Netanyahu, Just another monster for our times... from earlier times

“the more things change, the more they stay the same”,1849, French writer Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr

Different types of human monsters: a man with double bodies and heads and a woman with four legs and two sexes. Engraving from “De monstrorum natura, causis et differentiis” by Fortunio Liceti (1577-1656), Italian scientist. 1646

“Netanyahu’s genocide is just another historic walk-on part casting him as the monster to insure all things,”stay the same.” Like Zelensky of Ukraine he is another Frankenstein created by a raging impotent empire in its death throes.”

Italian artist Fotunio Liceti was famous for his monster engravings, and he filled whole books with them. His monsters are works of a powerful imagination and a skilled engraver. Even though they were pages in a book they still have ability to jump off the page at us.

Some might consider his depictions as sick, the drawings of an insane artist, spilling out these nightmare figures at us when the human body at its best is the ultimate erotic beauty. We would like to see life as a well chosen Rembrandt or a stunning Sandro Botticelli, but the history of art is the history of Humankind and we have our very ugly moments, and the great artists like the great writers were there to see and record the innate fallibility of man and all the horrors of which we are capable.

Sandro Botticelli, Primavera, ca. 1480.

We can ask ourselves what is the real world, the world of Liceti or the world of Sandro Botticelli, or some where in between? Luceti’s work can be categorized as morbid deviant art where as Botticelli paints an ethereal fairy world. How do we reconcile the stark difference between the two world’s these artists create in their imaginations? When does our existence become real and when is it delusional?

We might consider Botticelli's painting a decadent conceit of the aristocrats of that time. This is the idealized world they sought and lived in as they actually wandered among their gardens in the finest of finery while the serfs toiled in the fields for their meager share of life… short and brutal.

What sort of balance do we strike? Are we even capable of sustaining that balance at a tipping point in world history where Humankind has to be on our best behavior and fully prepared to manage CHANGE effectively. Managing change is boring against the constant drama of war; but we have binged on war for the last century, along with a host of other ruinous ideologies. War is now tantamount to a global death wish and we are being led by bloodied necrophiliacs.

This is the final end game for globalization. We have been so smart, we are proving how dumb and inhuman we really are. There are no extraterrestrial aliens. We are led by self-alienating grave digging terrestrials.

Adolph Wamper was one of Hitler’s favorite artists. It is interesting to compare these figures with Michelangelo’s David

During WW ll, Hitler’s Third Reich expropriated vast quantities of art. Not because they loved art, but because, like books, it had to be hidden from the public. Art would become fascist art just as we see above. As cold and forbidding as the fascist ideology, still alive and flourishing today.

In spite of warnings from archeologists, anthropologists and others, when the USA sacked Iraq in 2003 thousands of pieces of art and artifacts were looted from Iraq’s 65 museums under the indifferent eyes of American troops. These artifacts dated back to the earliest cradles of civilization. Today we are still fighting and bombing the Middle East out of existence. What a stunning indictment of the moral depravity of Humankind. The Philistines have been with us since the beginning of time still flourishing today.

The history of art is the history of man’s folly and of our great accomplishments. Equally so, it is an indictment of our recidivism, how time and time again we cannot escape our monstrous imperfections.

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It has been said all the great ideas have been expressed, our failure is our inability to act on them decisively. In medieval times populations feared the wrath of God and a coming apocalypse he might inflict on Earth. Now the apocalypse is by the the hand of man. Five hundred years later we have learned nothing, and slunk back to a barbarous state predating Medieval times, and even Roman times as we have knowingly walked away from a rich humanist legacy of thousands of years and become child killers, and perpetrators of endless wars and moral depravity.

“the more things change, the more they stay the same”,1849, French writer Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr

We are buried alive by false prophets and glutted on bafflegab with no referral to common sense, as supplied by Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr. Where our heart and soul do not drive us forward, things remain the same as we crawl into the tar pits of failed civilizations.

Netanyahu’s genocide is just another historic walk-on part casting him as the monster to insure all things,”stay the same.” Like Zelensky of Ukraine he is another Frankenstein created by a raging impotent empire in its death throes.

The Watcher, British artist Edward Burra,1937. “ Burra, like the similarly disreputable Salvador Dalí,created eerie visions of a land gone mad. The tragedy of war transcends the side you are on.”— The Guardian

Post Script: The insanity of our times is personified by an American four star general who recently assures us the US Military can handle war on three fronts, Ukraine, the Middle East and China. I know from trusted expert sources this is a pipe dream as the impotent empire rages against a world where it can no longer exercise its extortionist tyranny. It matters not that they continually lose wars; war is the only language they speak .

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