By Russell Working
A Soviet poster reads, “Rats of the Ku Klux Klan: American Democracy.”
My wife’s Christmas present for me last month was inspired. For years I have talked about taking a drawing class, so she signed me up for one at an art studio in our Chicago suburb.
The class is ongoing, and the teacher began the session by laying out the previous week’s artwork (white pencil or gouache on black paper) and asking for critiques.
Disturbingly, one student artist had sketched a rat in a red MAGA cap crawling out of a tipped-over trash can. The message wasn’t as original as he perhaps imagined. Portraying one’s adversaries as vermin has a long and venomous history in Nazi, Soviet, North Korean, and other totalitarian propaganda.
“Germany for the Germans!” Nazi propaganda shows the state sweeping away Jewish “rats.”
This drawing was particularly troubling in dangerous times. President Trump was nearly assassinated twice. Legions of progressives celebrated Charlie Kirk’s murder in September. Leftists keep swatting conservative politicians and podcasters (a practice meant to cause panicky cops to shoot the victim), and high-profile conservatives must hire security teams to protect their families. In 2022 a transgender radical sought to murder several conservative Supreme Court justices, starting with Brett Kavanaugh.
[Check out my satire of woke America, The Insurrectionist]
And just last fall the National Review reported that Virginia Democrat Jay Jones had texted that if “he had only two bullets and was faced with the choice of murdering then-Speaker of the [Virginia] House Todd Gilbert or two dictators, he’d shoot Gilbert ‘every time.’” Jones also fantasized about a killer slaughtering Gilbert’s young children and watching them die in their mother’s arms.
That sounded so awesome to Virginia Democrats, they promptly elected him attorney general.
A pro-Palestinian artist treats North American Jews as rats with dual loyalties. From the Canadian Handbook on the IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism.
In such an environment, it was alarming to see a student artist creating propaganda better suited to the notorious Nazi rag, Der Stürmer, but with Republicans replacing Jews as the rats.
Giggling over dehumanization
We live in Oak Park, Illinois, where Kamala Harris won more than 90% of the 2024 vote. The portrayal of Republicans as vermin seemed to draw amused smiles.
The sketch was amateurish, the perspective warped, and the rat resembled a burrito with feet. But the critiques seemed to be friendly. Someone called the red dab of a MAGA cap a successful highlight of color.
Don’t get me wrong: art is often political. I am the author of a satirical novel about a reporter’s persecution of a J6 family. I certainly don’t expect to agree with everyone’s message. But dehumanization crosses a line.
When my turn came to critique the piece, I mentioned that every 20th-century mass murder was preceded by campaigns similar to the rat drawing. This was how Bolsheviks, Maoists, Pol Pot cadres, and Nazis got ordinary people to participate in killing millions. People were egged on to see the enemy as an Untermensch, a skunk, a kulak. More recently, Hamas’s pogrom of rape and murder of Israeli Jews on Oct. 7, 2023, was preceded by decades of genocidal Palestinian messaging.
“Totalitarian regimes portray their adversaries or scapegoats as vermin, as rats,” I told the class, “What do you do with rats? You exterminate them.”
‘The Humiliation of Li Fanwu’ (1966) by Li Zhensheng, via the Financial Times.
Reflecting in 2016 on the Cultural Revolution, in which Mao egged on mobs that murdered millions, one man told the Guardian how teenage fanatics beat his 37-year-old father to death.
“I can’t forgive them,” the son said. “My father was a human being, not an animal. He wasn’t a cat or a dog. He was a person. They beat him to death…”
When our teacher urged me to focus my critique on the artist’s techniques, I said sure—and verbally shredded the piece further.
Did I dishearten my fellow student artist? Who knows? But perhaps my remarks will spark some reflection.
The class looked a little intimidated by this newcomer—me—who came stomping into the critique like Godzilla. Would I be similarly ferocious with them in the future?
If so, they can count their blessings. I dropped out, not because of one ugly sketch, but because we spent 1¼ hours of class evaluating drawings, leaving only 45 minutes to create our own work. Waste of time. Still, I wish all Americans could learn to see their political adversaries as fellow citizens—not rats.
The Elephant Box 