Not only did Trump reprise the world’s nuclear anxiety after a post-Soviet respite—officially withdrawing, in February 2019, from the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty—but it now coexists with the collective imagination of ecological ruin. The glaciers of Greenland are hemorrhaging almost two million gallons of fresh water into the sea every second. In 2015, the northern white rhino was declared technically extinct. Across the globe, coral reefs are bleaching and dying. In the early days of Japan’s Fukushima disaster, approximately 520 tons of radioactive water spilled into the sea and contaminated the entire Pacific Ocean. What is being done? Who is taking action? In 2016, honeybees were added to the endangered species list; as I write this, it’s still legal for the agricultural industry to use pesticides that lead to colony collapse disorder.
Bees, in fact, are dying globally at an alarming rate—so much so that it’s become a meme, as Lauren Duca writes for The New Inquiry. Most of these memes show an individual removed, emotionally, from his or her circumstances—at the club or a dinner with friends, at house parties, at sporting events. The turning inward one could read as a form of distraction: the subject was having a good time until they remembered that bees were dying. But so too could one read the subject’s face as a sudden suspension from distraction—an instantaneous confrontation with reality. In this sense, the meme becomes a meta-meme, a reference to the ways we distract ourselves to cope with the cascade of news pushed to our phones every day: inexplicable worldwide violence; absurd pronouncements by cartoonish politicians; legislation that unabashedly favors the wealthy; a new extinction; another landmark or beach or island lost; and someday, not far off, entire cities abandoned. As Duca observes of the bees: “There is nothing we can do about it. Or maybe there is something we can do about it? But we won’t. The hopelessness attached to either possibility is great for comedy.” The loudness of our laughter is a wish to drown out all that other awful noise; we entertain ourselves with co-opted terror because there is only so much real terror a person can process before they adapt, before it becomes something to use rather than something to feel. Each day, something immeasurably terrible happens; each day, I think of Christa Wolf’s note in her diary, in 1981:
On the sixth of August, the anniversary of the day the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, the American President made the decision to build the neutron bomb; the Secretary of Defense revealed that the first warheads have been mounted and could be in Western Europe in a few hours in case they were needed there. This could be our death sentence, I thought; but what did I really feel? Helplessness. I put breakfast on the table in the yard. Talked with the others. Laughed.
As with the imposition of the nuclear imagination in the latter half of the twentieth century, everything Trump is doing—even out of office—seems calibrated toward reminding the entire world, at every opportunity, of its tenuous future. If a future you could call it. What we’re seeing as Trump divides this nation, as he incites more violence, is exactly what we expected to see from the moment he announced his candidacy.
And we are meant to see it. Trump’s supporters assaulting women and minorities in the streets on the morning of 11/9: we’re meant to see it. We’re meant to notice that every person Trump assigns to oversee a branch of the federal government is the ideal person to subvert and dissolve that department. We’re meant to understand the consequences of a renewed nuclear arms race. We’re meant to panic at his every denial of reality, and the mainstream media’s shoulder-shrugging at every new lie or unsupported claim. We’re meant, as an easily preventable pandemic ravages the nation, to watch helplessly alongside a hamstrung CDC as hundreds of thousands of Americans die. During the election, it seemed impossible that Trump could win—not only for his ignorance of politics, economics, and foreign policy, but for his sheer, unfiltered hatred of women, Black and Indigenous Americans, people of color, persons with disabilities, immigrants, journalists, and anyone who’s ever read a book. This story was supposed to be different. Hillary Clinton, under whose governance we would be “stronger together,” was supposed to triumph over hatred, stupidity, violence. Yes, I fell for this, and if you’re reading this you probably did too. From the point of view of Trump and his supporters, her loss was meant to feel hopeless. You and I were supposed to feel like America was no longer for us.
