil, to a degree. Even though Libya produces only 2 percent of the world’s oil, the companies that Libya nationalized after Mr. Gadhafi took power in 1969 were owned in part by British and American companies with long memories and a lot of lobbying clout in Washington due to their political contributions to parties and congressmen. France, the United Kingdom and the United States would just love to get their concessions back.”

On March 18, 2011, the day before ordering U.S. military forces to attack Gaddafi’s Libya, President Obama told a select group of 18 U.S. Congress members that the U.S. military action would last for “days not weeks.” Three months later the war grinds on. The president still persists in arguing that there is no need for Congressional approval of his war on Libya; the 90 day limit provided by the War Powers Act that terminates a war not authorized by Congress passed on June 17th; NATO forces are apparently ready to bomb Libya’s ancient Roman ruins, and the so-called “peace movement” seems little more than a relic from the Bush years.

I began writing these words after stumbling upon the aforementioned TIME Magazine photo essay. In truly Orwellian fashion, the essay title had already been changed before I finished this article. No doubt “See Libya’s Roman Ruins Before Nato Bombs Them“, was too honest a proclamation.

"Where there's a will there's a way - Francisco Goya. Etching. 1819-1823. A comment on humanity's lunatic dreams of the impossible - to fly like bats!

March 19, 2011 marks the eight year anniversary of the U.S. war in Iraq. George W. Bush launched his “Operation Iraqi Freedom” on March 19, 2003, and Barack Obama launched his “Operation Odyssey Dawn” against Libya on March 19, 2011.

It is the third major war currently being conducted by the United States. One cannot forget the fourth - the robot drone war Obama is waging at present in Pakistan. Allegedly designed to assassinate Al-Qaeda and Taliban militants seeking refugee in the northwest of Pakistan, the drones have killed upwards of 2,138 individuals since Obama took office, the overwhelming majority of them innocent civilians. Iran also looms on the horizon as a possible target of U.S. military action. Forget the “dogs of war,” release the bats!

"The sleep of reason produces monsters." Francisco Goya. Etching. 1799. From the artist's Los Caprichos etching series. Release the bats!

It what now seems like ancient history, Egyptian Vice President Omar Suleiman warned on February 9, 2011, that pro-democracy protests should immediately end in Egypt, otherwise he anticipated “the dark bats of the night emerging to terrorize the people.”

Suleiman was chief of Egypt’s much hated General Intelligence Service, the spy agency known for its use of torture and its connections to the C.I.A. when Hosni Mubarak appointed him Vice President in the hopes of appeasing the masses. The Obama administration approved.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton extolled Suleiman’s appointment as part of a “transition” to democracy. Suleiman’s dark bats of the night had indeed been set loose; when their dirty work was done an estimated 1,500 Egyptians had been murdered by state security forces and some 5,000 injured.

On Feb. 11 Mubarak stepped down and handed over power to the U.S. backed Egyptian military. With the people seemingly victorious the bats flew elsewhere, it has been reported that the skies of Libya are now filled with them.

Ostensibly a joint operation conducted by French, British, Canadian, and American military forces under the aegis of a UN Security Council resolution, Operation Odyssey Dawn is a military campaign purportedly aimed at preventing Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi from terrorizing Libya and “shooting his own people”. Gaddafi is certainly guilty of such crimes, but then so are a good number of the monarchs and potentates of the region - many of them staunch U.S. allies.

The opening salvo of the U.S. operation came in the form of at least 112 Tomahawk cruise missiles being fired from U.S. Navy ships at military targets inside Libya. The United States Navy fact file on the Tomahawk Cruise Missile states that each long-range missile had a cost of $569,000 in fiscal year 1999 dollars. That would make the cost of 112 missiles $63,728,000, but adjusting for inflation - the current cost of that first barrage of missiles fired by our Nobel Peace Laureate president actually comes to $84,655,340. It is but the first stage of what the Obama administration says will be a “multi-phase campaign” against Gaddafi’s Libya.

Conflict - Garri Bardin. 1983. Screen shot from the stop motion animation. For God and country! For freedom! For right and honor! Matchstick men have come to do battle!

When contemplating the folly of this unbridled militarism and its unintended consequences, I remembered an ingenious stop motion animation created in 1983 by the Russian animator Garri Bardin. Titled Conflict (конфликт), the short film (seen here) made use of wooden matchstick men who comprise opposing armies.

A more poignant antimilitarist animation has yet to be made, and while Bardin’s Soviet-era film was created during the height of the Cold War, the film’s antiwar message has become universal and eternal. With Libya becoming America’s latest battlefield, and with Japan’s Fukushima nuclear power plants melting down, Bardin’s Conflict could hardly be more pertinent. Mr. Bardin has since gone on to enjoy great success as an animator, founding the “Stayer” animation studio and producing several award winning films.

Before landing in Libya the aforementioned bats roosted in Bahrain, and along with King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa they unleashed a lethal wave of repression against tens of thousands of pro-democracy demonstrators. So far 11 have been killed since the beginning of the protests last month, and hundreds have been shot with everything from rubber bullets to live ammunition. Bahraini doctors believe the regime has used nerve gas to quell the dissidents. The King has declared martial law, banning all protests and public gatherings. Saudi Arabian and UAE soldiers have entered Bahrain to help crush the pro-democracy movement. Protest organizers have been rounded up and imprisoned. Amnesty International released a report condemning Bahraini security forces for using “live ammunition and extreme force against protesters.” While Mr. Obama has asserted Gaddafi has “lost legitimacy to lead” because of his “appalling violence against the Libyan people,” he has not made the same declaration against King Khalifa. Is there any mystery here? Gaddafi is to be overthrown because the West covets Libya’s oil fields, the largest in Africa; the Khalifa dynasty is to be supported as a bulwark against the Arab revolution, with Bahrain home to the U.S. Fifth Fleet naval port.

The bats have also been nesting in Yemen, where U.S. backed President Ali Abdullah Saleh is engaged in the brutal repression of a mass movement for democratic reform opposed to his 32-year reign. So far dozens of Yemenis have been killed by Saleh’s security forces, and thousands have been injured. The most shocking instance of government violence took place on March 18, 2011, when Saleh’s security forces shot down hundreds of demonstrators in the capital of Sanaa, killing at least 46; government snipers with high-powered rifles shot at protestors from rooftops. Yemeni doctors also believe the Saleh regime has used nerve gas against demonstrators. Surely President Saleh is guilty of “shooting his own people”, but as an ally in Washington’s “war on terror” he has been rewarded with $250 million in U.S. military aid this year.

Conflict - Garri Bardin. 1983. Screen shot. The aftermath of the war.

And while pointing out the contradictions of U.S. foreign policy, could there be a more despicable cabal of undemocratic reactionaries than the Saudi Royal family? Yet in October 2010 the Obama administration struck a $60 billion arms deal with the Saudis, the largest arms deal in U.S. history.

