Gideon Polya, “”Four Seasons” Painting. Easter, Holocaust & History Ignored Yields History Repeated”, MWC News, submitted 23 March 2008.
”Four Seasons” Painting. Easter, Holocaust & History Ignored Yields History Repeated
“Four Seasons” is a huge painting I have created to illustrate fundamental cyclical, cosmological and behavioural aspects of the human condition. However we are not totally victims of the relative disposition of the Sun and the Earth – thus Man can control his physical environment. “ Four Seasons” also represents a powerful metaphor for Man’s repetitious behaviour that is best summarized by the aphorism “history ignored yields history repeated”. However Man is unique among sentient creatures in being potentially able to overcome his animal nature – history does NOT have to repeat itself.
My huge painting “Four Seasons” (1.3 meters x 2.8 meters; acrylic painting on doubly-primed fine canvas) has a geometrical basis that is precisely that used in Pablo Picasso’s 1937 anti-war masterpiece “Guernica” – both elongated, “landscape mode” paintings have a dominant, underlying, classical Double Golden Rectangle geometrical construction (for discussion see my article “Picasso, Guernica, Qana & the Da Vinci Code” on MWC News: http://mwcnews.net/content/view/9547/26/ that describes a huge painting “Qana” dealing with the Israeli destruction of Lebanon in 2006 and the pre-Christian Phoenician Four Seasons story of the recurrent death and resurrection of Adonis – a story that is mirrored in the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Jesus celebrated at Easter in the Christian world ). This geometry involves 2 successive Golden Rectangles (each having a length 1.618 times – or Phi times - the width) bounded by upper and lower strips.
Each Golden Rectangle involves the bringing together of 2 squares (each containing an exactly fitting Circle and Diagonals) and when they reach the correct position of overlap (the so-called Golden Section or Divine Section) a beautiful four-petalled flower arrangement – the Golden Flowers – appears. For a related huge, female figurative painting entitled “Truelove” and a detailed discussion of the sacred and profane significance of the Golden Rectangle, the Divine Section and the Golden Flowers see my article “Woman & Truelove, Sacred & Profane” on MWC News: http://mwcnews.net/content/view/11031/26/ .
In the “Four Seasons” painting the dominant 4 circles in this dominant Double Golden Rectangle geometry are used to illustrate the successive seasons (from left to right) of Spring, Summer, Autumn (Fall) and Winter. Female figures in various modes are used to illustrate the dominant human dimension of these Four Seasons and colours are used that are consonant with both the dominant mood and the season. Thus in Spring (light yellow, green and blue) these women are beginning to emerge and become active. In Summer (blue, reddish brown and yellow – these are Australian Summer colors!) the women dance with wild abandon. In Autumn (deep blue, brown, orange and red) the remorseful women cover their faces in shame over their Summer indulgences. However by Winter (cold purple, pink, white and blue-green) the women have sorted out their History and created a “nice”, ordered, fictional world in which all is forgotten and they are all set for history to repeat itself, again and then again and again …
Man has the capacity to overcome the PHYSICAL aspects of the Four Seasons through clothing, glass houses, snow ploughs and central heating. Indeed when I worked in upstate New York years ago I was typically much hotter there in its icy, snow-bound Winter (due to requisite thick clothing and central heating) than I am in the benign Winter of sunny Australia. In all my working life in Melbourne, Australia I refused to use an umbrella or an overcoat and my concession to Winter was typically a button-up jumper or cardigan.
Man also has the capacity to modify his BEHAVIOUR. Outstanding atheist and Humanist Professor Richard Dawkins analyzed the evolution of animal behaviour and human behaviour (notably altruism) in his seminal book “The Selfish Gene”. Altruism (being nice to others) has evolved in Man through Darwinian natural selection involving mutation of GENES and selection of alleles (genetic variants of a gene) that favour reproductive survival of the species. One can readily see how maternal and paternal altruism (and indeed the child-care by relatives or “allomothering”) can increase the chances of survival of offspring to reproductive age. However, in addition to this genetic evolution of altruism hard-wired in DNA-constructed Genes, Man has also evolved altruism through the non-genetic mechanism of selection of favourable MEMES, or societally-selected ideas and behaviours. Thus examples of powerful Memes include “thou shall not kill”, “love thy neighbour” and “all men are created equal”.
In the last chapter of “The Selfish Gene” Professor Dawkins powerfully outlines Man’s capacity to rise above his animal nature : “It is possible that yet another unique quality of man is a capacity for genuine, disinterested, true altruism. I hope so, but I am not going to argue the case one way or another, nor to speculate over its possible memic evolution … We have the power to defy the selfish genes of our birth and, if necessary, the selfish memes of our indoctrination. We can even discuss ways of deliberately cultivating and nurturing pure, disinterested altruism -- something that has no place in nature, something that has never existed before in the whole history of the world. We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our own creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.”
