Anti-American Art: Murder On His Mind

Another poster from Cuba's OCLAE, the Latin American Student Organization, ca. early 1970s for the "Continental Day of Support for Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos." The poster shows a harsh caricature of the eminently caricaturable President Nixon, with a cut-away on his heading showing that he has the dead bodies of a lot of Indochinese civilians on his mind.

If the American war of aggression on Vietnam was seeded by Kennedy and started by Johnson, it blossomed into new horrors courtesy of Nixon. Nixon expanded military operations on the ground into Cambodia. The U.S. engineered a military coup in Cambodia, establishing a puppet regime to replace the nominally non-aligned ruler Prince Sihanouk. In 1970 U.S. and South Vietnamese forces invaded Cambodia in pursuit of National Liberation Front sanctuaries. The invasion ultimately strengthened the Khmer Rouge insurgency which gained the support of Sihanouk, then exiled to China. The Khmer Rouge liberated Cambodia from that dictatorship shortly before the fall of Saigon to the People's Army of Vietnam and NLF. That, of course, would lead to several other stories. Here's a thought-provoking essay on how different the world might be had Nixon been tried for his war crimes at War Is a Crime blog.

Anti-American Art: Godwin's Law?

Poster from the Cuban OCLAE, Organización Continental Latinoamericana y Caribeña de Estudiantes, or Student Organization of Continental Latin America and the Caribbean, ca. 1973, showing a new playing card, the King of Swastikas: rightside up it's Hitler, flipped around it's U.S. President Nixon. OCLAE was founded in Cuba in 1966, and engaged early on in solidarity activities with the Vietnamese then defending themselves from American attack. One of its early leaders, a young Puerto Rican named Jose Rafael Varona, was killed by a US air raid while on a solidarity mission to Vietnam. Thus OCLAE reserved special venom for Republic President Nixon, who escalated the war that had been started by his Democratic predecessors Kennedy and Johnson.

Godwin's Law refers to the notion, according to Wikipedia, that "given enough time, all discussions —regardless of topic or scope —inevitably wind up being about Hitler and the Nazis....[and] that overuse of Nazi and Hitler comparisons should be avoided, because it robs the valid comparisons of their impact."

Given the scope of U.S. violence against Vietnam, I'm not sure that comparing Nixon to Hitler is particularly hyperbolic.

Blind Injustice

Somehow I've kept this bumper sticker since the presidential election of 1972, which I was too young to vote in. Surrounded by other anti-war family and friends, I was surprised and devastated when President Nixon defeated George McGovern. This "Re-Elect the Dike Bomber?" sticker was put out by Nixon opponents who wanted to cut to the chase: Nixon was a war criminal not a presidential candidate. The "dikes" in question refer, of course, not to butch lesbians but to the civilian agricultural infrastructure of Vietnam that Nixon spent much of his presidency trying to destroy.

I'm reminded of this bumper sticker by the repeated inability of Americans to empathize with the millions of people in foreign countries effected by American interventions, or American policies, or American self-interest, or, as it is best summed up, by American arrogance. Recently Rep. Patrick Kennedy, a liberal Democrat, rightly attacked the American media for its fixation on the bizarre personal scandals of congressmembers rather than on liberal Rep. Kucinich's just defeated bill calling for withdrawl of US forces from Afghanistan. An admirable sentiment. But Rep. Patrick characterizes the Afghan war as having taken "1000 lives," a number that completely erases the thousands of Afghans and Pakistanis, including likely thousands of non-combatants, killed by "NATO" (ie, American) forces, or even those killed by Taliban suicide bombers, all of which deaths might be laid at the feet of the ongoing American effort to do whatever the hell it is trying to do in that part of the world.

It's kind of like how the deaths of nearly 3,000 Americans on September 11, undeniably a horrible horrible crime, is seen by Americans to be somehow worse than the deaths of ten? a hundred? a thousand? times that many people in Iraq in George Bush's unprovoked attack and its unending aftermath. All those innocent civilians killed "accidentally" by US airstrikes; all those Iraqi pedestrians and motorists casually murdered by Blackwater mercenaries, do their relatives not weep for these sudden and senseless deaths just like the relatives of those killed by the 911 hijackers?

"Re-elect the Dike Bomber" was a call to hold Nixon accountable for what he actually did. It was brave, accurate, and a landslide of Americans turned out not to give a crap as they voted for an ugly, corrupt, lying sleazeball; just as they did years later in sweeping Reagan and re-electing Bush. Why are Americans so blind to what is being done in their names?

Anti-American Art: No, tell us how you REALLY feel

Two more 1960s North Korean stamps. I believe the one on the right came out first; the text has something to do with an anti-imperialist proclamation from Kim Il Sung, father of today's Kim Jong Il. The US is depicted as a pig being stuck by bayonets, the flag in tatters. Shortly thereafter the stamp on the left was issued; a yellow-faced President Nixon replacing the stuck pig and the pens of the world (socialist) journalist's conference the stamp commemorates replacing the bayonets. Note the pen neatly slicing off Nixon's hand, causing him to drop the A-bomb he carried. Maybe that wasn't such a good idea. Anyway, no subtlety here!