Giuliani as Hitler Goes Mainstream in Whitney Museum by Robert Lederman
In a phenomenally bold move for an institution whose board of directors includes many of Mayor Giuliani's top contributors, the Whitney Museum of American Art will show a work by German born artist Hans Haacke directly equating Giuliani with Adolf Hitler. The work titled, "Sanitation", will premiere on March 23rd, 2000 at the Whitney Biennial, one of the most important art shows in the world.
"Sanitation" features a wall with a series of 8 to 12 garbage cans, each containing a speaker which will play an audiotape of Nazi troops marching. Above the garbage cans will be displayed a copy of the First Amendment surrounded by quotes written in a German Gothic script by Giuliani on art and the Brooklyn Museum. The work is a response to the recent Brooklyn Museum show, "Sensations", which Giuliani made a tremendous legal and political effort to close before its opening.
The Whitney's director, Maxwell L. Anderson, has gone on record that he doesn't share the artists' views about Giuliani but promises that the museum will display the work at the opening. Mr. Anderson will likely be under tremendous pressure in the next two weeks to remove the work from the show.
Those aware of my activities during the past six and a half years concerning Mayor Giuliani know of his efforts to prevent my paintings likening him to Hitler from being seen. He's denounced the cardboard protest paintings at numerous press conferences, has had me falsely arrested on 41 occasions, has had hundreds of the paintings confiscated by the NYPD Intelligence Division and during the Diallo protests last year organized a campaign among prominent Jewish leaders, including the ADL's Abraham Foxman and the NYCLU's Norm Siegal, to pressure political activists to ban the paintings from demonstrations in NYC. According to many reporters the Mayor has also gone to great lengths to pressure the media not to show the paintings on television or in newspapers.
While the Hans Hackke work in the Whitney show specifically comments on the Mayor's efforts at censorship and their striking similarity to Hitler's efforts to censor German art there is a much larger context that the work will inevitably be viewed within. In recent weeks there have been almost daily accusations by ex-police officials, ex Mayors, ministers and one-time political allies of Giuliani that he is a racist. Both the President and Hillary Clinton made statements last week that can only be interpreted as meaning that Amadou Diallo was a victim of racial profiling as part of an official Giuliani administration policy.
Giuliani can be expected to denounce the Whitney show as a political move by Democrats to link him to the far right in preparation for the Senate race. The real issue should be whether there is anything to the comparisons between Giuliani and Hitler not simply whether those making them have some political motive.
Despite the existence of a great deal of solid evidence that links both Giuliani and his pal GW Bush to far right groups, some with direct links to Nazi ideology, racism and Eugenics, there have been no efforts by the mainstream media to explore this issue. The Hitler/Nazi accusations are treated as nothing more than name calling and the venting of emotion.
To give one outstanding example, so far during this Presidential election not one mainstream media outlet has mentioned the indisputable historical fact that the Bush family were among Hitler's most important financial backers or that in 1942 the US Congress seized many of their banking assets under the Trading With The Enemy Act. [see: Office of Alien Property Custodian, vesting order # 248. The order was signed by Leo T. Crowley, Alien Property Custodian, executed October 20, 1942; Fed Reg Doc 42-11568, Filed Nov. 6, 1942 11:31 AM; 7 Fed Reg. 9097November 7, 1942]. Immediately before the Super Tuesday Primary, GW Bush was shown on CNN in a yarmulke with Jewish leaders dedicating a Holocaust memorial. Neither has anything in the mainstream media dealt with the undeniable fact that the Manhattan Institute, which Giuliani routinely points to as the source of his ideas, has been directly linked to far right groups, the CIA, and the dissemination of purportedly scholarly works advancing the notion that blacks are inferior.
In addition to his well-documented efforts to eliminate First Amendment protection for visual art altogether...
