…I edge my bicycle to cross the road, but I get distracted by an image on a shining pill box mounted on the strip in the middle of the road. It is a perspex domino, upon which advertisements are plastered to wash the brains of the drivers whizzing northbound and south. The advertisement features a row of soldiers in fatigues and combat helmets, one soldier with a particularly blonde face in the middle. These camouflaged corpses-to-be hold rifles in their hands and stare at the camera, at me, through me, and chant in unison the blunt text emblazoned across the middle: ‘How far would you go to defend …’ Wait for it. Wait for it …
‘Democracy?’
If this were 1940, it could just as well have said ‘das Vaterland’, only now the master signifiers have been decanted and switched. The fathers are sterile but still they hold the strings. Their erect metaphors have transmogrified into an incandescently vapid simulacrum—’democracy—in whose name dark and inexorable futures await….
Read the full article here: https://arena.org.au/guns-and-pixels-in-deutschland-2025/