Yet the horrible reality in the 21st century is that an awful, genocidal history is being IGNORED as it is happening. The West, led by the US, is involved in what it calls a War on Terror but which is in horrible actuality a Western War on Women and Children, or more specifically, a Western War on Semitic Women and Children (as in Nazi-occupied Europe in World War 2 but with a different Semitic target), a War on Arab Women and Children, a War on Muslim Women and Children, a War on Asian Women and Children and a War on Non-European Women and Children. This US-led War on Women and Children in the Occupied Iraqi and Afghan Territories has been associated – so far - with about 9 million post-invasion violent and non-violent excess deaths (avoidable deaths) in these brutally occupied countries (see “The Big Lie & Falsity of Zionist, Neo-con & US Administration Terror Hysteria” on MWC News: http://mwcnews.net/content/view/20850/42/ ).
For 5 years in the mid-20th century the world largely IGNORED a horrendous Holocaust and genocide as it was happening – it was only about 30 months before the end of World War 2 in Europe that the Allies finally officially and publicly acknowledged ONE part of that Holocaust, the Jewish Holocaust that killed about 6 million Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe (1 million of these victims dying from deprivation as opposed to violent killing). However the World War 2 Holocaust in general (30 million Slav, Jewish and Roma victims) has been largely deleted from general public perception by lying, racist, Zionist-beholden Mainstream media in the Western Murdochracies.
Over 60 years later we see “history ignored yields history repeated”. The post-invasion excess deaths in the Occupied Palestinian, Iraqi and Afghan Territories now total 0.3 million, 1.7-2.2 million and 3.3-6.6 million, respectively; post-invasion under-5 infant deaths total 0.2 million, 0.6 million and 2.2 million, respectively; and refugees total 7 million, 4.5 million and 4 million, respectively. This carnage constitutes a Palestinian Holocaust, an Iraqi Holocaust and an Afghan Holocaust – and indeed a Palestinian Genocide, an Iraqi Genocide and an Afghan Genocide as defined by Article 2 of the United Nations Genocide Convention. Yet this is remorselessly IGNORED by racist, lying, holocaust-ignoring, racist Zionist-beholden and racist Bush-ite-beholden Mainstream media of the complicit Western Murdochracies.
My country, Australia, is a loyal Bush-ite American lackey and has been variously involved in the Palestinian Genocide, the Iraqi Genocide and the Afghan Genocide as well as in a CONTINUING Indigenous Australian Aboriginal Genocide (90,000 excess Indigenous deaths in the 11 years of the previous Bush-ite Coalition Government; current Indigenous population 0.5 million) and – as the Developed World’s #1 annual per capita greenhouse gas polluter – in an horrendous, expanding Climate Genocide ( 16 million people die avoidably every year - with this carnage being increasingly climate-impacted - and Professor James Lovelock FRS estimates that over 6 billion will perish this century due to unaddressed man-made climate change).
Because these horrendous realities are IGNORED by racist, lying mainstream media in Murdochracy Australia, I have lodged a Formal Complaint to the International Criminal Court over Australian involvement in Aboriginal Genocide, Iraqi Genocide, Afghan Genocide and Climate Genocide (see: http://climateemergency.blogspot.com/ ).
However this remorseless DENIAL by Western Murdochracies involved in genocidal democratic imperialism, democratic tyranny and democratic Nazism gets even worse. In 1943-1945 a man-made famine atrocity in British-ruled India killed 6-7 million people in Bengal and neighboring provinces – yet this Bengali Holocaust has been essentially deleted from British History as exposed in my book “Jane Austen and the Black Hole of British History”: http://janeaustenand.blogspot.com/ - a book written to cogently expose this continuing obscenity that “history ignored yields history repeated”. These millions perished when the price of rice double and then doubled again and those who could not afford to buy food simply perished horribly under a merciless British colonial administration.
History ignored yields history repeated – US farm wheat prices have tripled in 3 years; the price of a wheat-based staple “roti” in Pakistan has doubled in the last year; FAO and the UN are expressing alarm at global food price rises; the price of food is again a major issue in Bangladesh as it outstrips the ability of the poor to pay for basic survival. Just as Argentina burned millions of tons of grain to drive trains in World War 2 (due to a coal shortage), in a year or so America will be using 10% of its wheat and 30% of its corn for biofuel – while 4 billion citizens on Spaceship Earth shift from malnourishment to starvation.
For a very detailed exposition of this vital argument on “history ignored yields history repeated” see the detailed lecture notes of my current Melbourne course on Risk Management, Science and Denial (see: http://rationalriskmanagement.blogspot.com/ ) – you can scroll down to the end of this course to find detailed Tables on global excess death and Links to numerous companion paintings to “Four Seasons” published by the ethical and humanitarian MWC News.
Please tell everyone you can.