A sharp, passionate, and frequently scathing plea.
~ NPR
Hi friends. As of today, Image Control is available in paperback. It’s a gorgeous and very portable edition that, I think, serves the book well. If you have a chance, take a look at it here on Bookshop.org.
When I first began writing Image Control, I was incredibly frustrated that the platforms most of us use or experience on a daily basis seemed not only to reinforce our alienation from one another, but to actually subvert our ethics and politics, no matter how resolute. Just this last weekend, Ezra Klein published this op-ed in the New York Times stating that “Television turned everything into entertainment and social media taught us to think with the crowd,” and that “All this happens beneath the level of content.” I wrote the book I did because it concerned me, deeply, that our “public square” was not arbitrarily becoming but designed to be a place where even the most tender abolitionist can be turned into a vicious cop. These platforms are not only a place for fascists to spread their influence. These platforms, in their very architecture, are fascist.
Instead of a letter, I’ve decided to share an excerpt from the book that touches on a few of its key themes. Hope you enjoy! And please don’t hesitate to share. Thank you all so much.
A common lament is this country’s obsession with “identity politics” – so phrased to make it seem as if the identities of marginalized persons are what’s corroding our political discourse. For me, though, identity isn’t about how I choose to approach politics; it’s about how politics has approached me – or confined me, even attacked me. My sexuality isn’t something I choose to think about every day; it is an identity assigned to me by an ignorance that threatens my life. This is an unsolicited politics. In return, it is ethical to demand that white people think of their own whiteness, that men see their masculinity as imposed from without. What we must demand – not only of editors but anyone who holds institutional or visible power – is to be aware of this ethics. The stories you choose, the words you leave on the page, and the images you frame are not games; and the devil already has enough advocates. These choices – about magazine covers, about representation, about the images we come into contact with every moment of every day – are decisions that contribute to how livable my life in this country can be, not to mention the lives of millions I’ve never met. These are decisions that get people killed.
All of this is propaganda that can no longer be invisible. It’s telling that totalitarianism, in America, is “unnatural.” That fascism is unnatural. These are regimes, it is imagined, that restrict or deny freedom – to speak, to gather, to pray, even to think. We ground stories in these regimes because they fascinate us; we want to understand how human beings would allow such total control, not only over their lives but their imaginations. We want to imagine the circumstances under which people like me or like you, who might otherwise enjoy freedom, would accept such a narrow vision not only of what comprises a life, but of what is possible in a life.
It can’t be said enough: Americans have no right to not understand those who allow themselves to be dominated by totalitarian rule; this nation – where freedom is merely a brand, an ideological export – is the most submissive, beaten, and terrified country on earth. This is a terror that’s mounted for years, as Masha Gessen outlined in their essay, “The Reichstag Fire Next Time.” From Woodrow Wilson’s Sedition Act of 1918 – which criminalized “speech perceived as critical of or detrimental to the American war effort” – to Roosevelt’s internment of Japanese Americans to McCarthyism to the “secrecy, deceit, and paranoia of the Vietnam War years, which culminated in a president who had his opponents prosecuted and wire-tapped,” the so-called “state of exception” of executive emergency powers throughout the twentieth century “came close to being the rule.” What has changed since the September 11th terrorist attacks, which Gessen compares to the 1933 Reichstag Fire in Berlin, is that “the enemy is not a nation or an army but a tactic, one that has existed for millennia. This war cannot be won, because a tactic cannot be eradicated. A war that cannot be won cannot end, and so it has not. Nor have the liberties surrendered by Americans in response to 9/11 been restored.”
Any visit to an airport will illustrate just how thoroughly this nation is governed by fear – and not only from without but from within. As Arendt observes, “A fundamental difference between modern dictatorships and all other tyrannies of the past is that terror is no longer used as a means to exterminate and frighten opponents, but as an instrument to rule masses of people who are perfectly obedient.” Primarily, Arendt is analyzing the rise and fall of the Reich and Stalin’s rule in Soviet Russia, but reading her thoughts today offers an eerie, sickening, unsettling recognition: Americans have become the exhausted Germans, desperate for an easy way out of economic frustration; we have become the cowed Russians, too concerned with making it from here to there to protest our unconstitutional mistreatment. Remembering the immediate response to 9/11, Gessen notes that, “Fear has a way of catapulting citizens into the inside of a lie… Within hours of the September 11 attacks, 150 members of Congress gathered on the Capitol steps and sang ‘God Bless America.’ Some of them held hands. The strongest country on the planet was making a spectacle of fear and resolve.” We have become the terrified Americans, so convinced by the sensibilities of entertainment – the terror and ecstasy of seeing a disaster we’d never seen before – that we behave as if something almost statistically impossible could happen to us at any moment, and therefore we must safeguard ourselves against it at all times, by any means. We became, as Gessen writes, mobilized:
A key characteristic of the most frightening regimes of the past hundred years is mobilization. This is what distinguishes the merely authoritarian regimes from the totalitarian ones. Authoritarians prefer their subjects passive, tending to their private lives while the authoritarian and his cronies amass wealth and power. The totalitarian wants people out in the square; he craves their adulation and devotion, their willingness to fight and die for him… A nation can be mobilized only if it knows its enemy and believes in its own peril.
