Saturday 6 October 2012

East End Nazi Art

The London Borough of Tower Hamlets is in the news again. It has ordered the obliteration of a mural by graffiti artist Mear One - real name Kalen Ockerman -, because the bankers behind a Monopoly board on the backs of slaves appear to be Nazi caricatures of Jews. Banker bashing is all the rage, but not ethnic banker bashing, certainly not in Hanbury Street. The area has seen waves of immigrants: Russian Jews, West Indians and Pakistanis. The mural is on private property owned by Azmel Hussain. He has been given 28 days to remove it before the council heavy mob moves in (CLICK). To me it looks old-fashioned. I'm sure the modern banker looks more like David Cameron or Mitt Romney.

6 Comments:

At 6/10/12, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Modern bankers may also look like Gordon Brown and Tony Blair who helped create this mess and why we are having such austere times. As for the so called art on private property, if the owner did see the bankers as Jews, and if by law it is interpreted as racist, then it is hardly surprising that he has to remove it. It is good that the picture has been highlighted as that way it can be shown for the rubbish that it is. Racism has no place in art.

 
At 7/10/12, Blogger Unknown said...

I see you also avoided Ed Milliband as an example. I was going to use him to show political impartiality. Then I thought "Shit! He is Jewish and he has got a big nose!" So I used Mitt Romney instead.

Did you you know that the Latter Day Saints have been absorbing prominent dead Jews into their own religion? Anne Frank is now a Latter Day Saint! This has caused much condemnation.

The owner of the wall didn't have any say in the content of the mural. He merely gave permission to the street artist to paint it. He denies it's racist. So does the artist. But it reeks of Nazi propaganda against the Jews.

Remember that inflation was far worse in Germany before WW II than it is now in the UK. You needed a pram full of devalued bank notes to buy a loaf of bread! Blaming Jewish bankers for the financial mess was popular with Germans and other Europeans. We had Mosley's blackshirts in Britain. When he tried to march through the Jewish East End, it caused a riot.

Race - as opposed to racism - can't be kept out of art. Jesus was a circumcised Jew, but generations of European artists have portrayed him as blue-eyed and blond-haired. Hint: God is a white man. As for the Garden of Eden, sience tells us that that Adam and Eve should at least have been black, if not a pair of gorillas!

 
At 7/10/12, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Censoring art is always a dangerous sign of a society's intolerance. The Third Reich burned books and destroyed art, often by Jewish writers and artists. Like speech - it should be left to be openly debated on its merits and meaning.

Jacob Epstein's statues often upset the London Evening Standard, The Tablet, and various religious conservatives. The eventual defacement of his BMA commission in the Strand exemplifies the power of intolerance. Also - as Coxsoft has pointed out - Epstein's Christ was denounced by the Catholic press for portraying the figure as "an Asiatic Jew".

 
At 7/10/12, Blogger Unknown said...

True. And look at the riots that blow up whenever a cartoonist depicts Muhammed or somebody burns a copy of the Koran. The more civilized a society is, the more tolerant it is.

 
At 7/10/12, Anonymous Anonymous said...

It is better to see racist works of art and highlight the bigots to show what they think of people and only then can the racists be denounced for what they are. Also, with a rise in anti-semitism, this just shows that it has never gone away. Censoring art and other things such as books and music is always dangerous and can play into the hands of the revisionists who can say that the racism and suffering never happened. The Nazis burned the books of those it didn't like like, but it wasn't the first time in the country's history that this had happened; it had happened a century earlier and the suffering of those in the 1800s was repeated and worsened on those in the 1930s and 40s. History tells us not to censor, but instead to see the bigotry and to condemn it. As for Ed Miliband, yes, he too deserves praise for the mess that we are in.

 
At 8/10/12, Blogger Unknown said...

Revisionists have a lot of explaining to do, starting with King Herod's massacre of the innocents. The Black Death was blamed on Jews (they were foreigners and so was the disease). So Jews were burnt to death, here and elsewhere in Europe, in a futile attempt to stop the Black Death. And the Spanish Inquisition was an anti-Jewish purge. (The Horniman Museum has a Spanish Inquisition iron torture chair as an exhibit.) Then Russian pogroms. In short a long trail leading to the Nazis.

Ever read Ivanhoe? that's all about a knight who rescues the daughter of a Jewish money-lender who financed his attampe to win a fortune in a tournament. He is the most noble of knights because he fights to defend a Jewess condemned to be burnt at the stake. I'm sure Hitler would love to have burned every copy of that novel.

Coming up to date, have you seen the German campaign to get rid of Father Christmas? He is depicted as an evil-looking Jew, straight out of Nazi propaganda pictures. I posted a small graphic on my blog. It's farcical. http://coxsoft.blogspot.co.uk/2006/12/santa-ban-spreads.html

 

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