Amongst other highly developed weapons systems the pact will supply the House of Saud with 84 sophisticated F-15 fighter jets, 70 Apache and 72 Black Hawk combat helicopters. And what exactly will be done with this “cutting edge” weaponry? It will be used against the people of Saudi Arabia, where all demonstrations have been banned and the pain of death awaits those who do not comply; some of the weaponry has been deployed to help quash the pro-democracy movement in neighboring Bahrain. So much for standing against tyrants who repress and brutalize their own people.

In his latest commentary on the Middle East, seasoned reporter Robert Fisk lets us in on the obvious concerning President Obama’s “Operation Odyssey Dawn”. He reminds us of an unforgettable comment made in 2003 by neoconservative Tom Friedman of the New York Times, who said of the U.S. war to remove Saddam Hussein from power, “When the latest dictator goes, who knows what kind of bats will come flying out of the box?” Now we know. After 8 years of war in Iraq 4,439 U.S. soldiers have been killed and some 32,992 wounded. Estimates for Iraqi civilian deaths range from 109,318 to over one million. The colony of bats in Libya now swarming in great black clouds are working on casualty figures for the new imperialist war in North Africa. Release the bats!

####

UPDATE:
The U.S. Constitution: Article 1, Section 8, Clause 11. “Only Congress can declare war.”

In the build-up to the U.S. attack on Libya, the U.S. Congress did not conduct a single debate regarding the merits of sending American soldiers into battle in Libya, nor did the U.S. Congress declare war or otherwise authorize any military action against Libya. Amazingly enough, after commencing military strikes against that country, Obama sent a letter to congressional leaders informing them that attacks had been launched. One group of Congressional representatives stated publicly that they “raised objections to the constitutionality of the president’s actions.” They went on to say that the Obama administration “consulted the Arab League. They consulted the United Nations. They did not consult the United States Congress. They’re creating wreckage and they can’t obviate that by saying there are no boots on the ground… there aren’t boots on the ground; there are Tomahawks in the air.” Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, lashed out at Obama’s actions, calling them “an impeachable offense.” Rep. Roscoe Bartlett, R-Md., called Obama’s action “an affront to our Constitution.”

Readers of this web log know of my antipathy towards George W. Bush, but despite my aversion to the former president, he launched the 2003 war against Iraq after a Congressional debate (contrived and distorted as it was), and after the U.S. Senate passed the “Joint Resolution to Authorize the Use of United States Armed Forces Against Iraq” (though the Senate had been given false information by the administration regarding Iraq’s ability to attack the U.S. with chemical or biological weapons). The threadbare resolution provided Bush with a “legal” basis for the invasion of Iraq, but Obama acted without even that.

In an interview conducted with Charlie Savage of the Boston Globe on December 20, 2007, presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama said the following regarding presidential war powers as defined in the U.S. Constitution. The relevant excerpt from that interview is as follows:

Question from Charlie Savage: “In what circumstances, if any, would the president have constitutional authority to bomb Iran without seeking a use-of-force authorization from Congress? Specifically, what about the strategic bombing of suspected nuclear sites - a situation that does not involve stopping an imminent threat?

Answer from Senator Obama: “The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.”

Readers of this web log are no doubt aware that the Israeli military attacked a flotilla of six civilian ships in international waters on Monday, May 31, 2010. The ships were attempting to break the three-year long Israeli blockade on Gaza and deliver humanitarian aid to the 1.5 million people who live there. The Israeli commando raid took the lives of at least nine people and wounded dozens, sparking global calls for an independent investigation into the deadly operation and the lifting of the blockade. On June 3 the U.S. State Department confirmed that one of those killed was a 19-year-old American – shot four times in the head and once in the heart. In this article I would like to mention a part of the story that has received comparatively little attention.

On the evening of May 31, international TV channels showed people around the world protesting the Israeli attack on the “Freedom Flotilla.” A brief video clip of a West Bank protest depicted a chaotic scene of Palestinians running in the streets as tear gas canisters rained down upon them. The final seconds of the film showed a small cluster of people carrying a young woman, her hands covering her bleeding face as she screamed in perfect English, “My eye!” Who was the young woman? What had happened to her?

A Palestinian woman cries for help as she holds a cloth to the head wound suffered by Jewish American art student, Emily Henochowicz, who had just been shot in the face with a tear gas canister by an Israeli soldier. Associated Press photograph by Majdi Mohammed.

The young woman in the film was 21 year old Jewish American art student, Emily Henochowicz. Ms. Henochowicz is currently enrolled as an art student at Cooper Union in the East Village of Manhattan. She took part in the protest at the Qalandiya Checkpoint as a member of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM). That group defines itself as a “Palestinian-led movement committed to resisting the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land using nonviolent direct-action methods and principles.” ISM members come from the U.S., Australia, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, England, Spain, and many other countries.

Hundreds of Palestinians took part in the Qalandiya Checkpoint demonstration, including a number of foreign nationals from the ISM. The Associated Press reported one witness saying that some Palestinian youths threw rocks at Israeli soldiers, but that Henochowicz and other ISM members were not involved in the violence – in actuality, according to the witness, they were standing at a distance from the melee.

Regardless, Israeli troops fired volleys of tear gas projectiles at the crowd of demonstrators. The ISM alleges Israeli troops fired tear gas projectiles “directly at the heads of Emily and another ISM activist.” On the ISM website, Sören Johanssen, the ISM volunteer that had been standing with Henochowicz, insisted the Israeli soldiers “clearly saw that we were internationals and it really looked as though they were trying to hit us. They fired many canisters at us in rapid succession. One landed on either side of Emily, then the third one hit her in the face.”

Ms. Henochowicz was carried from the scene by fellow protestors and members of the ISM, and rushed to Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem. On May 31 she underwent two surgeries. Her left eye, destroyed by the tear gas projectile, had to be removed. Surgeons inserted three metal plates into her head and face, as the bone surrounding her eye socket, cheekbone, and jawbone suffered severe fractures. Ms. Henochowicz is now recuperating in Hadassah Hospital.

"The Tribe of Levi" - Marc Chagall. 1960. Stained glass. One of twelve windows, each measuring 11 feet high by 8 feet wide. Located in the synagogue of Hadassah Hospital, Jerusalem. Photograph - Creative Commons, Wikimedia.

When I read that the young artist was rushed to Hadassah Hospital, where the good Israeli doctors and staff did their best for her, I was dumbstruck by the irony of it all. Hadassah Hospital is where the 12 magnificent stained glass windows created by the famed Russian-born Jewish artist Marc Chagall (1887-1985) are housed.

Starting in 1960, Chagall began creating windows for the hospital’s synagogue, stained glass that would depict the twelve tribes of Israel. Chagall donated the windows to the hospital free of charge, and I would agree with those that say they are the artist’s greatest creation in the medium of stained glass.

