No.6 Discussion Board

They are bombing us; peaceful citizens and children are dying," he says. But his relatives in Russia, who live a thousand kilometers from the front lines, refuse to believe him. "There is no war. ”, answers the voice of an old woman. The man gets angry. "How do you know? I'm here!" he yells. "We have a television," he hears himself in response. It is no coincidence that the Russian government forbids the use of the word "war." It indicates a situation that cannot be perceived in a neutral way, unlike a “special military operation”, which is perceived as the continuation of a complex government policy and does not require a personal attitude towards it from a citizen. Government propaganda gives people a kind of saving grace by allowing them not to accept reality.

When art is offered as war propaganda, history becomes a show. The disasters of war It is hard to imagine that an artist who has experienced war first-hand could produce pro-war propaganda, and it was precisely at the time when artists began drawing on their personal experience that a monumental moral shift occurred in depictions Telegram Number Data of war. war. Francisco de Goya created his spectacular and highly political series of 82 prints The Disasters of War (1810-1820) after visiting the battlefields around Madrid, bearing witness to the carnage of the Napoleonic Wars.



The images of the many forms of suffering portrayed by Goya captivated the observer; disturbed, provoked feelings of indignation. The artist wrote emotional captions under each image, such as "You can't look at it"; "This is bad"; "This is worse"; "This is the worst!" The captions and images seem to be in dialogue with each other and with the observer. They seem to ask: are we going to allow this to continue? Because he makes us examine our assumptions in this way, Goya is considered the first true modernist (although he is a pre-modernist). Few works of art have preserved such freshness over time; but then again, the atrocities of war never go out of style.