The Untouchables
It has been my privilege to stand before two of the greatest anti-war paintings in human history. Francisco Goya’s “The Third of May, 1808” and Pablo Picasso’s “Guernica” reside in two of the three “Golden Triangle of Art” museums in Madrid, Spain: the Museo del Prado and the Museo Reina Sofía, respectively. Both works are titanic emblems of the stark price of war, and each are powerful works of advocacy for peace.
I recently became aware of a third such anti-war artwork by the Cuban artist Erik Ravelo. It is part of a multimedia series called ‘The Untouchables.” The series is about the right to childhood and the human-created plagues that affect children’s lives. They are films-displayed-as-art of children metaphorically crucified on the bodies of these symbolic, anthropomorphised evils. “Pedophilia” shows a child crucified on the back of a robed priest, “Nuclear Polution” on the back of a man in a hazmat suit, “Obesity” on the orange and yellow back of Ronald McDonald, and so on. “Ukraine” shows a young girl in traditional Ukrainian dress crucified to the front of Vladimir Putin.
It should give pause to even the most ardent Warhawk or the fiercest AR-15 rifle-toting, MAGA hat-wearing, Second Amendment-defending advocate. Ravelo showcases in poignant realism the true cost of this vainglorious game for old men. As Laugh-In’s Dan Rowan put it while standing next to a child representing the actual victims of the Vietnam war, “We have met the enemy and he is ours.”
It takes a psychopathic narcissist like Putin to fail to remain unmoved by this connection. The point, of course, is that none of these children ever did anything to harm Vladimir Putin. They didn’t write anti-Putin articles or campaign to replace him. They merely did what he cannot, lived their lives of harmless, innocent play without thought or care for the nonsense ideology of a long dead Soviet Union. Perhaps that’s why he hates them.
American Civil War General William Tecumseh Sherman told the world what it should have already known but did not. “It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded,” Sherman said, “who cry aloud for blood, more vengeance, more desolation. War is hell.”
Ravelo brings home this idea in a single, disturbing image. It’s hardly surprising that the biggest advocates for Putin’s appalling outrages in Ukraine have themselves never been in the military and never fired a shot in anger. Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham know nothing but wealth and luxury. They have never known a single day of war. But while these old, white men and women cheer on Putin’s bloody festival of madness, it’s the innocent and their children who suffer.
Let’s not mince words. War is stupid and no nation is blameless of the depredations of war. No one can stop it but us. We need to make war so repellent that the people who run our planet never again reach for it as a solution. With this latest in his series of “The Untouchables,” Erik Ravelo reminds us of another reason why we must make it so.
In the final analysis, human beings are the authors and finishers of war and Americans are war’s most generous paymasters. The greatest war machine in human history has been bought and paid for by the American taxpayer. For too long we have invested trillions of dollars into the machinery of war and thought nothing of it. It’s time to stop. It’s time for the world to start thinking about peace before it’s too late. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.