["Elizabeth Freedman, an attorney speaking on behalf of the N.Y.C. Corporation Counsel's office [Mayor Giuliani's lawyers], explained the City's anti-art position. "Visual art...does not express ideas", Ms. Friedman said, "and as such is not entitled to First Amendment protection." 2/24/97 radio interview WNYC's syndicated business news show, "Marketplace"
"An exhibition of paintings is not as communicative as speech, literature or live entertainment, and the artists' constitutional interest is thus minimal." -Giuliani appeal brief against street artists having First Amendment protection, Giuliani v Lederman et al and Giuliani v Bery et al, filed with the U.S. Supreme Court 2/24/97.]
...the Mayor's efforts to cleanse the City of immigrant vendors, community gardens, the homeless and his policies on a host of other issues makes a convincing case that he is being compared to Hitler for substantial reasons.
Last Fall the Mayor's insistence on repeatedly spraying the City with Malathion, an organophosphate nerve gas his own Chem-bio Handbook described as similar to those invented by the Nazis for military use and which is known to cause sterility, birth defects, cancer, immune deficiency and encephalitis, was for many observers an indication that Giuliani's Nazi connection was coming out of the closet.
When the Mayor begins his inevitable denunciations of the Whitney exhibit, including likely statements bizarrely suggesting that the show is anti-Semitic, let us hope the media will once and for all delve into why so many call the 107th Mayor of NYC, Adolf Giuliani. To paraphrase Johnnie Cochran, let the jury of public opinion decide: if the moustache fits, you must not acquit. ----------------------------------------------- Robert Lederman is an artist, a regular columnist for the Grenwich Village Gazette [See: http://www.gvny.com/ for an extensive archive of Lederman columns] The Shadow and Street News, and is the author of hundreds of published essays concerning Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. His essays and letters have appeared in the NY Times, NY Post, Daily News, Newsday, Brooklyn Bridge, Park Slope Courier, The Daily Challenge, Amsterdam News, Sandbox, Penthouse, Our Town, NY Press and are available on hundreds of websites around the world. Lederman has been falsely arrested 41 times to date for his anti-Giuliani activities and has never been convicted of any of the charges. He is best known for creating hundreds of paintings of Mayor Giuliani as a Hitler like dictator.
Robert Lederman, President of A.R.T.I.S.T. (Artists' Response To Illegal State Tactics) ARTISTpres at aol.com (718) 743-3722 http://www.openair.org/alerts/artist/nyc.html
"Sanitation," an installation by Hans Haacke, a well-known German-born New York artist, puts Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani in the company of the Nazis, with quotations by him written in the Fraktur script favored by the Third Reich and the sound of jackboots marching in the background. The artwork, which will be on view when the 2000 Biennial opens on March 23, recalls the fury over the First Amendment issues raised by the "Sensation" exhibition at the city-subsidized Brooklyn Museum of Art last fall when the Mayor attacked some of the art work as "sick" and "disgusting." -NY Times 3/9/2000 Signs of New `Sensation' at the Whitney Museum
"But the Mayor repeated his anger over signs and chants at the post-Diallo protests that liken him to Adolf Hitler. "The comparisons to Hitler, Adolf Hitler, and fascism have to stop, because they're sick, perverted, and they do affect some people," he said. "Invocations of Adolf Hitler are despicable no matter who it is. Nobody should participate in it, and nobody should do it." -NY Times Sunday March 28, 1999 "After Meeting Mayor Vows Major Changes for Police"
"We'll say it simply: Just because people don't like Rudy Giuliani doesn't give them license to compare him to Adolf Hitler. The Hitler analogy is something that seems to amuse many people in this city. Cutesy stories have been written and published in the past week about an art installation on Madison Avenue called No York in which the mayor is depicted with a Hitler moustache. This image was first bandied about by an obnoxious twerp who claims to represent a group called A.R.T.I.S.T. - but which really ought to be called M.O.R.O.N. - who is outraged that the mayor attempted to enforce plainly written statutes regarding sidewalk clutter in front of the Metropolitan Museum. For this, the twerp (whose name we shall never again use because he deserves no more public mention) imagines that Rudy Giuliani deserves comparison with the personification of evil in this century...As the New York Times' gleeful seizure of the "bunker" story indicates, you don't have to be a cabbie, a vendor or a M.O.R.O.N. to issue forth such repulsive opinions. -NY Post Editorial 6/16/98
