For an image of the huge “Sydney Madonna painting (1.3 x 2.9 metres) see: http://www.flickr.com/photos/gideonpolya/3429287878/in/set-72157616584873236/ .
Gideon Polya, “Sydney Madonna & Aboriginal Genocide”, MWC News, 18 November 2006.
Sydney Madonna & Aboriginal Genocide
Sydney Madonna is a huge painting (1.3 meters x 2.2 meters) that I have recently created in a humanitarian cause. It is inspired by a 2 millennium tradition of Christian icons representing the Virgin Mary and Baby Jesus.
That image also represents at a fundamental, universal level what is most sacred to all decent people whether theist, atheist or agnostic, namely Mother and Child. My “Sydney Madonna” shows Mother and Child superimposed (together with aspects of the flora and fauna of Australia) upon the most beautiful Man-made landscape in Australia, specifically the Sydney Opera House, the Harbor filled with yachts, the Sydney Harbor Bridge, and the North Shore. The message of the painting is that Mother, Child and Wild Nature utterly transcend the greatest works of Man.
Without Mother we would not exist and without the love and nurturing of Mother we would not grow, develop and mature to the Age of Reason as Children and thence to Independence as adults. However, while Mother and Child are sacred to decent human beings, in harsh reality Mother and Child are horribly abused in our First World-dominated world. The horrendous extent of this abuse is revealed by the following analysis of global excess death.
Excess death (avoidable death, avoidable mortality, excess mortality, deaths that did not have to happen) is defined as the difference between the actual deaths in a country and the deaths in a peaceful, decently-run country with the same demographics. The 1950-2005 excess death in the world totals 1.3 billion, including 1.2 billion in the non-European world and 0.6 billion in the Muslim world – a Muslim holocaust 100 times greater than the Jewish Holocaust (6 million victims) or the contemporaneous, man-made WW2 Bengal Famine (4 million victims and a Bengal 1940s demographic deficit of 10 million).
The above estimates are consonant with independent estimates of 0.85 billion 1950-2005 under-5 infant deaths, this including 0.8 billion in the non-European world and 0.4 billion in the Muslim world. This carnage is continuing apace. Thus currently (2003 figures) the annual global excess deaths total 16 million (44,000 daily) and the global annual under-5 infant deaths total 10.6 million (29,000 daily, of which 90% are avoidable).
Westerners are slowly becoming aware of this horrendous reality but scrupulously avoid recognizing their own complicity in current excess mortality. This complicity falls into 3 zones as outlined below.
1. From a global perspective, we are all passengers on Spaceship Earth that is dominated by the First World. First World people are largely in charge and the Ruler is responsible for the Ruled.
2. In the inter-national case of Occupied countries the responsibility of the Occupier is clear: the Ruler is responsible for the Ruled and according to the Geneva Conventions for the protection of civilians, the Occupier is obliged to do everything within his power to preserved the lives of the Conquered Subjects. However this is clearly not being done as seen from UN-derived data on :”annual under-5 infant death rate” in the United States (0.17%) as compared to US-occupied Haiti (2.7%), US-occupied Iraq (2.7%) and US-occupied Afghanistan (5.7%). This failure constitutes a horrendous war crime by the US and its allies (notably the UK and Racist White Australia) as can be seen from the “annual death rate” of 10% for Australian prisoners of war of the Japanese in WW2 (for which crime Japanese generals were hung).
3. Finally we have intra-national situations such as that in Australia in relation to its Indigenous (Aboriginal) inhabitants. The “annual death rate” (2003 figures) is 2.2% (for Aboriginal Australians) and 2.4% (for Aboriginal Australians in the Northern Territory) – as compared to 2.5% (for pre-drought sheep in paddocks of Australian sheep farms) and 0.7% (for White Australians). This is happening in one of the richest countries of the world because of deliberate neglect – Australian Aboriginal health services are funded at 50% of what they should be; many Australian Aborigines live in Third World conditions; the “annual under-5 infant death rate” is over 3 times higher for Aborigines than that for White Australians; 1 in 5 Australian Aborigines have diabetes (mostly type 2 diabetes) which has huge attendant problems such as cardiovascular complications, kidney problems and blindness; and the Australian Aboriginal life expectancy is about 20 years less than that for White Australians.
Australian Aborigines suffered Genocide at the hands of the European invaders in the 19th and 20th centuries. The Indigenous population dropped from about 1 million to 0.1 million in the first century after the invasion in 1788, mainly through violence, dispossession, deprivation and introduced disease. The last massacres of Aborigines occurred in the 1920s. Throughout much of the 20th century there was a policy of forcibly removing Aboriginal children from their mothers, a systematic genocidal policy involving the removal of perhaps 0.1 million children. This practice ended in the 1970s. However the continued deliberate deprivation of Aboriginal Australians amounts to a White Australian policy of passive genocide.
Indeed Monash University diabetologist Professor Paul Zimmet stated recently in relation to the world-wide diabetes epidemic "If we don't do something, there is a real chance that Australia's indigenous community will be wiped out by the end of the century. The world needs to act now if we're to deal with this problem, which threatens to consume world economies and bankrupt health systems. We are dealing with the biggest epidemic in world history." (see: here ).
“Sydney Madonna” (1.3 x 2.2 meters) is a Madonna and Child based on Sydney Harbor and Indigenous Australian (Aboriginal) themes. From a technical perspective, “Sydney Madonna” is geometrically based on classical Renaissance Italian Madonna and Child paintings (e.g. those by Leonardo da Vinci, Botticelli and Raphael) and involves a single Golden Rectangle (as in the Da Vinci Code) between upper and lower margins. It presently has a sister painting having the same Mother and Child theme but linked to New York and the 9/11 atrocity (for this painting and a detailed discussion see: http://sites.google.com/site/artforpeaceplanetmotherchild/ ).
The central part of “Sydney Madonna” shows the most beautiful Man-made scene in Australia – the Sydney Opera House, the Bridge, the North Shore and the Harbor with yachts. The Bridge (noting that Bridges link worlds) is like a Gateway to a Continent and under the Bridge we see Uluru, the Red Rock in the Center of Australia.
Superimposed on this scene is an Australasian (Australian Aboriginal/South Pacific Melanesian or Polynesian) Mother and Child. The dancing figures on either side of the Mother are naked from the waist up. 4-petalled Golden Flower or Truelove constructions arising from the Golden Rectangle geometry make the dancing figures modest and are incorporated into Sydney Harbour entities. Further Truelove symbols become necklaces. The dancing figures are also tree trunks that end in Eucalyptus and Wattle foliage. The Mother is also decorated with 5 phases of the Moon, this representing the Monthly Menstrual Cycle.
Below Sydney Harbor is the gorgeous Indigenous Child surrounded by Wild Nature – Summer Grasses as a lithe Figure, Kangaroo, Emu, Emu egg, Seal, Boomerang with Snake Motif, Whale, Dolphin, Jelly Fish, Shark/Murray Cod or Groper, Big Fish, Tiny Fish and a huge Pacific Roller crashing to Shore. The core message is that the most beautiful Man-made creation in Australia - the iconic Sydney Harbor view from Lady Macquarie’s Chair of the Sydney Opera House, Bridge, North Shore and yacht-strewn Harbor – is utterly transcended by Mother, Child and Wild Nature.
Through ethical media such as MWC News I have attempted to inform and engage people around the world about the horrendous excess deaths associated with First World global hegemony and US Asian wars and the appalling differential mortality of Australian aborigines. However the carnage continues. Perhaps my “Sydney Madonna” painting may succeed in sparking requisite action where sober words and carefully compiled statistics have failed.