Posts Tagged ‘spying’

THE EYES HAVE IT

Friday, January 17th, 2014

Eyes were everywhere.

A German awoke trembling from this frightening dream during the 12-year reign of Adolf Hitler and rule of the Third Reich in Nazi Europe. Journalist Charlotte Beradt in her book The Third Reich of Dreams recounts the nightmares plaguing Germans, whether in denial or defiance of the pervasiveness of totalitarianism.

One Amazon.com reviewer wrote: “The book traces the ways in which the rising tide of Fascism infected the unconscious lives of ordinary Germans,skewing their dreams towards increasingly brutal and nightmarish reflections of the pathology of Nazism.”

Some of the 300 dreams Beradt collected discerned the terrible path the nation was taking but the dreamer felt helpless to change events. One housewife dreamt she ripped a swastika off a flag each night, but the swastika appeared on the flag again in the morning. Another German realized he was “inch by inch” raising his arm in the Nazi salute.

The Eyes collage is PDJ’s rendition of an imagined contemporary American’s dream as the U.S. government and U.S. corporations –- independently and together – spy on citizens under the auspices of national security and commerce. Concurrently, tactics copied from Hitler’s Fascist Germany –- fear, omnipresent surveillance, aggression against sovereign nations – and the parlance of fascism – homeland, patriot –- consume U.S. politics, policies, and culture.

(See more coverage of the rising tide of fascism under Political Diary on this website.)