GRAPHIC artists with creepy rapidity produced enough expensive-looking Covid propaganda posters, or agitprop, this spring, to cover the actual and virtual worlds, including billboards, transportation kiosks, and Internet ad spaces, with revolutionary imagery and slogans evoking collective strength amid the trials of house arrest.
I draw your attention to one in particular: the supposedly stirring Covid poster above by Shepard Fairey, the artist who made the famous Obama ‘Hope’ poster and who is, you might say, America’s foremost Communist artist. There is no question that Mr. Shepard, I mean Mr. Fairey, brings great talent to his work. He’s accomplished and his mind, apparently undisturbed by the extremely violent and oppressive legacy of his idol, is stuffed full of Marxist clichés. Among his many works is this poster promoting Proposition 8 in California with the Marxist raised fist and rays of the rising sun, just in case you didn’t know that “marriage equality” stands for total revolution.
Fairey’s Covid poster was commissioned by the extremely well-funded graphic arts political propaganda organization, Amplifier. According to Amplifier, also promoting “artwork” calling for the defunding of the police, the organization was working directly with government agencies on Covid art. Fairey informs we the little people:
In response to COVID-19, Amplifier launched an emergency campaign with top art curators and public-health advisors from around the world looking for public health and safety messages that can help flatten the curve through education and symbols that help promote mental health, well-being, and social change work during these stressful times.
With all of the stresses coronavirus puts on healthcare workers, public servants, and the public psyche in mind, I created this art piece, “Angel of Hope and Strength.” This piece was created to celebrate the courage of healthcare workers specifically, and generally symbolize the spirit of hope, strength, compassion, and resilience that we can all find in ourselves and share collectively. It’s a tough time even for tough people, but we will all fare better if we summon the better angels of our nature.
Got it? Covid — a virus — is about social change, that chilling euphemism for social destruction.
At the request of Rhode Island governor Gina Raimondo, one of the more aggressive Covid shysters, Fairey, a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, offered the poster to the state and titled it, “Rhode Island Angel of Hope.” Sick, yet? The poster depicts a “Rosie the Riveter” nurse lifting high the torch of hope against the virus. Fairey created another poster featuring a nurse (of ambiguous nationality), released when nurses in many places were being furloughed because hospitals and clinics were empty of everyone but the few with Covid.
He promoted it on May 1, which as he noted is the Communist International Worker’s Day:
The Valor & Grace Nurse print represents one of the many healthcare workers whose selfless acts of compassion and service are always meaningful, but at this moment are especially heroic. I’m inspired to glorify those who don’t seek glory, but rather to serve humanity when it is most challenged. I want the portrait to emanate the comforting warmth and empathy healthcare workers provide in the midst of anxiety and crisis.
This poster emanates as much warmth as Chairman Mao. I have to admit though that it is much warmer than a recent Chinese image of a nurse fighting Covid.
“Soviet Realism” was known for just the kind of schmaltz-y idealization of the working man that Fairey has produced. The “working man” was glorified while powerful cliques were ripping him off and making sure he would become an indentured servant of the state for life, standing in line for his basic necessities (sound familiar?) and getting only what was deemed “essential” by the state. The working man was glorified while he became the pawn of the mercenary and powerful.
The Russian aristocracy, the middle classes, the intellectual elite, the landed peasantry, and those workers who could be regarded as the elite of the working class, were all executed. The independent landed peasantry were robbed of their lands and deported to Siberia. Individual and independent smallholdings were replaced by the kolkhoz system, and the “liberated” proletarians were enlisted in the works’ divisions of the factories, where they had no leaders any longer but lords and masters only. (Source)
I’m not sure what ordinary people who have seen Tik Tok videos of nurses dancing make of these glorious heroes. Does it occur to them that American nurses don’t usually wear Lenin caps, favored by both Bolsheviks and the Chinese Red Army?
The right-arm salute that we see in the first Covid poster, in addition to the raised fist, is also a familiar symbol of Communist collective strength: Read More »