"In satire and protest, the Mayor of the City of New York is again being likened to some of the vilest figures in history. But this time Rudolph W. Giuliani is learning to accept it.... Deputy Mayor Randy M. Mastro goes so far as to detect a touch of flattery in the Giuliani-as-Dictator analogies." NY TIMES 6/24/98 "Hudson Hitler? Midtown Mussolini? Giuliani Grins and Bears It"
"I take a different view of someone comparing me to Adolf Hitler than when someone calls me a jerk." Mayor Giuliani, N.Y. Daily News 10/25/1998
'The Manhattan Institute clearly has become the force, and there is no progressive force to counter it. There isn't even a debate.' "The mayor has a very close working relationship with the Manhattan Institute," Giuliani's communications director, Crystine Lategano, said...Another sign of how much New York has changed: The most influential source of political ideas is a conservative think tank that was founded by Margaret Thatcher's mentor and Ronald Reagan's spymaster." -Boston Sunday Globe 2/22/98
"It [The Manhattan Institute] was an early proponent of shrinking city government; it enabled Charles Murray to publish the 1984 book that many people believe begat welfare reform, and it promoted theories about crime and public disorder that later underlay the work of the former Police Commissioner, William J. Bratton. It took up the question of the quality of life in New York City in 1990, well before Mr. Giuliani made that a cornerstone of his successful election campaign in 1993. The institute has savaged open admissions al the City University of New York, pushed hospital privatization and aggressively promoted school choice...Mr. Giuliani and his campaign staff began meeting with institute members in 1992, and since that time have absorbed many of its ideas, particularly on such issues as the city's tax structure, economic development, education policy, policing and quality of life...In mid-1992, the magazine published an issue on the quality of life - full of articles on such subjects as "reclaiming public spaces" - and Mr. Giuliani could be found seated in the audience at an institute sponsored conference pegged to the issue, scribbling notes...In a brief interview recently, Mr. Giuliani said he had found City Journal, in particular, "enormously helpful. I've read it for years, since it first came out. It has sparked a lot of the reanalysis, reinvention, reinvigoration of government. It produces provocative and very good ideas." -NY Times 5/12/97 Turning Intellect Into Influence: Promoting Its Ideas, the Manhattan Institute Has Nudged New York Rightward
From: http://www.accuracy.org/articles/manhat.htm The Manhattan Institute: Launch Pad For Conservative Authors "The Manhattan Institute was founded in 1978 by William Casey, who later became President Reagan's CIA director. Since then, the Institute's track record with authors has been notable. Funneling money from very conservative foundations, the Institute has sponsored many books by writers opposed to safety-net social programs and affirmative action...Charles Murray's Losing Ground -- a denunciation of social programs for the poor -- catapulted him to media stardom in 1984. More than a dozen years later, the Philadelphia Inquirer (10/13/97) recalled that Losing Ground "provided much of the intellectual groundwork for welfare reform." As Murray wrote in the book's preface, the decision by Manhattan Institute officials to subsidize the book project was crucial: "Without them, the book would not have been written."...When Murray appeared on ABC's This Week (11/28/93), host David Brinkley introduced him with lavish praise as "the author of a much-admired, much-discussed book called Losing Ground, which is a study of our social problems." Minutes later, Murray was explaining his solution: "I want to get rid of the whole welfare system, period, lock, stock and barrel -- if you don't have any more welfare, you enlist a lot more people in the community to help take care of the children that are born. And the final thing that you can do, if all else fails, is orphanages."...: Shortly after The Bell Curve was published [in late 1994], the Institute sponsored a luncheon to honor Murray and the book, in which he proposes a genetic explanation for the 15-point difference in IQ between blacks and whites that is the basis for his dismissing affirmative action policies as futile."...Along with ongoing subsidies from a number of large conservative foundations, the Manhattan Institute has gained funding from such corporate sources as the Chase Manhattan Bank, Citicorp, Time Warner, Procter & Gamble and State Farm Insurance, as well as the Lilly Endowment and philanthropic arms of American Express, Bristol-Myers Squibb, CIGNA and Merrill Lynch. Boosted by major firms, the Manhattan Institute budget reached $5 million a year by the early 1990s."
