When the Bicentennial Center for the District of Columbia recently dedicated its new buildings, a weird mural was unveiled for Washington dignitaries. In what was expected to be a painting depicting the 200th anniversary of the birth of our nation, the artist had inserted the founding fathers of Communism, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Joseph Stalin, and Mao Tse-tung. Also depicted in the mural were Angela Davis, Tricia Nixon Cox with an Afro hairdo, Oracle Allen, Greta Garho, and Laurel and Hardy.
The artist who painted this crude propaganda piece calls himself a “Marxist. He was paid only $2.75 per hour. Obviously, the propaganda opportunity was more important than the pay.
The D.C. Bicentennial Commission should not have been surprised. We can always trust a Marxist to behave like a Marxist, Marxist painters are notorious for inserting propaganda in their paintings.
Marxist painter Pablo Picasso is especially known for his Dove of Peace, widely used by the Communists, and also for his painting of Guernica which portrays a town in Spain which the Communists claimed was destroyed by aerial bombardment by the anti-Communists. Recent evidence has thrown considerable doubt on this story because there were no bomb craters inside the city. Some historians state that the Rojo militia destroyed Guernica by dynamite and surface fires as part of the scorched earth policy they followed in nearby towns.
When John D. Rockefeller, Jr., hired Marxist painter Diego Rivera to paint a mural at Rockefeller Center, Rivera’s painting included theCommunist dictators, Lenin and Trotsky, the men who forcibly overthrew the elected Republic of Russia, Rockefeller protested and had his wall repainted. Poet Ogden Nash defended Rockefeller with a famous poem ending: But after all, it is my wall.”
After all, the Bicentennial Commission should be celebrating the 200th anniversary of a successful, prosperous and free America — not the dismal 56-year Communist record of slave labor camps, food shortages, and invasions of little countries. This Bicentennial painting is another lesson to us that Marxists always put ideology ahead of art, business, and good relations. Our diplomats who are promoting detente, and our businessmen who are promoting trade with the Communists, should learn this lesson.
