When I painted this piece back in 1974 I called it nuclear warhead.

I wanted to have an evil face peering out of a nuclear explosion. The lips kiss the ground. The seething, billowing clouds of the nuclear inferno form the sulci and gyri of the cerebrum. The eyes peer out from flame. Behind it are the lights of a city.

A Holocaust

 

I wrote this after reading a poem that talked of Holocaust. I am sorry I cannot track it down and so cannot tell you the poet’s name. He was castigated for applying the term holocaust to things such as poverty. He was told it was disrespectful.

I do not agree.

The holocaust perpetrated by the fascists in Germany against the Jews, Gypsies, Trade Unionists, Communists and others was a horrendous crime of unimaginable cruelty and scale. Yet it is one of many such crimes. They occur with monotonous regularity. Cruelty and barbarity has been an ingredient of human nature throughout time.

We run the world to create inequality from which millions die. Poverty is as much a holocaust as the Nazis orchestrated. It is there by design.

Genocides are not always concentrated in one vicinity.

ISIS is demonstrating the barbarity of humanity as they think up the most sadistic methods of killing people.

The terrorist bombers loading shrapnel and nails into their bombs must imagine the flesh and organs being ripped. The thought of these horrific injuries probably causes them satisfaction.

But for me the greatest crime of all is not that inflicted by people on other people; it is the mindless destruction of nature, the slaughter of our wild-life, the cruelty inflicted on animals.

As the relentless intrusion into habitat, the poaching, hunting and building, the deliberate inflicting of pain, continues on a daily basis; each and every day is a holocaust for nature.

 

A Holocaust

 

A holocaust

Six million burnt.

A holocaust

Pol Pot and Uganda.

A holocaust

Rwanda and Sarijevo.

 

Genocide on scales unimaginable.

Repeated with regularity.

Out of the psyche

Of humanity.

 

A holocaust. A holocaust. A holocaust.

 

Nagasaki.

Hiroshima.

 

Dachau.

Auschwitz.

 

A holocaust. A holocaust. A holocaust.

 

Every decade

Another atrocity

Is designed.

 

Yet

A holocaust

For nature

Every single day.

 

A holocaust. A holocaust. A holocaust.

 

Opher 9.5.2016