Observe, Citizen:
This is a dignified stage. The location has been selected for its historic connection to your nation’s founding. This is your tribal heritage, standing strong and proud in brick and mortar, hearkening back to the cultural heroes—the statesmen and visionaries whose images we are diligently revising, slowly but surely eliminating all cultural memory of their true contributions to the nation.
Your Dear Leader walks out on the stage, accompanied by his loving wife. They wave happily at their adoring audience.
The applause dies down. Darkness descends upon the arena.
We have cast the stage in a blood-red light to convey the ominousness of the threat to this nation (which we have been working on all year and are about to announce.)
Silhouetted in the background, we have placed two impeccably uniformed Marines—guardians of the holy flag, hung vertically for this occasion to convey phallic energy and militaristic power.
To our faithful, compliant citizens, the entire atmosphere elicits feelings of patriotic fervor, of moral outrage on behalf of the tribe, and of morbid anticipation of the conflict to come. (To war! To war!)
But for the noncompliant among you—those who adhere to alternative fact narratives, those who insist upon thinking for yourselves—our intentionally crafted staging carries a different message. The vertically-hung flag triggers feelings of fear. The red light reminds you of the blood you are filled with, and the dark flag guardians remind you that we have no qualms about spilling it.
Dear Leader’s speech writers have not neglected to highlight the hallowed significance of this arena, hearkening back to the nation’s founding: the writing of its most sacred documents.
The speech writers have, however, skipped smoothly over the problematic character of those cultural heroes. Never again will any of your dear leaders pause to dwell upon the fact that these were dissidents, rebels, insurrectionists who sought to tear away from a corrupt and unjust institution of tyranny. These details do not support our claim to power. They do not square with our narrative about good guys and bad guys in the modern era, and therefore they must be stuffed down the memory hole.
Observe, Citizen. Dear Leader now makes his declaration of war. It is a vilification of half of your countrymen, though he takes pains to stress that “not all” of his political opponents are the enemy. This caveat was necessary in order to maintain the illusion of dignified statesmanship, but the psychological undercurrent of the message is clear to the intended audience:
Half of you are terrorists, insurrectionists, and evildoers.
The hypnotized citizen does not need to wonder which half. He, or she, or they, need only to accept at face value the implication that the country is at war within itself. That he, or she, or they, are the good guys and those who question or dissent from the rulership are the bad guys. This way, in future elections, only one outcome will be accepted. If the undesired outcome comes to pass, it will be instantly nullified because the political opposition is antagonist to the Sacred Nation.
The only question remaining is: will this war be waged with purely psychological tactics? Or will the war descend into physical violence?
Well, we don’t want to spoil the ending for you. You’ll just have to wait and see.
In Writhing Anticipation,
Your Overlords
Hey! In case you missed the big announcement…
I am re-launching my productivity group, Extremists Being Awesome. It’s a super fun and rewarding guild of anarchists and other extremists, where we focus on deep creative work and inner growth, getting massive amounts of shit done each week with a little time left over for social breaks. For the month of September we are accepting new members and you can drop in to any productivity session during the month for free to see how you like it. Check out the details.
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“All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.” -Orwell
I wonder which fascist's end this one will get? Il Duce, or Die Fuhrer?