The Dangers of Hope
20th Century Propaganda and the Rise
of American Theocracy

On more or less untarnished wings of victory, Americans glided through the 20th century like so many avenging angels, setting a number of major wrongs right: the noxious Germans not once but twice, the barbaric Japanese, and finally those notorious commie-pinko bastards, the Russians. The only villain left standing at the end was those notorious commie-pinko bastards, the Chinese. But they, knowing a good thing greed-wise when they saw it, wound up embracing free-market Late Capitalism, with the Shanghai Bund becoming a new Wall Street in all but name.

Throughout those campaigns, which—face it—given the way of the world had to be waged and which were waged—lest we forget—at a very high price in blood, a seed of domestic evil was planted at home which few noticed and fewer still worried about what would happen if—when!—that seed germinated.

The process—call it SHS ("self-inflicted horticultural suicide")—worked like this:

However enormous and loathsome the wrong thinking was that led to the Nazis, the Japanese Empire, the U.S.S.R., and Communist China, the huge and powerful driving emotion behind them all was simple: hope.

An advanced, intelligent society in Germany embraced Hitler by buying into the hope he offered while at the same time rather too easily overlooking the larger reality of the racist, militarist campaign he had in mind, and had in fact spelled out very clearly in Mein Kampf. Life in Germany in the 1930s, for everybody except Jews, homosexuals, and gypsies, got better and better. It was a time of optimism. And hope. Yes, the German people were duped. And yes, they made a terrible mistake. But hope is just that powerful. Similarly in Japan.

And Russia, embracing the flawed but brilliant insights and theories of Marx, set out to construct a society of genuine equality. The "Internationale" is, after all, a hymn of and to hope: a better, fairer world is ours for the making. Powerful stuff. At the beginning few saw the dangers of concentrated power and unbridled greed that would eventually poison and destroy the people's state. In the 1920s few could imagine the horrors of repression and purges to come. It was a time of great hope in Russia.

So too in China in the 1950s. After decades, centuries, of oppression and exploitation, the Chinese people embraced a vision of hope and worked hard and happily to realize a state of almost unimaginable beauty.

A Russian child in the 1920s, a German child in the 1930s, a Chinese child in the 1950s all grew up in an atmosphere of welcome work and struggle toward a more equitable world which, their leaders all assured them most convincingly was attainable. Hope.

Of course, all three societies had their own internal, unnoticed seeds of self-destruction. That’s not my point here.

My point is the external, simplistic distortion of the reality inside those three societies that America fell victim to.

As the century played out, each of those societies in turn came to symbolize and embody evil itself. First the Germans and the Japanese, then the Russians, then the Chinese. American propaganda both before and after the wars simplistically painted each enemy as evil.

To an American, especially to an American child, in the 1940s, it was inconceivable that there had ever been anything good about Germany. When Hollywood wanted a villain, they trotted out a Nazi.

From the 1950s onward, the Bad Russians became a whole American industry, with novelists building careers on Good Spy vs. Bad Spy, politicians and publishers building small or great empires on Good American Democracy vs. Bad Russian/Chinese Communism. Not to mention the politicians...

So clearly and thoroughly evil were the Bad Guys that it was inconceivable that they had ever had any goodness in them. Hope? You gotta be kidding.

So it went.

By century’s end, it was all over but the shouting. And the globalization of unbridled profit-making.

After a hundred years of fighting the bad guys, Americans had become—we thought—really good at spotting and identifying them. Sadly, though, it was yet another case of easily find the mote in the other fellow’s eye and failing to see the beam in our own.

Evil, we came to believe, was something Out There. Hope was something In Here, uniquely American. And indeed in many ways hope was uniquely American. For all its flaws, America, in such an imperfect world continued for a long time to be truly the land of opportunity.

But our myopia, our distorted vision, our Good Us vs. Bad Them view of things, left us ill-prepared for what to do if the Bad Guys sprouted at home (SHS!).

A century of propaganda had convinced Americans that bad societies are perfectly bad. No gray area in Russia or Germany or China of the 20th century.

Thus, when a totalitarian theocracy began to sprout at home, we simply couldn’t see it. Shouts of alarm went up, but the shouters were out-shouted and dismissed as, well, unpatriotic, un-American.

In the land of hope and opportunity, a Christian dictatorship? Impossible. No way. Because we knew that such bad governments looked like. Where were the gulags and the places of torture (well, they were out of sight offshore, weren’t they)? Where was the rubber-stamp parliament (Congress continued to meet but was so docile that not once did the leader have to veto a bill)? Where was the obedient court-system (it too continue to convene but ruffled none of our leaders’ well-groomed hair)? Where was the exploitation of the weak to benefit the wealthy (income-inequality became greater and greater but it was O.K. because everybody had a chance to get rich if they’d just work hard enough in the free markets)?

And so on.

Having learned from a hundred years of one-sided propaganda that bad societies are wholly bad, we were incapable of believing that 21st-century America, which still had much goodness in it, could be fertile soil for a totalitarian theocracy in all but name.

Or that the massive, real hope of old, pluralistic America was in danger of becoming a false hope of new monolithic America.