By ALEXANDRE ARAGÃO DE ALBUQUERQUE*
Everything suggests that Donald Trump's first moves – in this war to build a new American hegemonic order – will make use of the Machiavellian thesis at any cost.
1.
The power of images and symbols lies in their ability to convey ideas, values and emotions, and they are used very effectively to capture the attention of specific audiences.
Designed and planned to convey a message, images can trigger feelings due to their subliminal and emotional action capacity. Propaganda strategies are often used to build mass public opinion, through the power of persuasion and conviction that images and symbols exert in the formation of social identity.
Symbols and images reveal the meanings of each culture's experience, since people give new meaning to the reality they live in through symbols, applying different conceptions of the world and understanding that need to be constantly reinterpreted.
Images and symbols control the media that are of interest to ideological power and its maintenance. In the contemporary world, multimedia technology is widely used as a form of seduction and ideological domination. Not without intention, an image transmitted on the global network was that of the first platoon of authorities present at Donald Trump's presidential inauguration on January 20, composed of the owners of the four largest big tech companies in Western digital communication: Meta, Google, Amazon and X.
The German Nazi movement has historically followed a well-defined strategy of linking the swastika symbol – one of the symbols present in several civilizations, even considered a religious symbol – seeking to popularize it in the creation of consensus, through intensive repetitive propaganda, limiting and restricting the swastika to the pejorative meaning that alludes to Nazism. Brazilian Bolsonarism followed the same direction by wanting to link the yellow jersey of the Brazilian soccer team as a national neo-fascist symbol, as seen in several popular demonstrations throughout the Bolsonaro government and in the attack of January 8, 2023.
In his work Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler proclaimed that it is through propaganda that the collective's purposes are stimulated with the vehemence of publicized social communication incorporated into the entire corporate organization, which does not take into account truthfulness, but the ability to convince: “Propaganda must lash out at the soul of the crowd, leveraging fanaticism, aiming to develop hysterical violence, addressing itself not so much to the brain, but to the feelings of the human mass”, stated the German dictator.
2.
Keeping his base engaged is therefore one of Donald Trump's goals in these first days of government. At his inauguration ceremony on January 20, when he announced that he would change the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, the audience stood up and applauded him for a long time.
Another striking international image from these early days of Donald Trump's government is that of Latin American migrants being rounded up, handcuffed and handcuffed, and herded like cattle onto planes back to their countries of origin. This clearly demonstrates one aspect of the totalitarian ideology in which anything goes against the enemy.
Hannah Arendt explains in her book The Origins of Totalitarianism that one of the fundamental characteristics of a totalitarian government is the institution of procedures in which the degradation of human identity occurs. One of the foundations of totalitarian ideology is that everything is permitted against the enemy. Thus, the worst barbarities are tolerated. Individuals who have undergone some experience in these totalitarian regimes have experienced annihilation and the loss of their identity.
The actions of the totalitarian state are carried out to promote the greatest possible psychological and physical torment. The purpose of this ideology is to destroy the civil rights of the population, which, after all, sees itself as outside the law in its own country as stateless people and refugees. The destruction of human rights, the death of its legal person, is the primary condition for it to be completely dominated. And this applies not only to those special categories, but to any inhabitant.
In Barbarism and Civilization, Tzvetan Todorov points out the disease of authoritarian dogmatisms because they are convinced that they hold the exclusive right to truth and justice, imposing muteness and invisibility on others, denying them full humanity, and excluding them from civilized life. In order to achieve such domination, these fascists act by considering others as less than human.
3.
It is also important to remember, at a time when the nationalist expansionism of the US empire is returning with full force in the face of the failure of the international institutional order established after the war, that both Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini – the greatest expressions of 20th century European Nazi-fascism – were inspired by the genocide perpetrated by the US against the indigenous people of the North American continent. Therefore, this type of horror is not something that began with Donald Trump.
It is estimated that more than 25 million indigenous human beings, originating from that immense territory, speaking around two thousand different languages, were decimated by the Americans during the XNUMXth century, in a true ethnic cleansing.
For ethnologist Ward Churchill of the University of Colorado, it was characterized as a huge genocide, the longest ever recorded by humanity. American settlers used to invade indigenous villages and kidnap children and adolescents for slave labor. (Killing Native Americans California. Video).
Finally, by announcing a new indiscriminate stage of the war of economic sanctions, Trump revives the policy of Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924), 28th President of the United States, for whom sanctions were a powerful tool to suffocate a State, causing shortages of food and medicine, among other problems, for the civilian population of sanctioned countries, without having to resort to military spending or unnecessary deaths of American soldiers on the battlefield.
Machiavelli is a reference in political science as a keen observer of the dynamics of power. By arguing that human emotions are fickle, since loyalties built in political environments can be easily shaken by various difficulties and threats, the Florentine defends the thesis that the Prince should desire to be loved, but if he cannot be loved, it is preferable to be feared.
Everything suggests that Donald Trump's first moves – in this international war to build a new American hegemonic order – will make use of the Machiavellian thesis at any cost.
*Alexandre Aragão de Albuquerque Master in Public Policy and Society from the State University of Ceará (UECE).
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