The NY Daily News, always on top of the important stuff, has this item about a Danish-Norwegian artist named Nina Maria Kleivan who made unusual sartorial choices for her baby for a photo essay. MomLogic has a fuller gallery: it’s not just Baby Hitler, but Baby Mao and Baby Khomenei.
From an interview Kleivan did with Israel’s Ha’aretz:
We all have evil within us. Even small children are evil towards each other… Even my daughter could end up ruling Denmark with an iron fist.
Let’s leave aside the fact that no one will end up running Denmark, a nauseatingly consensual society, with an iron first.
Apparently Kleivan’s father was a resistance fighter, and she has some Jewish family, and I’m not inclined to be offended anyway. I am even, in fact, a little tempted to find out where she got those clothes (surely the Interwebs can bring us babyhitler.com, with some tagline like “Even your first baby will love the Third Reich!”).
If nothing else, I think the get-up might get me something I’ve craved for a while: more fist-fights with fellow Upper West Side parents.
That’s shocking – I am noticing more and more Holocaust “fashion” and find it disturbing.
So funny. Reminded of this from The Onion:
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/34766
Ha– very similar! But I don’t know, Get Ready Dad, if there’s really a trend? You got any other examples?
If it’s a trend, it’s an old trend. The photos are eleven years old. First time they were exhibited was nine years ago.
It is worth noticing that no English language newspaper display more than nine out of ten photos in the series – but quite a few display nine. Two thirds of the web newspapers have no objections displaying photos of “Faustina as Hitler”, “…as Mussolini”, “…as Idi Amin”, “…as Pinochet”, … These are not objectionable, at least not enought to protect the readership from seeing them.
The “missing” one, “Fauistina as herself” can be seen at the photographer’s web site, and e.g. in the slide show in the Norwegian newspaper “Dagbladet” (http://www.dagbladet.no/2010/03/18/kultur/kunst/fotografi/drapstrusler/10903065/ ). “Faustina as herself”, displaying as a four month old baby girl, is so objectionable that no respectable newspaper dares to show it. The baby girl is powerless, with no protection. Not even the protection of clothes.
THAT is far more objectionable than every one of the nine dictators and all the reactions readers may have to seeing them imprinted on a baby girl. What we cannot handle, is the picture of the girl NOT dressed up as a dictator.
@j b Thanks for the link. That’s a commentary on our times right there: a naked baby is more offensive than all the rest. I’d guess it’s probably old-fashioned. body shame with a dash of anti-pedophilia hysteria thrown in.
Pingback: A Week on the Wagon: Displacement Edition | DADWAGON