On February 6, 1962, Chagall attended the dedication of the synagogue, where his windows were permanently installed. At that ceremony, the artist made the following statement: “This is my modest gift to the Jewish people who have always dreamt of biblical love, friendship and of peace among all peoples. This is my gift to that people which lived here thousands of years ago among the other Semitic people.” The heart breaks when contemplating the full meaning of those words, truths that also now include a young Jewish artist in a Hadassah Hospital bed, recovering from a terrible wound.

"Sheikh Jarrah" – Emily Henochowicz. Pen and ink, watercolor. May, 2010. The artist captioned her drawing with the following words, "Amongst the chaos of the military and settler’s attempts to squander our ability to paint a mural, a little girl sadly sits on the swing set." Sheikh Jarrah is an Arab neighborhood in Jerusalem that is undergoing an official Israeli government policy of judaization. Palestinian families are forcibly evicted from their homes, which are then awarded to Jewish settlers. The Palestinians are of course resisting, and Israeli students have been protesting the evictions along with them. As recently as May 26, 2010, hundreds of Hebrew University students chanting "We won’t sit in class while rights are being trampled," marched from their Mount Scopus campus to rally in solidarity with Palestinians in Sheikh Jarrah.

I discovered the works of Marc Chagall when I was but a child, and he remains one of my favorite artists to this day. His delightful modernist prints and paintings were my very first introduction to Jewish life and culture, and his works no doubt have had that same affect on untold millions.

Chagall once said that it was an artist’s duty to keep “awake the sense of wonder in the world,” but he also warned that in life’s long vigil the artist must always be “striving against a continual tendency to sleep.” It appears many have fallen into the deep slumber the visionary Chagall cautioned against.

Some will no doubt call Emily Henochowicz naïve, but I believe that in her own youthful way, she was struggling against the “continual tendency to sleep.”

Looking at her past sketches, one can plainly see a young artist fascinated with humanity, and reaching to find a means of expressing the complex realities of our time. She was grappling with the human figure, form and color, just as all art students do, and was perhaps a bit too reliant on whimsy, but she obviously has the necessary spark one needs for the serious pursuit of art.

I pray that the thuggery displayed by some goon with a tear gas gun will not deprive us of Ms. Henochowicz’s artistic talents; that she will overcome what may now seem like an insurmountable obstacle, and help to bring some beauty into this troubled world – for it is sorely in need of that.

_____________________

Visit Emily Henochowicz’ web log and flickr gallery.
Click here for information about Sheikh Jarrah.
A video that shows the shooting of Emily Henochowicz can be found on the Lede news blog of the New York Times.

"The History of the World" - Jeremy Deller. 2004. Pencil and paint on wall. Installation dimensions variable. Turner Prize winner Deller standing in front of his wall chart at the Turner Gallery. Photo by Associated Press.

In 2004 Jeremy Deller won Britain’s most prestigious art award - The Turner Prize - for his short video, Memory Bucket.

Documenting Deller’s travels through the State of Texas, the film impressed the judges at the Tate Modern in London sufficiently enough for them to honor Deller with their highest award, plus a check for $48,000. That Deller admitted he cannot paint, draw, or sculpt to save his life was no impediment to his being proclaimed numero uno in the world of postmodern art; at least for a brief moment in time.

"The History of the World" - Jeremy Deller (Detail).

Deller had actually submitted a number of installations to the Tate’s annual art competition, Memory Bucket being just one of them. In the room at the Tate that displayed all of Deller’s works, one could find his wall chart, The History of the World. Supposedly an exploration of the connections between working class brass bands and the 1980s acid house scene, the chart is a jumble of hand scrawled lines and arrows, along with the names of important bands, events, places, and concepts in music.

Deller’s chart is all but incomprehensible - even to music lovers and historians. But then, striving to create works that are easy to comprehend has never been a strong point for postmodern conceptual artists. Nonetheless, Deller’s The History of the World has been an obvious inspiration to a rather unlikely group of artists, the U.S. military’s Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff - who are also reported to possess a total lack of skill when it comes to painting, drawing, or sculpting.

"Afghanistan Stability/COIN Dynamics - Security." Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. 2009. Unclassified document digitally printed on non-archival paper with foam core backing and laminated surface. Installation dimensions variable.

Trying their hands at conceptual art, the Joint Chiefs have created a wall chart installation titled Afghanistan Stability/COIN Dynamics - Security, a brash reference to the U.S. counterinsurgency strategy, “COIN” for short, which the Obama administration is currently applying in the Afghan war.

While their work has a strong political dimension, the Joint Chiefs have to their credit avoided the tedious moralizing so common with much of today’s political art. By dispensing with outdated notions of craft, skill, and narrative (at least one that makes any sense), the Chiefs have given us a hardheaded no-nonsense look at what really lies behind America’s “necessary war” - confusion, bewilderment, and stupefaction.

The eddy of lines and arrows swirling across the face of Afghanistan Stability/COIN Dynamics – Security, pulls the viewer into the work’s dense subtext having to do with counterinsurgency strategy for Afghanistan, and the impenetrable text that floats on the surface of the piece like an opaque cloud of obscurantist chatter (”Western Affiliation Backlash-Acceptance of Afghan Methods-Overall Government Capacity”) only points to the futility of attempting to make sense of the world. To fully appreciate this ephemeral work, one must put aside logic, as well as any attempt to understand history - just as the Joint Chiefs have clearly done.

"Afghanistan Stability/COIN Dynamics - Security" (Detail). Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. 2009.

If Jeremy Deller gave us a fractious view of the world with his unsteady scribbles and nervous squiggles, the Joint Chiefs have delivered order and tranquility with their clean lines and methodically arranged catchphrases. They have created an installation to rival the Turner Prize winning wall chart produced by Mr. Deller; in fact Afghanistan Stability/COIN Dynamics - Security is a postmodern masterwork that will long be remembered after the last body bags are flown out of Kabul.

Every good postmodernist knows that an artwork’s true value is determined solely by its price tag and not some foolishness like “intrinsic spirituality”, or gads - “beauty.” It was wonderful when Jeremy Deller was given $48,000 along with his Tate prize, and it was even more fantastic when Damien Hirst sold his diamond encrusted platinum skull sculpture, For the Love of God, for $100 million. But with the creation of the Joint Chief’s Afghanistan Stability/COIN Dynamics - Security piece, one need ask - what is being born, exactly? It might be the art of the 21st century! Surely by its price tag alone that is so; it took the Joint Chiefs’ $636 billion to produce Afghanistan Stability/COIN Dynamics - Security, making it the most expensive piece of art ever produced. Time will tell whether or not there will be a buyer.

MSNBC wrote an extensive review of the Joint Chief’s Afghanistan Stability/COIN Dynamics - Security installation piece that should be read by all. Click here for a large version of the artwork. Now that the war is finally escalating in Afghanistan and spilling over into Pakistan, one can only imagine what the next conceptual work from the Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff will be like - and what it will cost.