"Mayor Giuliani yesterday left open the possibility that his office might begin screening art exhibits bankrolled by taxpayers. The closer scrutiny would come on a "case-by-case basis,"...Giuliani's comments came a day after he warned he would slash money to any of 41 city-funded cultural institutions that presented works, which, in his view, aggressively attacked religion". -Daily News 10/6/99 Mayor Hints at Art Exams Says city might do 'case-by-case screening of exhibits
"Anything that I can do isn't art," he said. "If I can do it, it's not art, because I'm not much of an artist. And I could figure out how to put this together. You know, if you want to throw dung at something, I could figure out how to do that." -. NY Times 9/25/99
"There is no federal constitutional issue more grave," the judge wrote in her 38-page decision, "than the effort by government officials to censor works of expression and to threaten the vitality of a major cultural institution as punishment for failing to abide by governmental demands for orthodoxy." Giuliani called Judge Gershon's decision "the usual knee-jerk reaction of some judges" and said the city would appeal..."This is all about dollar signs," Giuliani said Monday. "It isn't about free speech. It's actually a desecration of the First Amendment, as much as it is a desecration of religion, to use the First Amendment as a shield in order to take money out of the taxpayers' pockets in order to put that money into the pockets of multimillionaires." NY Times 11/2/99 Giuliani Is Ordered to Halt Attacks Against Museum
"Jewry was able, largely by exploiting its position in the press, to enlist the aid of so-called art criticism not only in gradually obscuring all normal ideas of the nature and function of art and its purpose, but also in destroying the general healthy response in this area". -Adolf Hitler
"For it is an affair of the State ..... to prevent a Folk from being driven into the arms of spiritual lunacy ..... for on the day that this kind of art were actually to correspond to the general conception, one of the most severe changes of mankind would have begun; the backward development of the human brain". -- Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf.
"It is not the function of art to wallow in dirt for dirt's sake, never its task to paint the state of decomposition, to draw cretins as the symbol of motherhood, to picture hunchbacked idiots as representatives of manly strength". Adolf Hitler speech at the Nazi Party Rally in Nürnberg in 1935.
A07 "By seeking to shut a controversial art show at The Brooklyn Museum, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani managed this week to eclipse another issue, involving park permits, that threatened to highlight his troubled record on First Amendment liberties... The mayor's aides deny that he chose Wednesday to divert attention from the park issue by launching a perhaps more politically beneficial assault on the museum. Yet at the same news conference where he found himself denying and denouncing a Daily News front-page headline warning that the city wanted citizens to "pay" to use parks, Giuliani revealed that he'd cut city funds for the museum. "This is not exactly a topic that's been dormant," said Giuliani's spokeswoman, Sunny Mindel, citing published reports on the exhibit last week. "There were a number of news organizations that were calling on this." She denied that the museum denunciation was linked to the park story. Whatever the intent, however, aides let it be known among reporters before Wednesday's press conference that he was "fuming" about the exhibit, planting the seeds for the stories that followed. -Another 1st Amendment Fight / Rudy's Museum Spat Has Political Benefits." -9/24/99 Newsday
"I ask you not to create any undue or unnecessary alarm or panic," Giuliani said at a City Hall news conference on Thursday morning. "There's no point in not spraying, because there's no harm in spraying. So even if we're overdoing it, there's no risk to anyone in overdoing it...The more dead mosquitoes," he added, "the better. I don't think the media should try to push this out of proportion". NY Times 9/10/99
"The mayor dismissed complaints from environmental advocates about the spraying, referring to them as hysterical "environmental terrorists" who "like to get you angry because it gets them on television." The spraying is harmless, he insisted." "More Mosquito War Protests greet new plan for spraying"-Daily News 9/18/99
"I have nothing to hide," "I'm very comfortable with the spraying of Malathion. If we had to do it again, we would do it the same way". Jerome Hauer, director of the Mayor's Office of Emergency Management 1/27/2000 Queens Tribune Emergency Management Director Grilled On Mosquito Control