Racism and Abstraction

Paul Berman, tireless fustigator of crypto-totalitarian useful idiots spawned by the long tail of the bad 60s, has composed another righteous tract, this time it seems attacking fifth columnists on the 'left' - those notorious socialists Garton Ash and Buruma - for being soft on seductive 'moderates' like Tariq Ramadan, who cunningly conceal the green bacillus of world-conquering Islam under the facade of reasonableness. To spare the reader the soul-crushing déjà-vu of actually reading this sterile screed, the publishers have kindly summarised it in the cover image - which neatly resolves, in the affirmative, the scholasto-aesthetic question: 'Can abstract art be racist?'

The straight white lines on the right, broken up by the evil green Islamist shard, leading to the culpable disarray of the white lines on the left...

As we all know, communism was the Islam of the twentieth-century and Islam is the communism of the twenty-first. Both are driven, at their core, by the blessed rage for abstraction, and their fantasmatic union would signal the total and utter implosion of all things Western, reasonable and good. Below, my friends, care of our guest artist Bat (aka al-Lissitzky), is the dialectical image that haunts the nightmares of Berman & co.