On December 1, 2009, in an address to the nation delivered from the United States Military Academy at West Point, President Obama announced the sending of an additional 30,000 U.S. combat troops to Afghanistan in order to wage what he calls a “war of necessity.”

"Vietnam: An Eastern Theatre Production" – David Nordahl. 1968. Offset poster. One of fifteen posters included in the "Hey, Hey, LBJ..." essay. Poster supplied by the Center for the Study of Political Graphics (CSPG).

To mark the occasion I have written, “Hey, Hey, LBJ…”, an illustrated essay on the subject of U.S. protest posters from the 1960s that lambasted that other liberal Democratic President who supposedly possessed a progressive domestic social agenda - Lyndon Baines Johnson, or L.B.J. (1963-1969).

L.B.J.’s assumed intentions of wanting to implement wide-ranging social reforms in the U.S. were thwarted by his ever increasing military escalation of an unpopular war in Vietnam. President Obama has similarly opened a Pandora’s box with his sharp military escalation in Afghanistan; and while the “Hey, Hey, LBJ…” presentation examines 15 historic posters from our collective past, it also offers the reader glimpses of what the future could possibly hold for us all.

The 15 posters I have written about in my essay disparaged L.B.J.’s foreign and domestic policies with wry humor, sardonic wit, and pointed outrage. What’s more, the prints were exceptional from a design standpoint, and they continue to stand as important political and cultural documents in American history. Despite their historic value and obvious political and aesthetic significance, few of the posters I present in my essay are to be found in online collections, even though they were widely distributed and known in the 1960s. Most of the posters featured in my essay have not been seen since they were first published.

With his December 1 troop deployment announcement, President Obama has fully completed his metamorphosis into L.B.J. Less than one year after his inauguration, Mr. Obama’s promises of delivering “Hope” and “Change” have ended up being battlefield fatalities on the arid plains of Afghanistan. Rather than delivering his diktat of escalating war from the Oval Office of the White House, Mr. Obama revealed his war plans at the same service academy used in 2002 by George W. Bush when the former president explained his Orwellian “Preventative War” doctrine. West Point afforded Mr. Obama the opportunity of presenting his military strategy for Afghanistan against a backdrop of soldiers and Academy cadets – a setting conveying resolute leadership from the nation’s Commander in Chief. How ironic that Obama will next travel to Oslo, Norway to accept the Nobel Peace Prize on December 10.

Obama administration officials have calculated that the Afghan war will cost $1 trillion over the next 10 years – a figure most likely underestimated. The Pentagon says that annually it spends $1 billion for every 1,000 soldiers in Afghanistan; and that by the time it delivers a single gallon of fuel to the landlocked country for use by U.S. soldiers, the cost has skyrocketed to $400 per gallon. As the U.S. economy teeters, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the unemployment rate reached 10.2 percent in November ‘09 – that’s 15.7 million Americans without work; the New York Times noted, “If the unemployed lived in one state, it would be the country’s fifth largest.” Just prior to his West Point troop deployment announcement, President Obama boasted that he would “finish the job” in Afghanistan; if the “job” in question is to drive the U.S. further into economic collapse, then Mr. Obama may well achieve his goal.

To help finance the unpopular war in Vietnam, L.B.J. imposed a 10-percent surtax on the American people. Not to be outdone, a number of powerful Congressional Democrats are today hoping to pass the “Share the Sacrifice Act”, a surtax to be forced upon all U.S. citizens in order to help pay for Obama’s war in Afghanistan. The bill would place a 1-percent surtax on all those who earn less than $150,000, with up to 5-percent imposed on those with higher incomes.

The particulars of Obama’s odious decisions should not hinder our optimism and authentic struggle for the democratization and transformation of society. Such a project should never be reliant upon a single politician or individual – the people in motion are the true engine of history.  The publication of “Hey, Hey, LBJ…” is but a small contribution towards wiping away debilitating historical amnesia and political illusions, allowing us to thoughtfully plot a course of action for building a society where words like “Hope” and “Change” are not slogans from some clever marketing and branding campaign – but expressions of a mass democratic impulse fully implemented by a free people.

The complete “Hey, Hey, LBJ…” illustrated essay can be viewed at:
www.art-for-a-change.com/LBJ/LBJ.htm

[ The Docs Populi archive and the Center for the Study of Political Graphics (CSPG) were kind enough to give me access to their archives, allowing me to select original posters from their incomparable collections as illustrations for my essay. The opinions expressed in the essay are my own and should not be attributed to either Docs Populi or CSPG. ]

I will be exhibiting at 365 & Counting, a group exhibit that examines the 1st year of the Obama Administration. Avenue 50 Studio in the Highland Park district of Los Angeles asked 15 artists to create artworks that provide insight into the president’s first year, and issues of race, class, war, health care, the environment and the economy, plus other global challenges - are explored in the timely exhibition.

"Bagram Prison, Afghanistan" - Mark Vallen. 2009. Oil on linen. On display at Ave. 50 Studio from Nov. 14 - Dec. 6, 2009.

Given the escalating war in Afghanistan, I painted a glimpse of the notorious military prison located in the U.S. Airbase at Bagram, Afghanistan.

The prison currently holds more than 600 detainees designated as “unlawful enemy combatants”; individuals that in some cases have been tortured and held for years without charge, legal representation, or due-process rights.

In February of 2009, the Obama administration began a $60 million expansion of the Bagram prison so that it could potentially hold as many as 1,100 suspects. As the Associated Press reported on November 1, 2009, as President Obama escalates the war in Afghanistan the U.S. Airbase at Bagram is being expanded even though it presently occupies over 5,000 acres and from a distance looks “more like a medium-size city than a military facility in a war zone.”

The 365 & Counting exhibition will be on view from November 14 to December 6, 2009. The exhibit also includes artists Alex Alferov, Yrneh Brown, Nancy Buchanan, Chukes, Carol Colin, Kathi Flood, Graham Goddard, Miguel Angel Murillo, CCH Pounder, Suzanne Siegel, Joseph Sims, Charles Swenson, Richard Turner, and Ted Waltz.

The Artist’s Reception for 365 & Counting takes place on Saturday, November 14, 2009, from 7 to 10 p.m. Avenue 50 Studio is located at; 131 N. Avenue 50, Highland Park, California, 90042 (map & directions). Phone: 323: 258-1435.

While on a visit to my local library as a nine-year-old in 1962, I randomly pulled a dog-eared picture book about the Second World War from a shelf, retreating to an isolated table to thumb through the digest in solitude. Flipping through the book’s tattered pages I received an unexpected surprise I would never forget. I had come to a full-page color reproduction of a painting portraying a horrifically wounded U.S. Marine, and I literally froze in disbelief, staring incredulously at the appalling image. The artwork depicted a gravely wounded soldier, still standing, but with half of his face blown away and his entire left arm reduced to a bloody pulp. All of my juvenile notions regarding war evaporated while gazing at that single image. I left the library shaken to my core.