This echoes Arendt’s own observation of “the perpetual-motion mania of totalitarian movements which can remain in power only so long as they keep moving and set everything around them in motion… If there is such a thing as a totalitarian personality or mentality, this extraordinary adaptability and absence of continuity are no doubt its outstanding characteristics.”
Uncoincidentally, the fundamental, irreducible quality of capitalism – particularly America’s brand of imperial capitalism – is motion: an aggressive, constant pursuit of novelty, innovation, and profit margins. Yet in the United States, capitalism is as natural as fascism is unnatural. Yet it is capitalism itself, as Russell indicates in his History, that has laid the groundwork for the fascist expression of totalitarianism:
Though many still sincerely believe in human equality and theoretical democracy, the imagination of modern people is deeply affected by the pattern of social organization suggested by the organization of industry in the nineteenth century, which is essentially undemocratic. On the one hand there are the captains of industry, and on the other the mass of workers. This disruption of democracy from within is not yet acknowledged by ordinary citizens in democratic countries, but it has been a preoccupation of most philosophers from Hegel onwards, and the sharp opposition which they discovered between the interests of the many and those of the few has found practical expression in Fascism.
This “imagination of modern people” – today, seventy years more modern than what Russell described – is visible even in the language we use in our day to day lives. Americans measure productivity not only at work but at home – whether we’ve done enough dishes or laundry, sent enough e-mails, texted enough friends, made enough plans. We talk about time management in our personal lives. We apologize for claiming sick time, for taking vacations. Instead of hobbies, we have side hustles, second incomes, gigs. During the Covid-19 pandemic, article after article circulated advising us on how we could maximize our time in isolation. In place of the thought police Orwell imagined, Americans have created thought managers.
When she covered Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Israel in 1961, Arendt was repulsed by this war criminal’s tendency toward total banality:
Officialese became his language because he was genuinely incapable of uttering a single sentence that was not a cliché… The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else. No communication was possible with him, not because he lied but because he was surrounded by the most reliable of all safeguards against the words and the presence of others, and hence against reality as such.
Eichmann’s envelopment in the vocabulary of his ideology, his subservience to it even at the level of language, illustrates the totalness of totalitarianism, that it is indeed within the power of a regime to limit what constitutes a life, as well as limit what one imagines is possible. Just suggest to a random American that we reduce the military, disarm or disband the police, pay people to stay home during a pandemic, and institute nationalized healthcare and free education to join the ranks of nearly all other western nations. You will hear, most likely, how this is “not possible.” Of course, this shouldn’t be a surprise in a society where, to return to Arendt’s words, there is “a way and philosophy of life so insistently and exclusively centered on the individual’s success or failure in ruthless competition that a citizen’s duties and responsibilities could only be felt to be a needless drain on his limited time and energy.” We are too busy being productive, too involved in managing our time, to participate as citizens in our own democracy.
Rooted in capitalism – an ideology predicated on expansion, acquisition, and unlimited growth – and branching out imperially into the entire world; establishing murderous regimes overseas in exchange for profit and national security; depriving other nations of their autonomy, wealth, and resources; branding itself as synonymous with freedom and liberty in the common imagination and warping our day-to-day language in the process; and of course having established itself upon two concurrent genocides, the United States of America’s project of imperial capitalism is the most successful, longest lasting, most deeply entrenched, and – given the catastrophic threat of climate change – the deadliest of all totalitarian movements in world history; and it is not only still moving, but still accelerating.
Thanks again for reading. If you get a chance, stop by your local bookstore and pick up a copy – either for yourself or a friend. As with any book, having a great deal of support right out of the gate is extremely helpful for the author, so whatever you can do would mean the world to me. Either way, thank you so much – for reading, for sharing, for just being.
I’ll have some fun news to share soon. <3