All of this is intentional because Donald Trump is a terrorist. His election to the U.S. presidency is a domestic terrorist attack planned and coordinated by white supremacists. However, he could not have done this without the psychological warfare corporations have waged for decades, hammering into the American consciousness that money is what matters, that the rich will always win, despite all the propaganda to the contrary—our films and TV shows and stories where the rich get their comeuppance. Trump is proof, despite what is right and good in the world, that money and cruelty and stupidity can win. What is this if not terror?
Of course, my personal terror is borne of my privilege as a white man living in a systemically racist society. And it’s here, in this contradiction—in this “sudden” dawn of terror that was no shock to those who’ve lived their entire lives in “Trump’s America”—that our nation faces its greatest opportunity, that we can learn what we failed to learn after 9/11.
In Trump’s embodiment of everything that is wrong with America—and everything that has been wrong since its founding—we are forced to see the work that needs to be done. We are forced to reckon with our nation’s legacy of preying upon all other nations; with its systemic and racist inequality, its poverty, its abominable education system, its vanity, and its poor health; and most of all, with its fatal equating of individual wealth, glamour, and celebrity to moral superiority, to greatness. There can be no more pretending that the United States is exceptional or innocent. We’re out of wool to pull over our eyes.
Unless of course you’re one of Trump’s loyalists. For these people, pretending is all there is. Fascism’s deepest appeal is a schism from reality. It not only bristles against the contradictions of a complex society but actively erases them, installing fictions in their place. In Totalitarianism, Arendt describes the masses’ “longing for fiction,” which stems from “those capacities of the human mind whose structural consistency is superior to mere occurrence.” As a society begins to neglect more and more of its individuals, fascism’s simplicity—its one-dimensional narrative—gains traction: “The masses’ escape from reality is a verdict against the world in which they are forced to live and in which they cannot exist, since coincidence has become its supreme master and human beings need the constant transformation of chaotic and accidental conditions into a man-made pattern of relative consistency.” As mentioned above—and in various vocabularies—shock and atrocity are followed by reductive simplicity, by storybook narratives. When the terrorist attack is domestic—when those terrorized live alongside those who seek to inspire terror—our acceptance of these narratives isn’t so immediate, nor so conformist.
This is a complexity that must be embraced, not reduced. To dispose of Trump and call our work done would be to make a monster of him, to place everything awful about America on his hunched shoulders and cast him out; and we would be reborn, we would be innocent again, and our story would start over with new characters, new atrocities, new monsters. But getting rid of Trump still leaves us with the country that not only elected him but created him. Instead, what needs to be resisted is the production and consumption of terror in exchange for profit, not to mention the usage of martyrs and monsters as repositories for the extreme states of humanity, for our ecstasy and our terror. Giving into a role assigned to you from without—be it “resistance fighter,” “real American,” or simply an indistinct part of a terrified populace—only entrenches these narratives. We trap ourselves neatly in a story that makes someone else rich, often destroying the lives of others—if not ourselves—in the process.
The stakes of the United States of America as it exists are easy to identify. Human beings are dy
ing, at home and abroad, so someone can scare us for money. Without intervention, this will continue until everyone, everywhere, is dead. This is not hyperbole.
If modern warfare, in Virilio’s words, provides us with a situation where “the image (photographic or cinematic) is the most concentrated, but also the most stable, form of information,” images themselves, deployed for sensation, become weaponized. Images of helpless women become images of terror. Images of Black victims without convicted murderers are terror. Images of the wealthy and their armored, imperious glamour while the poor die of treatable diseases are terror. The president laughing about sexual assault is terror. Images of his promise to dissolve every federal protection we have: terror. Images of unchallenged ecological disaster, of floods, fires, drought—all terror. Images of my generation as lazy, entitled, doomed, all while we work harder than our parents only to fall further behind every day—I don’t doubt for a second that these are terror. Juxtaposed with images of the past—housing that was once affordable, tuition you could pay with a part-time job, and a planet that wasn’t yet, as we are every day now told, irrevocably damaged—this is terror at its most elemental: It’s inconvenient that you exist, these images say, and it would be preferable if you never had.