It is difficult to describe how that painting unsettled me. The assassination of John F. Kennedy was still a year away and the horror of Vietnam had yet to creep into the American psyche. I had seen the shocking imagery of Francisco de Goya’s Disasters of War series, as my parents had a well stocked home library of art books, but Goya’s images were from a distant and shadowy past that I could not fathom. My experience in the library was something else altogether, the dreadful image of that bloody soldier was rendered in full color and it depicted fairly recent history. Despite the passage of time my memory of that painting never faded, though the work became lost to me in another way. As an adolescent it never dawned on me to write down the name of the artist and the painting, or the title of the book I had found the image in, so decades later those facts remained a mystery to me, that is - until just recently.

Last June I visited the Brand Library in Glendale, California, which has an enormous collection of books exclusively dedicated to the subjects of art and music. Meandering through the aisles my eyes suddenly caught the title of a large format book, The Art of War. I plucked it from its shelf and took it to a quite table where I could examine its contents at my leisure. I randomly opened the book towards its middle section and was astonished to see the very painting I had discovered forty-seven years ago as a boy; I had found it in a recently published book, but it was the same painting.

The Price - Tom Lea. Oil on canvas. 1944.

The artwork in question was painted by Tom Lea and titled, The Price. The artist created it while employed by LIFE magazine as a war artist in the Pacific Theater of war. Lea was attached to a Marine unit that assaulted the Japanese held island of Peleliu, and he was trained and equipped like every other Marine, except that he went into battle armed with a sketch pad and pens as his primary weapons. Lea had actually witnessed the soldier’s death during the bloody landing, and he sketched the soldier’s agony as it occurred. Back in the studio Lea transformed his black and white pen sketch into an unforgettable oil painting, which is now a permanent part of the U.S. Army Art Collection. In the battle for Peleiu, the U.S. Marines suffered 1,121 killed in action, with over 6,000 casualties. All 10,000 Japanese soldiers holding the island were killed. Reporting for LIFE magazine on the story of the invasion, Lea would write of the brutal landing:

“I fell flat on my face just as I heard the whishhh of a mortar I knew was too close. A red flash stabbed at my eyeballs. About fifteen yards away, on the upper edge of the beach, it smashed down four men from our boat. One figure seemed to fly to pieces. With terrible clarity I saw the head and one leg sail into the air.

I got up… ran a few steps, and fell into a small hole as another mortar burst threw dirt on me. Lying there in terror looking longingly up the slope for better cover, I saw a wounded man near me, staggering in the direction of the LVTs (Landing Vehicle - Tracked). His face was half bloody pulp and the mangled shreds of what was left of an arm hung down like a stick, as he bent over in his stumbling, shock-crazy walk. The half of his face that was still human had the most terrifying look of abject patience I have ever seen. He fell behind me, in a red puddle on the white sand.

It was established later that the invasion of Peleliu as a stepping stone to the invasion of the Philippines had not been necessary - Gen. MacArthur had already bypassed the Palaus and landed at Leyte in the Philippines.”

In retrospect I have come to understand how Lea’s painting of that mortally wounded soldier influenced my own work as an artist. Lea’s painting was a successful attempt at encapsulating the unvarnished truth. Obviously The Price was not a pretty picture, but its journalistic approach effectively captured an unpleasant reality that was necessary for people to confront. That same journalistic methodology became integral to my aesthetic viewpoint.

Lea’s painting could be interpreted as war propaganda, but it is an odd style of state propaganda that depicts the terror, futility, and brutality of war. Lea was not alone in painting or sketching images that were bone-chillingly frank and uncompromising in the portrayal of war. The U.S. military employed over 100 soldier and civilian artists to record the events of World War II, and much of their output was extraordinary.

Field sketch for Tom Lea's painting.

They Drew Fire, the PBS gallery of artworks created by combat artists of World War II, gives ample evidence of this blunt forthrightness. It is instructive to review the entire portfolio. Tom Craig’s Bone Pile at Cassino, George Biddle’s Dead Civilians, Howard Brodie’s Execution, Richard Gibney’s The Last Full Measure, and Kerr Eby’s Helping Wounded Man, are just some of the artworks created by U.S. military artists that revealed the true face of war. That this type of imagery was at the time published in LIFE Magazine and other publications with official sanction begs the question – why do we not see equivalent artworks from today’s wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq?

The U.S. Armed Forces still employ soldier-artists, and today a number of them have been assigned the task of interpreting war experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan. The U.S. Army Center of Military History maintains a website titled, Army Artists Look At The War On Terrorism, and the dissimilarity between the art produced by soldier-artists of the 1940’s and those now deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan could hardly be more pronounced. The first apparent difference is artistic quality. The soldier-artists from the 40s were distinctive draftsmen well versed in composition, color theory, perspective, and the like; present day combat artists suffer from a lack of such proficiency while displaying a slavish over-reliance upon photography.

More importantly, today’s soldier-artists seem unable or unwilling to create works filled with the pathos, tragedy, and simple candor routinely delivered by their compatriots in the 40s. Artists working for the U.S. Armed Forces during the Second World War depicted civilians and soldiers suffering from wounds, madness, and death, as well as portraying shattered cities and devastated landscapes. While there were also a great number of images showing glory and heroism, these were generally accomplished with no small degree of honesty. “War is Hell”, so it is said, and no one knows this better than a soldier. But in Army Artists Look At The War On Terrorism, there are no paintings of horrifically wounded U.S. soldiers nor are there bloody field hospitals, there are no watercolors of U.S. troops with that shell-shocked look about them, no drawings of dead civilians or towns reduced to rubble – no suicide truck bombers, improvised explosive devices (IED), or U.S. drone missile attacks. The “big picture” has been reduced to a narrow peep hole, where only gallant and brave U.S. soldiers can be viewed.

At present some 10,000 U.S. Marines are fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan’s Helmand province in an operation dubbed “Strike of the Sword.” At the time of this writing, 26 U.S. soldiers have died in the campaign – so far. British soldiers are also fighting in Helmand, with 15 of them having been killed since the beginning of this month, eight in one day of fighting last Friday. It is not known just how many Afghanis have been killed but casualties are likely to be in the hundreds. Suffice it to say, President Obama’s Afghan war, or “Overseas Contingency Operation” as he puts it, will not likely employ an artist like Tom Lea to create anything approaching the profundity of The Price.

