The Post-Partisan Emporium

  Fake Lit and the Curation of History We may need to pay closer attention to the shelves in our bookshops. The construction of the pseudo-reality is entering its secondary phase: the curation of historical amnesia and myopia. John Waters The Darker Side of Bad Books There is an aspect of propaganda to which  we may be paying insufficient attention: the curation of history. Through the work of Mattias Desmet and others, we are pretty much on top of the quotidian drip of news-management, indoctrination, misdirection, disinformation and normalisation disguised as warnings about malinformation or ‘conspiracy theory’, and other delightful skills of the contemporary nudge-monger. But we forget that what is happening is intended to be for keeps. It is not, in other words, as if, when the would-be tyrants have achieved their objectives, they will call an end to the lying and brainwashing programmes, and then revert to something resembling what we remember as the way things used to be. We shou

  Deadly Delusions: When the Plans Work All Too Well ALAN SABROSKY Prelude The first week of June, I watched all thirteen episodes of a mini-series called  Amerika  (1987)  I had briefly seen in part thirty-odd years before. Yes, I know it is a Hollywood production. Yes, I know it is fiction, just as I know that (e.g.)  1984  is fiction. Yes, I know many of the details re wrong for our time, most notably that the USSR is gone. Nonetheless, it shook me profoundly, and I could not understand why. Being a methodological Germanic scholar (perhaps a triple tautology?), I set out to understand why. I watched all thirteen episodes again, then a half-hour summary of the series in a program by the director and the key actors called “Storm Over Amerika,” and finally stayed up all night thinking about what I had seen and heard. Then I knew, in almost a secular epiphany. We had  already  been defeated and occupied, left and right alike (no nit-picking on terminology, please, I have no time for tha