I searched for pain, and I found none.
In those enormous halls of the Louvre, I searched for reminders of the agony of the people from the Caribbean, from islands like Grenada, where the native people were entirely exterminated during the French colonial onslaught. I searched for at least one tear, one moan, one canvas saturated with sadness and remorse. I searched for confessions.
But I found none.
I was trying to catch a glimpse of the desperate, terrified facial expressions of North African women, dragged into some empty rooms, and raped brutally by French soldiers. I was looking for paintings depicting the torture of Vietnamese patriots, and their execution by decapitation, for nothing else other than fighting for freedom and for their fatherland, against the appalling French colonial rule.
No – I found nothing, nothing at all in the Louvre, or in any other major French museums.
I stood in front of bizarre, sick and cold religious artwork, full of adult-looking, perverse baby Jesuses; or of some saints with daggers sticking out grotesquely from their heads. It was mostly total kitsch, created to order from the Catholic Christian Church – a morally corrupt [and bankrupt] religious organisation responsible for the extermination of entire nations, of entire races, worldwide...
read more of this fine polemic by ANDRE VLTCHEK >>>
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