Cops on the Side of the Klan
Philip Guston and the Pico-Robertson pogrom.
…a synagogue in the largest Jewish neighborhood in Los Angeles hosted a small, privately advertised event for those interested in purchasing homes or second homes in Israel. “The Great Israeli Real Estate Event” at Adas Torah synagogue wasn’t political and it had nothing to do with the Gaza war. But within moments of its noon start time, it became the backdrop to the worst antisemitic violence in Los Angeles since an attack on Jewish diners at a restaurant in 2021.
Over the course of several hours, with dozens of LAPD officers decked out in riot gear largely staying out of the fray, around 100 pro-Hamas activists attacked, bear-sprayed, harassed, and brawled with Jews up and down Pico Boulevard.
The police occasionally stepped in, but their main activity Sunday afternoon seemed to ensure that the activists were able to successfully shut down the front entrance to the synagogue, ruin the event, and harass Jews more or less with impunity. …despite the significant police presence, there is scant footage of the police forcefully intervening in the numerous fistfights, brawls, and beatings.
Had this happened to any other minority ethnic cohort, there would have been a national outcry and protests condemning the associated racism. Unfortunately, these victims were Jews.
Mayor Bass’s belated promise of beefed-up police patrols in the Pico-Robertson neighborhood is an anemic attempt to rectify months of neglect. For the Jewish people beaten on Sunday, the intervention is too little, too late.
The farce continued after the incident, as even some of the most violent protesters were promptly released from custody, thanks to the misguided policies of Los Angeles district attorney George Gascón. The D.A.’s tenure has obliterated bail for all “nonserious” offenses and prohibited his staff from prosecuting resisting-arrest or disorderly conduct cases.
The incident brought to mind another incident of police malfeasance from nearly a century earlier.
Soon after the forced departure of Siqueiros the Bloc of Mural Painters organized an exhibit in opposition to racism, the exhibition was sponsored by the John Reed Club of Hollywood. Six members of the Bloc each created two large portable mural panels for the exhibit, and Guston was one of the artists; he chose the trial of the Scottsboro Boys as his theme.
The available information on the exhibit is sparse and conflicting. There’s a chilling account provided by participating Bloc artist, Harold Lehman, stating the show was “scheduled to open in the Barnsdale in Los Angeles in December, 1932,” and that the LAPD attacked the John Reed Club’s headquarters in Hollywood where the artworks were stored, destroying them all so “the controversial images would never reach the light of day.”
Philip Stein, the American artist who painted murals with Siqueiros in Mexico for ten years, and later wrote the biography, Siqueiros: His Life and Works, also mentioned the incident, stating that the Red Squad had “confiscated the paintings, all rich with political content. When eventually the paintings were returned, they were full of bullet holes.”
Robert Storr’s biography on Guston erroneously placed the incident as having occurred one year earlier, and recounted the story in the following manner; “By 1931 Guston had executed his first public work, a series of portable panels based on the notorious racist trial of the Scottsboro Boys. He then watched in anger and amazement as the panels were mutilated by members of the Police “Red Squad” and a gang of American Legionnaires, who took pleasure in using the eyes and genitals of the black figures in the painting for target practice. The persecution that Guston had only imagined thus became all too terrifyingly real.”
The only other account I’ve found so far came from Jean Bruce Poole and Tevvy Ball, in their authoritative history, El Pueblo: The Historic Heart of Los Angeles. The entry in that book states; “Early in 1933 the LAPD Red Squad raided the club offices, and a number of paintings and frescoes were damaged. The club brought suit against the city, claiming that these were valuable works fashioned by Siqueiros’ students and alleging that officers had removed a number of paintings and shot or poked them full of holes.”
The scene is recounted in Night Studio by Musa Mayer: “On one occasion, the so-called Red Squad of the L.A. Police Department broke into the club and shot out the eyes and genitals of a fresco [Guston had] painted depicting a black man being flogged by Ku Klux Klansmen.”
Someone objecting to the parallel might protest that the police are on opposite political sides in the two cases. I’m here to tell you that they’re not. The political labels are meaningless and the anti-Israel protesters are the Klan of our time.
Guston’s Hood paintings that became the objects of Kaywin Feldman’s and Matthew Teitelbaum’s cowardice a couple of years ago were attempts by the artist to enter the mind of evil.
As Guston said, “They are self-portraits. I perceive myself as being behind a hood. In the new series of ‘hoods,’ my attempt was really not to illustrate, to do pictures of the KKK, as I had done earlier. The idea of evil fascinated me, and rather like Isaac Babel, who had joined the Cossacks, lived with them, and written stories about them, I almost tried to imagine that I was living with the Klan. What would it be like to be evil? To plan and to plot.”
Teitelbaum’s crew thoroughly denigrated that effort, noting that “Guston himself remained noncommittal about the meanings of these works, claiming that he was only trying to imagine ‘what it would be like to be evil.’” Now it’s apparent why. Guston’s introspection was anti-racism done correctly. The cynical ethos passed off as anti-racism by the now disgraced Ibram Kendi, and taken up by the museums, was nothing more than debased nihilism. Its goal was to wear the hood proudly, with the same sense of entitlement, self-righteousness, and vengeance. All that was needed was to refashion it as a keffiyeh.
That entitlement has been enshrined in the institutions, including the institutions of law enforcement. Now it’s no longer safe to be a Jew in Los Angeles. Entirely too many artists and art bureaucrats who professed that they were conducting an excavation of their souls a few years ago have been revealed as merely wading in their existential mud.
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Wow ~ just wow. Going to repost.
Franklin, the people you allude to in your last sentence, like so many political and "activist" types, are exhibitionistic "virtue" signalers motivated by a variable mix of opportunism and fear. The whole ethos is pathological, as in diseased, but as long as it serves the afflicted well enough, they will keep at it.