Movie at the Ellipse: A Study in Fascist Propaganda
https://www.justsecurity.org/74504/movie-at-the-ellipse-a-study-in-fascist-propaganda/by Jason Stanley
February 4, 2021
Excerpt:
. . . This history, both European and American, illuminates the dangers we face today, laid bare in the video. In it, Trump is repeatedly represented as the nation’s father figure. It is laced through with images of masculinity, and mournful loss at the hands of traitors, clearly justifying a violent restoration of recent glory.
The video begins with Trump’s eyes in the shadow, and its second frame focuses the audience on the Capitol building – America’s Reichstag, where the decisions being denounced by the rally’s organizers were being made that day. The third frame of the video is the Hollywood sign in Los Angeles. This image immediately directs the attention of an audience attuned to an American fascist ideology to the supposedly elite class of Jews who, according to this ideology, control Hollywood. The appearance of the Hollywood sign makes no other sense in the context of a short video about an election. The next two images, of the UN General Assembly and the EU Parliament floor, connect supposed Jewish control of Hollywood to the goal of world government. As we have seen, according to Nazi ideology, Jews seek to use their control of the press and the entertainment industry to destroy individual nations. The beginning of the video focuses our attention on this supposedly “globalist,” but really Jewish, threat.
The next clip lingers on Joe Biden, with a vacant stare in his eyes and the video footage slowed, while Trump’s inauguration speech plays, “For too long, a small group in our nation’s capital has reaped the rewards of government, while the people have born the cost.” It is clear from the image of Biden that he is not making the decisions. The video shifts to an image of Senator Charles Schumer, reminding the viewer of prominent Jewish leaders of the Democratic party. Schumer is wearing a Kente cloth, an image evocative of Ku Klux Klan ideology — that Jews support Black liberation movements as a way to undermine white rule and destroy the nation. The next frame shows the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, flanked by two Jewish Congressman, Representatives Nadler and Schiff. Pelosi, too, is controlled by Jews.
Who, then, are this “small group in our nation’s capital”? The video suggests it is a group that controls Hollywood and the Democratic Party, and seeks to use Black liberation movements to undermine the nation, and bring about world government. In Nazi ideology, as well as its US counterpart, this group is the Jews. And what are the costs? As the inauguration speech continues, “The establishment protected itself, but not the citizens of this our country;” gunshots are fired and we are shown images of these citizens betrayed by a duplicitous establishment – mournful pictures of coffins of veterans, homeless encampments, and a series of slides varying between nostalgic images of white American families over dinner with rural destitution – a worn down home flying a large American flag with an old pickup truck in front. At the end of these grim scenes of the results of elite betrayal, Trump declares, “This all ends right here, right now.”
. . . more:
https://www.justsecurity.org/74504/movie-at-the-ellipse-a-study-in-fascist-propaganda/
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Last edited Sun Feb 7, 2021, 12:41 PM - Edit history (1)
the very bad word "fascism" and finding out that it was a form of archconservative extremism. Their propaganda was that it was LW and liberal, turning what should be increasing fear of what was happening on the right against the left. However, liberals are the anti-fascists, liberalism completely incompatible with fascism, and searching library collections also only turned up books on archconservative fascism. So in 2008 a book was published to fix this called, guess what?
Liberal Fasicsm: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning
Pure garbage, of course, and literally the only one googling would turn up for years. But it was enough. No one actually had to get the book or read beyond that title to confirm that evil fascism was liberal.
Today, its insidious function having been augmented by lies through every other medium, all RW useful idiots, ditto heads, and fascists in the making know they have to protect America from the liberal fascists.
Unfortunately, much the same for counterparts on the illiberal/typically socialist left -- who also see their biggest enemy as the Democratic Party that constantly undermines their beliefs and attempts at revolution by fostering general wellbeing. They want to believe as much as the RW's fascists-in-the-making do.
Someone right here on DU not so long ago disturbingly argued that fascism was an outgrowth of capitalism, that archconservative fascism and corporations were wholly interdependent in fascist states. This reality-free* linking is illiberal-left/socialist propaganda, and a mirror image of the right's linking to Democratic liberalism, and of course socialism. 
Exasperating, yes, but this overlap of hostile, irrational beliefs shared by both the right and the far left is a real potential threat to the survival of our liberal democracy.
(*In reality, fascistic governments, which by their very identity insist on total control as soon as they can establish it, are inimical to continuation of corporate power. As it takes over, fascistic leadership becomes a literally existential threat to corporate leaders and power centers of corporate wealth not yet in the grasp of the ruling strongman/cabal. )
