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"Just look at the painting," said the guide. "Look at the smirk expression of the clergy of the Inquisition, and look at the despondency of the victims whose doom is always a foregone conclusion unless a person has highly placed influential friends. Goya once stood before the Inquisition himself, to explain his painting The Naked Maja. He survived. Many tens of thousands did not."
The guide pointed out to us that the scene in the painting also goes beyond the historic context and becomes a scene of today. She said that the garments of the players may be different today, but that the game remains the same and grinds on just as horribly. The players all wear different hats today, but the executioners are still honored the same. The fascism under Torquemada has become universal fascism, while the system behind him has not changed, but remains imperialism. Surprisingly a symbol that we find in the painting reflects this trend. The blood stained cross that Torquemada's representative wears in the painting, hanging at his breast,--the broken cross, the tortured cross,--has become extended in modern time into the Nazi swastika. The swastika graphically represents the work of the beastman executioner that Joseph de Maistre had idealized, of a civil servant who shatters the bones of a living victim and threads the broken limbs into the spokes of a wheel on which the victim eventually dies. The swastika represents that wheel threaded with the broken limbs. It appears that inquisitor in the painting wears that symbol, the symbol of a cross that has been shaped into a wheel. It appears that this symbol might have inspired future history in which the swastika played a huge role to symbolize the continuing beastmen process.
The guide suggested that while the swastika has been dethroned the ideology of human sacrifice that it represents has been raised to new highs, such as by the imperial declaration that the earth has cancer, and that this cancer is man, coupled with calls for massive processes for depopulation. She said that the process is still designed as it was then, in an apparent effort to protect the imperial machine from the uprising of a humanist renaissance.
After that the guide took us to the third of the four paintings that dominated the entrance hall. The gallery guide explained that this painting is likewise a 'universal' painting, though it appears to pertain only to a specific part of history, in this case the 1808 takeover of Spain by Napoleon. She pointed to Goya's painting, The Colossus. The painting portrays a muscular giant towering over a landscape of chaos beneath clouds of lightening and thunder. On the ground peasants flee in every direction, men, women, and children. Herds of animals break up. Horses throw off their riders. But as the gallery guide points out Goya has also included a tiny scene of tranquility that is almost lost in the tumult. It is the scene of a donkey that stands serene and oblivious of the hubbub around it as if it wasn't real or didn't pertain to its 'little' world.
The guide suggested that the colossus and the donkey are timeless for as long as small-minded thinking exists. In Hitler's Germany the Colossus was Nazism and the donkey was an entire nation that stood tranquil as if the changing world was not of its concern. The guide said that the same was happening again in America with the towering Colossus rising in the form of universal fascism in its countless dimensions. She listed its names: military fascism; political fascism; financial fascism, the kind that is designed to loot the world; and the new fascism of free-trade-slavery that is destroying the world's economies in the march of its globalization. "Here again, the donkey stands tranquil as globally tens of thousands of people a day are deprived of the means to exist and die under the yoke of the new fascism of greed."
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