It’s no wonder Americans are so afraid, and that so many seek to surrender their will to dictatorial control. Only a child is afraid of everything. Only a child demands protection from every absurd, imagined fear. Only a child’s stories lack complexity. By choosing to regress into innocence, to hide from its own crimes, that is exactly what this country makes of itself: a child whose tantrums kill by the thousands, by the millions; whose wailing in the dark is drowning countries on the other side of the earth, and whose reckless pushing of buttons could announce the end of humanity itself.
These stories must end. This country must switch off its cartoon politics and embrace complexity, heterogeneity, even contradictions. We must abandon the childish belief that the individual as an isolated being is somehow virtuous. We must take care of our own and others in every way. We must resist our fictions and accept ourselves as we are: not only broken and vulnerable, but still powerful, still capable—and, above all, ready to grieve what we’ve lost as we create something new.
How does someone propose to speak the truth about Fascism, to which he is opposed, if he does not propose to speak out against capitalism, which produces it?
—BERTOLT BRECHT, 1935
In the United States, the cultural connotations of fascism and totalitarianism are derived from this country’s historic (and most dramatic, most spectacular) political adversaries: Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. Sometimes, one may picture this or that Latin American junta from the seventies or eighties, but rarely with the awareness of who installed and empowered those dictators. In all cases, fascism and totalitarianism are supposed to sound exotically horrifying. Often, they serve as images in and of themselves.
These other regimes are easy for Americans to grasp—not to mention fear. Our entertainment is full of them; along with the atom bomb, the totalitarian threat sparks more film plots and thriller novels throughout the twentieth century than any other historic scenario, if not all others combined. Unsurprisingly, they’ve found a new audience in the twenty-first century, either via television adaptations or simply new novels and films. As with most forms of entertainment, particularly those branded or categorized as art forms, there is a shadow-understanding that they will “instruct” or “prepare,” or at the very least familiarize, viewers and readers and listeners with what a totalitarian politics in power looks like. Nearly all of them have left us just as ignorant as before. This is, again, a matter of images and their situated contexts, their space and their time—as well as who creates and distributes those images for our consumption.
One word, then, to describe Guillermo Saccomanno’s novel 77—translated into English by Andrea G. Labinger in 2019—is “timely.” We could learn something, as American readers, from Saccomanno’s claustrophobic rendering of Jorge Rafael Videla’s Argentina. In that country’s past, where CIA-funded terror suppressed leftist politics with nine years of torture, murder, kidnappings, rape, surveillance, and intimidation, we could recognize a warning of what nationalism can become in our own country, where socialism has, for a hundred years, been a cipher for all things treason.
I only say “could” because we’ve had hundreds, if not thousands, of other opportunities—some artistically better, most of them worse—to learn these same lessons, to edify as we entertain ourselves. The other word I could use, with respect to 77’s effect on an American reading public, is “irrelevant.” Opportunities like these require a will to learn, and given the fact that few in this nation seemed to care about Videla’s junta when it existed—nor the tens of thousands killed and hundreds of thousands extrajudicially imprisoned—is a lesson in comfort and complicity. The only thing that’s timely about a novel like 77 is how uncomfortable Americans have become on their own soil, how suddenly sensitive to the idea of fascism’s encroachment upon reality, even if it is, as I’ve said, more entertaining in our day-to-day lives than it ever was in the movies.
Nonetheless, I do think the novel is worth a close look. It takes its title from that year, following Videla’s military coup in 1976. Argentina is entrenched in terror. Police kidnap people in broad daylight; rarely are they seen again. No one interferes: “We passengers avoided making eye contact. No one had seen anything. Maybe I hadn’t, either.” Into this, Saccomanno plunges Gómez, a middle-aged high school professor of English literature who cruises the alleyways of Buenos Aires for public sex with younger men. “As many people as necessary must die in Argentina so that the country will again be secure,” Videla said in 1975—the real Videla. As with any totalitarian system, this “as necessary” never stops moving. “The military issued an announcement,” Gómez remembers, telling his story to an unspecified narrator thirty years after it happened: “First we will eliminate the subversives, then their accomplices, then their sympathizers, and finally all those who are indifferent or lukewarm.”
