Wiping Hands On The Flag (after William Allen Rogers, 1917)

The ongoing, escalating roaring of bloodthirsty racism in support of Israeli thuggery in Gaza — speaking of mass shootings — put me in mind of a book of cartoons entitled “America’s Black & White Book”, published during World War I by an artist named William Allen Rogers, in particular one of the “greatest hits” from that book, a ripe little nugget entitled “Another Case Of Wiping Hands On The American Flag”, a classic rendition of the “Filthy Dirty Huns Kill Children” genre of the WWI era. Rogers was arguably one of the most raving, drooling, jingoistic warmongering editorial cartoonists of that era — sort of a poor man’s James Montgomery Flagg — and drew for the New York Herald, arguably one of the most raving, drooling, warmongering newspapers in the US of that era.

Their presentation nowadays may be slicker, their media more sophisticated, their rhetoric a little more refined, their approach a little classier, but if you strip it to the core it’s the same old shit they’ve been serving up since the Spanish-American War, at least: filthy dirty Huns are killing babies, filthy dirty Huns are throwing babies out of incubators, dirty filthy Huns are beheading babies… you get the idea.

11 x 16 inch high-res color .jpg image, 1.7mb