Text by George Russell

It must be a sign of the times that pundits’ observations are gelling into clichés almost as fast as the events that they describe are unfolding. I am, like so many others, “shocked but not surprised.” Indeed, it’s hard to find effective new ways to phrase what happened at the Capitol on January 6th, hard even to state the facts without apparently skirting hyperbole. Every account, image, and recording I’ve seen since, though, has only gone to prove that there has hardly been any overstatement in the reliable press. And there is no shortage of accounts, images, and recordings. One of the hallmarks of the Capitol attack, and another sign of the times, was the sheer volume of documentation by its very perpetrators. These thousands of keepsake photos and videos will prove—have already proven—to be one of the most incomprehensible blunders of this entire Beerhall-Putsch cosplay, but also, in some ways, its entire point. Like Trump, bigoted far-right extremist groups in this country, as everywhere, derive power and influence from their performances of impunity.

In the horrific photo post-cards bearing images of lynchings, which circulated throughout the U.S. during the Jim Crow era (and I do not invoke these at all lightly or mean to compare them in their substance to the recent images from the Capitol), the message was not only an imminent threat of deadly violence but also a telegraphing of the unassailability of its white supremacist perpetrators. A photograph of a man kneeling on the makeshift gallows, erected on the Capitol mall by confederate flag bearing rioters, in a disgusting echo of (and necessarily a reference to) those not-so-distant-as-we’d-like-to-think images, speaks to this point. The man posing with the noose jokingly around his neck, no doubt mugging for the camera we see in front of him, is, by that very act, part of the greater plan to threaten violence. The gleeful documentation of the attack on the Capitol as a whole is likewise, as much as it is a broadcast of the explicit threat of violence (a given from the moment they arrived with weapons), an assertion of the expectation of impunity flowing from the radical white privilege that they were there to claim as theirs. To succeed, some have argued, the insurrection didn’t have to effect the change it purported to seek (preserving the Trump regime); documenting their impunity from their respective multiple felonies would be as great a blow to the rule of law as the very act of breaking it.

In their too-little-too-late back-pedaling, tech institutions set out along a fine line between being the adult in the room and Big Brother. Those applauding Twitter for their pulling of the plug on Trump, and Facebook’s contributions to identifying suspects with photos, should remember that this could prove to be a dangerous precedent when the shoe is back on the other foot. It was as self-serving as it was cowardly to wait until now to do the right thing. Facial recognition software and other nascent technologies will be a terrible cudgel of oppression if they continue to be used on peaceful demonstrators as they were this past summer in the U.S. and in Hong Kong. As some have noted, these same tech giants have done nothing to curb incitement of violence on their platforms by office holders abroad, in Myanmar for instance. Without deep structural reforms of law enforcement, widespread collaboration between big tech and the legal system will only further harm minority communities and peaceful-protest organizations.

Trump supporters raising his flag in lieu of the stars and stripes at the Capitol has implications far beyond the conflict at hand. It brings to mind the (staged) photographs of raising the American flag on Iwo Jima or of the Hammer-and-Sickle over the Reichstag. So many things that Trump and his supporters have said and done, though often criminal and always shameful, were never meant by them to be hidden, but rather to be aired publicly, like those photographs, as propaganda. The hubris of this is manifesting, at last, in the arrests of the past weeks. This might well be an inflection point for the perceived role of photography in this kind of conflict. The documentation, which was central to the “optical” dimension of the insurrection, has come home to roost. The photographs, taken as taunts and trophies, have begun to blow up in the faces of the takers, used against them as instruments of accountability. A picture… you know the cliché, you know what it’s worth.

Released on Monday, Trump’s “1776 Commission” report—propaganda of the rankest order—is a slap in the face to the idea of reconciliation, outrageous in no small part because of its release on the day set aside to remember the noble and ongoing legacy of the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Junior. The report, critical of the mid-century Civil Rights Movement, also minimizes the role and impact of slavery and racism in the founding of the United States and argues that addressing it is unpatriotic. Quackery on its face, it will hopefully continue to be dismissed by reputable historians, educators, and political scientists, as it has already begun to be. While it seemed that it would be hard to surpass the shame and national embarrassment of January 6th, this eleventh-hour move by the White House symbolically does just that, in a spiritual continuation of sorts. In less than twenty-four hours from the time that I’m writing this, Joe Biden will be sworn in. He will need to act decisively and unequivocally to begin to undo the historic wrongs that Donald Trump has been deliberately compounding for more than four years and has continued to foment into his last days in office. It will take more than quotations to unravel the bitter injustices still woven into our society and Biden has a dire call for courageous action. Images of Biden tomorrow on the balcony that rioters scaled to breach the Capitol will mean much more than in other years. I am expecting a speech to remember and can only hope that he delivers the repudiation that we deserve of the deep evil we’ve seen forever in our country, both in his words and in concrete, immediate action. Another cliché seems appropriate here—one coined by peaceful protesters in 1968: “The whole world is watching.”

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