[ Incidentally: The book in which I recently rediscovered Tom Lea’s The Price, is titled
Art of War: Eyewitness U.S. Combat Art from the Revolution through the Twentieth Century, by Col. H. Avery Chenoweth, USMCR (Ret.) ]

During the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, the Pentagon released to American troops a wanted list of Iraqi leaders that came in the form of a deck of cards. The playing cards featured photos and information about various government henchmen, and were designed to help U.S. troops identify and capture members of Saddam Hussein’s regime. Now, four years after the war began, the Pentagon has finally published a new set of cards - the Archaeology Awareness deck of playing cards. When the war began and American G.I.’s were hunting down members of the hated Baathist regime, the media made a great deal over the “Most Wanted” cards, but it’s not likely they’ll report much about the latest playing cards, for two important reasons; the Archaeology Awareness cards are about art, and it doesn’t exactly sound very gallant or heroic to have to council troops not to go about destroying a nation’s archaeological treasures.

Back in February of 2005, I wrote an article titled Mesopotamia Endangered, detailing a damning report made by the British Museum of London regarding the widespread destruction of Iraq’s archeological sites by U.S. troops - so I have to say, at first I thought the Pentagon’s Archaeology Awareness cards seemed a classic case of “too little, too late” - especially when surveying the enormous war damage already done to Iraq’s historic sites. But then I read a news story about the new deck of cards in The Telegraph, and realized that the Archaeology Awareness campaign represents a long term operation. The Telegraph reported: “Archaeologists working at Ford Drum, New York, where troops are trained for deployment in Iraq, hope soldiers will know what to avoid when it comes to bivouacking or setting up gun installations.”

Yes, the Pentagon is now employing archaeologists to instruct troops on their way to Iraq on how to avoid damaging that country’s precious archaeological sites. The new deck of cards are part of that training, with each playing card depicting a different archaeological site or antiquity, along with tips on how to preserve them. The seven of clubs card pictures the Ctesiphon Arch in Iraq with the caption, “This site has survived 17 centuries. Will it and others survive you?” The two of clubs card pictures the Nabi Yunis Mosque in Mosul, along with the caption, “Ancient Iraqi heritage is part of your heritage. Old stories say that Jonah of the bible was buried in this hill.”

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry when thinking of young American soldiers learning about Iraq’s cultural treasures by way of a deck of playing cards. I suppose in the long run it’s a good policy, but maybe that’s what bothers me most, that it represents something unending - and there are many signals the U.S. intends to be in Iraq for a long time to come.

Of course, Iraq possesses the third largest oil fields in the world and the Bush administration is pushing for an Iraqi oil revenue-sharing law giving U.S. companies the lion’s share of profits. Major players in the Bush administration have been referring to a Korea model for Iraq’s future, alluding to the tens of thousands of U.S troops still stationed in South Korea 54 years after the end of the Korean war. In remarks made on June 18th, 2007, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, General Petraeus, said it may take “at least ten years” to defeat Iraqi guerrillas. And then there’s that new Vatican sized U.S. Embassy being constructed in Baghdad at a cost of $592 million, a gigantic sprawl covering the equivalent of 80 football fields. If I were a gambling man, I would bet that the dealer in the White House and his high stakes game in Iraq will all go bust - and I won’t need a new deck of cards to win that wager.

I find an odd prescience in the “Target” paintings of Jasper Johns. While some gush madly over his works and others are simply indifferent - there is another story to relate, an untold chronicle that details the corporatization of American culture and the dumping of recent history “down the memory hole.”

Jasper Johns: An Allegory of Painting, 1955-1965, is a retrospective of Johns’s artworks running at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. from January 28 to April 29, 2007. The exhibit displays approximately 80 artworks, including paintings, drawings and prints. While Johns’s works facilitated the rise of pop, minimalism, conceptualism, and other genres found in postmodernism, that’s not what I want to address in this article. Fifteen of Johns’s Target paintings are on view at the National Gallery, and arts writer for the New York Times, Holland Cotter, says they look “every bit as radical and mysterious as they surely did in New York in the 1950s, when, simply by existing, they closed the door on one kind of art, Abstract Expressionism, and opened a door on many, many others.” Eerily titled Bull’s-Eyes and Body Parts, Cotter’s review touches upon more than a few sensitive issues:

“Art and crass are all but inseparable. So it’s no surprise to find an exhibition that brings together a record number of Jasper Johns’s famous target paintings being bankrolled by Target. You pass the corporate bull’s-eye logo, small but vivid, on a wall on your way into ‘Jasper Johns: An Allegory of Painting, 1955-1965‘ here at the National Gallery of Art. Mr. Johns’s targets, endlessly reproduced in the half century since he painted the earliest of them, have themselves become a form of advertising, a logo for American postwar art. Through sheer omnipresence they’ve become nearly invisible. What could change that now?”

It’s not a happy accident that the first image seen at the Jasper Johns show is a corporate logo that echoes the artist’s most celebrated series of paintings - blurring the distinction between advertising and fine art. No doubt the Target corporation is taking advantage of, and contributing to, the commercialization of culture. It should be remembered that the business practices of the Target corporation have attracted criticism, including its providing poor working conditions for American workers and using suppliers with links to foreign sweatshops. The company does not pay a living wage and of the over 1,400 Target stores in the U.S., not a single one has a union. Target is not only the official sponsor behind the Johns exhibit at the National Gallery of Art, it also sponsors the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan, New York, underwriting MoMA’s “Target Free Friday Nights” - which provides free admission to the museum on Fridays after 4 p.m. Target also backs a similar program at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art called “Free after Five,” providing free admission to the museum throughout the week.

But it’s not my opposition to encroaching corporate control over the arts that drove me to write this article, it was the title of Holland Cotter’s review, Bull’s-Eyes and Body Parts, that triggered my response. Whatever meaning that tiptoed behind Johns’s evocative targets in the past has since been superceded by unhappy real world events in the present - dealings that have much to do with actual targets and body parts. For me, Johns’s paintings have become the phantom face of modern warfare - a wraithlike stand-in for a reality too horrific to cast one’s gaze upon. I had this epiphany regarding the works of Johns during the 1999 Kosovo/Serbia war - but it’s a certainty Cotter wasn’t thinking about that or any other war when he came up with his art review’s clever title.

My story brings to light a brilliant graphic symbol created and used in opposition to war, but it’s also a cautionary anecdote - as our collective amnesia has all but erased the compelling and historic symbol from memory. Voluminous studies exist that analyze the 1999 Kosovo war and attempt to sort out the politics behind it, but presenting such investigation here is beyond the purpose of this web log, suffice it to say - I was against the war. Nevertheless, I’m astonished and dismayed that a recent conflict of such magnitude could be so easily forgotten, which is what motivated me to write this dispatch.