In this one hears an echo of Arendt’s warning that “Totalitarianism strives not toward despotic rule over men, but toward a system in which men are superfluous.”
“Terror makes a person more cunning,” Gómez says. “Not more intelligent, more cunning. Like a fox that evades the hunting party. But that survival skill, when it’s honed, becomes madness.” Like any humanist, he believes in literature—in poetry and in art. Gómez finds moments to laugh and to flirt. He enjoys reading and hot tea and getting fucked in the ass by strangers. He is living in a system that, ideologically, says he cannot exist; and like most Argentines he lives in it quietly: “If a military raid shook the night with explosions, gunshots, shrieks, and babies’ screams, the neighborhood soothed its conscience by thinking there must have been a reason.” He is the ideal subject of totalitarian rule: that is, neutral.
His old friends and new friends demand his sympathetic ear: they’ve turned to poetry, they tell him; they’ve turned to the occult; they cut photographs of Videla from the newspapers and pierce his eyes and slip them into the locked bedrooms of their disappeared children. No one is a safe confidant because everyone is a liability. Anyone can be tortured, even Gómez himself, despite harboring, in his apartment, two people he comes to love very much: “To escape,” he admits, “I would name anyone.”
A necessity of tyranny is this isolation, this atomization of individuals into solitaries unable to love or trust one another. Tyranny cannot exist, as Arendt writes, “without destroying the public realm of life, that is, without destroying, by isolating men, their political capacities.” A step beyond tyranny, totalitarian rule, Arendt says, “destroys private life as well [as public]. It bases itself on loneliness, on the experience of not belonging to the world at all.” In loneliness, “man loses trust in himself as the partner of his thoughts and that elementary confidence in the world which is necessary to make experiences at all.
”
Another necessity of tyranny is submission. If you don’t fall on your knees, psychologically, and feverishly welcome Videla’s regime, you might fall on your literal knees and choke, as Gómez often does, on a corrupt cop’s dick while he pulls your hair. You might surrender your will to the spirits who will help locate your missing child. You might travel deep into the provinces to visit a psychic. You might hand over your life to an armed resistance with dogmas of its own. You might abandon thought and speak in metaphors that flatten other human beings, or you might, like Gómez, abdicate to literature itself, which “in its pretension, confused history with the activity of bodies and the conclusions that could be drawn from their behavior.” Societies most vulnerable to fascist or totalitarian rule are already in some way damaged, peopled by the exhausted, the worn out, the lonely and afraid—by those who wish to hand their life to someone or something else, whoever or whatever promises to say, I’ll fix this. You might, in twenty-first century America, find refuge in memes or in hats with slogans. You might turn to the angriest pundit and call them the voice of reason.
Above all, tyranny requires terror: “Terror took over,” Gómez tells his interlocutor, “first in small matters, until it invaded even basic language functions, the language of thought, the language of speech, written language, body language, each and every gesture.” Terror isolates. It is the totalitarian separator, its highest form of governance to which one either submits or resists—either way under threat of total erasure. As American readers coming to a novel like 77—or Kertész’s Fatelessness or Sebald’s Austerlitz or Serge’s Unforgiving Years or Némirovsky’s Suite Française or Neruda’s poetry or García Márquez’s banana plantation massacre—shouldn’t we already know that? Have we learned nothing of terror after centuries on this continent, stenciling our fears onto others, isolating ourselves, submitting to harmful and stupid ideologies? Have we not created a cheerful, expensive—even fun—loneliness like no other in history, and has it not damaged us? It should be no surprise at all that we’ve opted, at last, to surrender to a dictator.
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