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Guest Editorial
"Sanitation" Stuffs Giuliani Into the Dustbin of History
Rudy as Hitler Goes Mainstream at the Whitney Museum

by Robert Lederman

March 9, 2000 -- New York (A.R.T.I.S.T. via AmpolNS) -- In a phenomenally bold move for an institution whose board of directors includes many of Mayor Giuliani’s top contributors, the Whitney Museum of American Art will show a work by German born artist Hans Haacke directly equating Giuliani with Adolf Hitler. The work titled, "Sanitation", will premiere on March 23rd, 2000 at the Whitney Biennial, one of the most important art shows in the world.

"Sanitation" features a wall with a series of 8 to 12 garbage cans, each containing a speaker which will play an audiotape of Nazi troops marching. Above the garbage cans will be displayed a copy of the First Amendment surrounded by quotes written in a German Gothic script by Giuliani on art and the Brooklyn Museum. The work is a response to the recent Brooklyn Museum show, "Sensations," which Giuliani made a tremendous legal and political effort to close before its opening.

The Whitney’s director, Maxwell L. Anderson, has gone on record that he doesn't share the artists' views about Giuliani but promises that the museum will display the work at the opening. Mr. Anderson will likely be under tremendous pressure in the next two weeks to remove the work from the show.

Those aware of my own activities during the past six and a half years concerning Mayor Giuliani know of his efforts to prevent my paintings likening him to Hitler from being seen. He’s denounced the cardboard protest paintings at numerous press conferences, has had me falsely arrested on 41 occasions, has had hundreds of the paintings confiscated by the NYPD Intelligence Division and during the Diallo protests last year organized a campaign among prominent Jewish leaders, including the ADL’s Abraham Foxman and the NYCLU’s Norm Siegal, to pressure political activists to ban the paintings from demonstrations in NYC. According to many reporters the Mayor has also gone to great lengths to pressure the media not to show the paintings on television or in newspapers.

While the Hans Hackke work in the Whitney show specifically comments on the Mayor’s efforts at censorship and their striking similarity to Hitler’s efforts to censor German art there is a much larger context that the work will inevitably be viewed within. In recent weeks there have been almost daily accusations by ex-police officials, ex Mayors, ministers and one-time political allies of Giuliani that he is a racist. Both the President and Hillary Clinton made statements last week that can only be interpreted as meaning that Amadou Diallo was a victim of racial profiling as part of an official Giuliani administration policy.

Hans Haacke is not the first artist to depict Rudolf Giuliani as Hitler.
Gestapo Giuliani
by Robert Lederman
©Robert Lederman. Reproduced by permission
Giuliani can be expected to denounce the Whitney show as a political move by Democrats to link him to the far right in preparation for the Senate race. The real issue should be whether there is anything to the comparisons between Giuliani and Hitler not simply whether those making them have some political motive.

Despite the existence of a great deal of solid evidence that links both Giuliani and his pal George W. Bush to far right groups, some with direct links to Nazi ideology, racism and Eugenics, there have been no efforts by the mainstream media to explore this issue. The Hitler/Nazi accusations are treated as nothing more than name calling and the venting of emotion.

To give one outstanding example, so far during this Presidential election not one mainstream media outlet has mentioned the indisputable historical fact that the Bush family were among Hitler’s most important financial backers or that in 1942 the US Congress seized many of their banking assets under the Trading With The Enemy Act. [see: Office of Alien Property Custodian, vesting order # 248. The order was signed by Leo T. Crowley, Alien Property Custodian, executed October 20, 1942; Fed Reg Doc 42-11568, Filed Nov. 6, 1942 11:31 AM; 7 Fed Reg. 9097 November 7, 1942]. Immediately before the Super Tuesday Primary, George W. Bush was shown on CNN in a yarmulke with Jewish leaders dedicating a Holocaust memorial.

Neither has anything in the mainstream media dealt with the undeniable fact that the Manhattan Institute, which Giuliani routinely points to as the source of his ideas, has been directly linked to far right groups, the CIA, and the dissemination of purportedly scholarly works advancing the notion that blacks are inferior.

In addition to his well-documented efforts to eliminate First Amendment protection for visual art altogether ("Visual art...does not express ideas and as such is not entitled to First Amendment protection," said Elizabeth Freedman, an attorney speaking on behalf of the N.Y.C. Corporation Counsel's office, in a February 1997 radio interview on WNYC's syndicated business news show, Marketplace), the Mayor’s efforts to cleanse the City of immigrant vendors, community gardens, the homeless and his policies on a host of other issues makes a convincing case that he is being compared to Hitler for substantial reasons.

Last fall the Mayor’s insistence on repeatedly spraying the city with Malathion, an organophosphate nerve gas that a chem-bio handbook provided to the Mayor described as similar to those invented by the Nazis for military use--and which is known to cause sterility, birth defects, cancer, immune deficiency and encephalitis--was for many observers an indication that Giuliani’s Nazi connection was coming out of the closet.

When the Mayor begins his inevitable denunciations of the Whitney exhibit, including likely statements bizarrely suggesting that the show is anti-Semitic, let us hope the media will once and for all delve into why so many call the 107th Mayor of New York City "Adolf" Giuliani. To paraphrase Johnnie Cochran, let the jury of public opinion decide: if the moustache fits, you must not acquit.

Robert Lederman is an artist, a regular columnist for the Greenwich Village Gazette, The Shadow and Street News, and is the author of hundreds of published essays concerning Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. He was the subject of an interview in American Politics Journal last October. His essays and letters have appeared in the New York Times, New York Post, Daily News, Newsday, Brooklyn Bridge, Park Slope Courier, The Daily Challenge, Amsterdam News, Sandbox, Penthouse, Our Town, and New York Press and are available on hundreds of websites around the world. Lederman has been falsely arrested 41 times to date for his anti-Giuliani activities and has never been convicted of any of the charges.

He is best known for creating hundreds of paintings of Mayor Giuliani as a Hitler-like dictator.