Bush is the Butcher of Baghdad

[San Francisco]: Arch D. Bunker, [1991]. 8 ½ x 11 in. Offset.

Small poster produced in protest of the 1991 bombing of Iraq by the United States and Allied forces, squarely denouncing the Bush administration for the violence wreaked in Iraq. Notably this poster, also draws a direct link to the American firebombing of Dresden 46 years earlier, a bombing campaign that killed more than 20,000 civilians.

Arch D. Bunker was an anonymous artists collective that mobilized in the early 1990s in response to the First Gulf War. The short-lived group detourned and criticized the distant and calculating language of military officials, arms dealers, politicians, and corporate media pundits. Produced in the first decade of cable news and the 24-hour news cycle, these prints also brought attention to the distorted ways in which most Americans were being shown the conflict, on television - the spectacle of war.

Though there is little recorded information about the group itself or the artists behind the initiative, we do know that Arch D. Bunker grew out of Processed World, the anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist magazine directed at office workers, produced in San Francisco in the 1980s and ‘90s. Their pointed criticism of the mainstream media’s complicity in the everyday spectacle of modern war is prescient in the age of media overdrive, riot porn, and social media.

“Today is a healthy day of bombing.” - Lt. General Thomas Kelly, Operations Director, Joint Chiefs

Near fine.