First - just a fragment of background for context. The U.S. says it led the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in order to force the late leader Slobodan Milosevic to withdraw Serbian troops from the province of Kosovo, where thousands had been killed in a counter-insurgency war with separatist Albanian guerillas. Starting on March 24th 1999, NATO attacked Yugoslavia, carrying out 38,000 air strikes on the Balkan nation - roughly 700 sorties a day for 78 days. The U.S. was the dominant force in the NATO coalition, and it carried out most of the attacks. Around 20,000 so-called “smart bombs” were used - including dozens of cruise missiles and thousands of cluster bombs, which resulted in some 2,000 civilian casualties. Even as the bombs and missiles rained upon Yugoslavia, President Clinton responded to the April 22, 1999 murders of 13 students at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, by saying “We must do more to reach out to our children and teach them to express their anger and resolve their conflicts with words, not weapons.” The very next day American cruise missiles slammed into the headquarters of RTS (Serbian state television and radio) in Belgrade (Beograd), the capital of Serbia - killing 16 journalists and technicians and maiming 16 others. Days later the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade would be hit by American cruise missiles, killing three embassy staff and injuring 20.

The image was quickly replicated by those without computers or printers, and the icon was hand-painted and scrawled on tee-shirts, banners and placards. Soon thousands of civilians wearing or carrying target symbols gathered on the ancient bridges spanning the Danube River in a defiant effort to save the structures from NATO bombs. International television crews filmed those vigils and beamed the footage worldwide. Once the aerial bombardment began on March 24th 1999, the crowds dispersed out of fear of being killed or injured - and fifty-five of Yugoslavia’s bridges would ultimately be destroyed by NATO bombs.

Eight years later the world has all but forgotten the brutal war over Kosovo, but every time I see one of Jasper Johns’s Target paintings, memories of that war’s savagery come rushing back - as well as anxiety over present-day belligerencies. Now that the West is embroiled in the even costlier bloodshed in Iraq, and with war on Iran looming over the horizon - it might be time to revive the antiwar target symbol.

In February of 2005, I wrote about artist Donald Shambroom and his Fatalities window installation assemblage in Boston’s Watertown area. Shambroom’s statement on the human cost of war seems more pressing today than when it was first conceptualized.

On November 19th, 2005, U.S. Marines went on a revenge killing spree in the western Iraqi city of Haditha after one of their own was killed by a guerrilla roadside bomb. In retaliation, Marines burst into civilian homes in the area of the bombing, killing up to 24 unarmed civilians in what will surely become known as Iraq’s My Lai massacre. One of those shot at close range was a 76-year old amputee in a wheelchair, other victims included little girls and boys ages 14, 10, 5, 4, 3, and 1. Time magazine obtained a video tape that was filmed immediately after the killings, a video that verified eyewitness accounts of the bloody slayings. A young Marine, sent in as part of a “clean up crew” in the aftermath of the shootings, took photographs of the victims and helped to carry their bodies out of bullet pock-marked homes. Those photos helped military investigators conclude that Marines had indeed killed women, children and elderly men. Last week the Pentagon announced that some members of the Marine unit may be charged with murder, and so the story of the massacre has finally reached the mainstream news.

On May 31st, 2006, two Iraqi women were shot and killed in their car after failing to stop at an American military check point. The U.S. military said in a statement that “repeated visual and auditory warnings” were made before shots were fired at the vehicle. After the shooting stopped, it was found that the two women were driving to a maternity hospital - one of them was pregnant and about to give birth. With mounting opposition to the war as a backdrop, Mr. Bush in his divine wisdom (God does talk to him you know), quietly gave the order for the deployment of more U.S. troops to Iraq. Some 3,500 soldiers from the 1st Armored Division stationed in Kuwait are now on their way to the killing fields of Iraq’s Anbar province.

Meanwhile Donald Shambroom has launched a new website where you can see his latest antiwar sculptures, works that continue to address the effects of America’s largest national enterprise - war. Hopefully, as the dreadful occupation of Iraq goes from bad to worse, Shambroom’s example will inspire other artists to create works of art in opposition to the folly of imperial wars and overseas colonial adventures.

“Nothing is so unworthy of a civilized nation as allowing itself to be governed without opposition by an irresponsible clique that has yielded to base instinct.” So wrote the White Rose, a group of ardent young activists who opposed the reign of fascism in 1940s Germany. I first discovered the writings of The White Rose (Die Weisse Rose) in the early 1980’s, and have since read and re-read their stirring proclamations - which the group clandestinely distributed in public places right under the noses of the Nazis. Eventually the young heroes were caught, and key members of the pacifist group were executed by guillotine after a Nazi court found them guilty of “treason.” Sophie Scholl, one of the group’s leaders, directed her last words at her Nazi executioners, “… your heads will fall as well.”

Director Marc Rothemund tells the gripping story of the last six days of Scholl’s life, in Sophie Scholl: The Final Days. The film opened in New York on February 17th and opens in Los Angeles on February 24th, 2006, with a nationwide release to follow. Not just another period piece on Germany’s disturbing past, this film should have deep resonance for today’s movie fans who are concerned about civil and human rights. Stephen Holden, in a review of the film he wrote for the New York Times, said: “In a climate of national debate in the United States about the overriding of certain civil liberties to fight terrorism, the movie looks back on a worst possible scenario in which such liberties were taken away. It raises an unspoken question: could it happen here?”

For those in Los Angeles, Director Marc Rothemund will conduct a Q&A after the 5:30 pm & 8:15 pm screenings at Laemmle’s MUSIC HALL 3 on Friday Feb. 24th and Saturday‚ Feb. 25th, and also after the 4 pm show & 7 pm show Sunday the 26th at the Laemmle’s TOWN CENTER 5 in Encino (click here for more info on these theaters.)

On February 16th Australia’s Special Broadcasting Services (SBS) program Dateline aired previously unpublished video and photos taken by U.S. troops at Abu Ghraib prison in 2003. The damning pictures show Iraqi prisoners - bound, naked, wounded, some covered in blood or excrement - undergoing abuse at the hands of their American jailers. Dateline executive producer Mike Carey said SBS obtained hundreds of images from Abu Ghraib, and that many of the pictures depicted “homicide, torture and sexual humiliation” too appalling to be broadcast on television. The station will not say how they acquired the images, but the Pentagon, despite trying to prevent the publication of the photos in America, verified their authenticity.

Philip Kennicott, staff writer for the Washington Post, wrote an article titled Painted in Blood: an Abstract Expression of Horror, in which he made a remarkable observation about one of the photos snapped by a U.S. soldier. The photo appears “to be a toilet floor covered with blood and litter, framed by a small glimpse of tiled walls. It suggests a bathroom turned into a holding cell, or perhaps a scene from a hospital or triage center, or a torture chamber.” After acknowledging that few American media outlets have published the new photographs, Kennicott went on to describe the aforementioned snapshot;

“The blood on the floor instantly suggests the splatter and drip paintings of the abstract expressionists. Newspapers have often turned to blood as a substitute for violence, showing photographs of the gore that lingers on streets long after the bodies — too graphic to show — have been cleared away. Here, in a photo that contains no particular information, no names, no certainty even about whether it shows what it seems to show, is the blood image in a new form. This is no substitute, no polite euphemism for what can’t be shown. Blood as a substitute for death deflects horror; this blood demands answers. Comparing blood to paint, violence to art, is dangerous, even repellent. But in one sense, the blood on this floor is exactly like the paint drippings of Jackson Pollock, who captured the visible traces of action, the visual memory of gestures. In Pollock’s painting, the gestures fixed on canvas were often graceful, melodic even, with paint obeying the law of gravity with a gentle quiescence. If this is blood, we can only imagine what the gestures were.”

