A photo is worth a thousand words. An image conveys subconscious associations: archetypal fears and anxieties that lie beneath the level of daylight awareness. Darkness carries a primordial dread.
That was why George Lucas, when creating Star Wars, consulted the renowned scholar of religion Joseph Campbell when concocting his archvillain Darth Vadar, the minions of the Evil Empire and the Imperial Storm Troopers. These personifications of terror were engineered to tap into our collective unconscious and trigger base instincts from our primate past. Danger! Run away! Surrender!
Resistance is futile.
The Nazi propagandist and filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl was, like George Lucas, a master at manipulating emotive imagery. Her 1935 propaganda classic Triumph of the Will celebrated the Third Reich's scheme to subjugate weaker nations and "inferior races" beneath the jack boot of Aryan White Supremacy. Hitler's ideas were nonsensical, his speeches were rambling, full of digressions, non sequiturs, lies and personal grievances. But the theatrics were superb. They invoked mass hypnosis and divorce from reality as Germans acquiesced to fantasies of domination and control of their perceived enemies.
Today in the United States, the Trump administration is borrowing from this same playbook. Nazi slogans and memes are abundant. Racial animus is rocket-fueled. Presidential tweets are disjointed, verging on demented. The strategic and economic policy objectives make no sense (Conquer Greenland! Down with Windmills!) But the choreography, the visuals, the staging and theatrics are magnificently calculated to cow and subdue the populace into submission. ICE has badges, masks, firearms, body armor, symbols of authority. Everything that conveys invincibility, omnipotence, and irresistible force.
Trump is deranged, a madman, a megalomaniac with the impulses of a spoiled child. But like Hitler, he is not stupid. He and his sycophants are cleverly deploying the nightmarish iconography of evil that evokes our deepest dread in order to intimidate and confound our ability to fight back.
But do not yield or submit to shadows or phantasms. The show of force—behind and beyond the monstrous masks and masquerades of absolutism—is hollow. The grotesque uniforms worn by ICE and Border Protection are empty suits, meant to shock and awe but without legitimacy, popular support or constitutional authority. Their charade will collapse like a bad dream once people awaken to its absurd and preposterous pretensions.
When we the people strike, the bullies we feared will be afraid of us. This week, as thousands of citizens march in the streets of Minneapolis and hundreds of businesses shut their doors, the Evil Empire takes pause. Myth gives way to reality. Photo-ops and memes submit to facts on the ground. People will not obey in advance beneath the directives of a criminal regime. Because they realize that the man behind the mask is a deformed, deficient and dehumanized substitute for a genuine leader. He is the apotheosis of our worst fears.
This man is not our Father, not our Dear Leader, and not our rightful President. Do not treat him as such.
Resist.