No doubt Pollock would be appalled by the new school of “Action Painting” founded at Abu Ghraib prison, and while Pollock had to suffer being called “Jack the Dripper” by a hostile press - that was the only torment he was subjected to. Today’s anonymous American “Dripper” working at the infamous Iraqi prison, left us a magnum opus installation piece composed of found objects, human body fluids and blood - materials not unfamiliar to some postmodern conceptual artists. However, this tour de force work is no mere vacuous creation devoid of meaning or social impact - no, it is a grand tribute to colonial arrogance and the denigration of the human spirit. Unfortunately the artist will most likely not want to take credit for the work… but I would urge this modern master to step forward into the limelight. Such genius cannot go unrewarded.

[ UPDATE: On Feb. 16th, Salon.com became the first U.S. media outlet to publish the new Abu Ghraib photos. According to Salon, over 1,000 photos, videos and supporting documents were made available to them by a source who "who spent time at Abu Ghraib as a uniformed member of the military and is familiar" with the Army's Criminal Investigation Command. Salon insists that "America - and the world - has the right to know what was done in our name." They also remind us that "no high-ranking officer or official has yet been charged in the abuse scandal that blackened America's reputation across the world." You can seen the Abu Ghraib files at Salon.com. ]

August 6th, 2005, marks the 60th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Japan. August 9th, marks the bombing of Nagasaki. Those who survived the blasts became known as hibakusha (Atom Bomb Survivors), and in 1974 the hibakusha began contributing artworks to an unusual project that would preserve for the world their memories of atomic fire.

The Nippon Hoso Kyokai (NHK - Japan Broadcasting Corporation), encouraged hibakusha to submit original artworks based on personal experiences of having survived the nuclear bombings. Soon thousands of drawings, paintings and woodblock prints began arriving at the offices of NHK, and an exhibition of the collected paintings and drawings was mounted at the Peace Culture Center of Hiroshima in 1975.

In 1984 I had the distinct honor of organizing an exhibition of these remarkable paintings in an exhibit I curated at a venue in Venice California. I received some 30 images from Japan that had at the time, rarely been seen in the United States. Since then the NHK/hibakusha artworks have been compiled into several books and traveling exhibitions. To commemorate the first… and hopefully last atomic war, I’ve recently expanded the archive of hibakusha artworks I maintain on my Art For A Change website. The artworks can be viewed at: www.art-for-a-change.com/Atomic/atomic.htm

Virtually unknown in the west, The Hiroshima Panels are as profound an antiwar work as Pablo Picasso’s famous mural, Guernica. The creation of Japanese artists, Iri and Toshi Maruki (both now deceased), the panels depict the atomic holocaust wrought upon Japan when the U.S. dropped nuclear bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The monumental panels, which are actually painted upon traditional-style folding screens, took 30 years to complete, and provide a chilling look at the terror of nuclear war. The husband and wife team visited the city of Hiroshima three days after it was bombed. They carried the injured, cremated the dead, searched for food, and gathered materials to help construct shelters. Overwhelmed by the destruction they witnessed, three years passed before the couple decided to set upon the creation of artworks that would communicate to the world the need to banish nuclear weapons.

Using a poetic figurative realism partly based upon traditional Japanese aesthetics, the Maruki’s painted a series of monumental panels that graphically portrayed how the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki came face to face with the atomic age on the 6th and 9th of August, 1945. By 1956 the artists had completed ten panels, adding two new screens; the eleventh in 1959 and the twelfth in 1968. Each of the panels dealt with specific aspects of the bombing, and were appropriately titled with names like Ghosts, Fire and Atomic Desert.

The murals were no mere castigation of the U.S. for having dropped the bombs on Japan. The Maruki’s savagely criticized Japan’s own war-time militarists for being cruel imperialists, and in the panel portraying the Japanese occupation and rape of Nanking, China - all the ferocity and arrogance of Imperial Japan is laid bare.

The artists also painted a panel called Auschwitz, where the Nazi atrocities committed against the Jewish people were depicted with unrelenting clarity. The Maruki’s also painted panels showing Korean forced laborers and U.S. prisoners of war as victims of the atomic bombings. One panel, simply title Crows, illustrated a grisly scene - flocks of Crows descending from the sky to feast upon dead Koreans. Painted with a traditional flourish, it is a heartrending and pitiful image. As the artists wrote, “Koreans and Japanese look alike. Mercilessly charred faces - is there any difference? Together, Asians were devastated by the bomb.”

Known in Japan as, Genbaku no Zu (Hiroshima Murals), the panels brought international recognition to the artists. In 1995 the Maruki’s were recommended for the Nobel Peace Prize for their ardent creative work towards world peace. Their artworks were exhibited overseas numerous times, and a museum was established in Japan to house them in 1967. Iri passed away in 1995, and his wife Toshi, followed in 2000.

The Maruki Gallery for the Hiroshima Panels is still open to the public today, and they maintain a website were you can get a glimpse of this world treasure. Part of the gallery is the actual studio were the artists worked and painted. However, in recent years attendance has been dwindling, and the gallery has put out an emergency appeal for funds so that it may continue operating. Visit the online gallery, view the works, and offer a donation to keep this vital project going (the gallery can also be telephoned at 0493-22-3266). Writer and gallery board of directors member, Teruko Yoshitake, put it this way, “The Maruki’s continued to paint, hoping to make the 21st century a period of peace. We want people to help out to ensure that the gallery continues to function as the base for anti-nuclear sentiments and protecting the peace Constitution.” Twenty years ago, the artists wrote:

 “We began making sketches and worked day and night, encouraged by friends of the same mind who offered to act as models. As we painted, we thought and remembered and wondered. What is a 17 year old life span to a 17-year-old? What is a three year life to a three-year-old? The 900 sketches were merged together to create the paintings. We thought we had painted a tremendous number of people, but there were around 260,000 who died in Hiroshima.

If we painted for years, we could not put on paper the number killed in that one second. We prayed for the blessing of the dead and prayed that the bomb would never fall again and destroy life. With these thoughts supermost in our minds, as one painting was completed - we began another. The long lasting radioactivity and the latent effects of the bomb are still, nearly forty years later, causing suffering and death. This was not a natural disaster - that is the unforgettable horrifying fact.”