Defeating Nuclear Beasts
What Godzilla can teach us about defeating fascism
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It’s 3 am, and I can’t sleep. I just sent Byline an elegy for my country. Despite years of reporting on the Trumpocene, Russian information warfare, and more recently, deep dives into 1930s Germany, I found myself truly believing in the last three days that we, the people, could beat the fascist beast.
I truly believed, despite knowing how well-funded and coordinated this new axis of evil is, that we would get it right and vote in our first woman president.
Each time I was asked what it would be like under Trump, I knew the answers, but I wanted to will our better angels to prevail.
But we are up against a nuclear beast, and because our government has been exercising information control rather than alerting the public to the degree of the attack, it’s been left up to independent investigative reporters, historians, and hybrid warfare analysts to sound the alarm.
We have no Western leaders willing to slay the real beast — petrol. Anything but that. Too scary.
Image courtesy High Fidelity
I found myself with two spare hours on Sunday night to catch a $5 showing of the 2023 film, Godzilla Minus One. The prehistoric monster lives in the ocean and is empowered by exposure to nuclear radiation. The 1954 original was clearly beast as metaphor for nuclear bombs and testing and the ability for physicists to create bombs so lethal they could wipe out the earth.
As I watched the 2023 film, I realized that information control by governments leave populations without inoculation to catastrophic danger.
A year ago, my podcast team wrote an open letter to President Joe Biden pleading with him to address the nation about The Invisible War. We are a decade into The Great Information War, and most Americans have no idea.
In Godzilla Minus One, the original Godzilla film, and 2016’s Shin Godzilla, the reluctance to warn people was due to not wanting to create panic or upset the economy. In America, I can only guess the reasons why confronting information warfare in a meaningful and cohesive way did not occur, but like Godzilla Minus One, the unwillingness for leaders to act in a meaningful and timely way, not only led to mass destruction but it also led to small groups of citizens banding together to strategize a way to defeat the nuclear-empowered beast.
I have been working with small groups of citizens who rose to the occasion to identify the dangers of nuclear-scale disinformation and how it is being used to target minds and radicalize people at scale. We’ve warned for years, and because I work with people in tech, they have specialized knowledge and sound ideas on how to defeat the beast.
Admitting we are under attack is the first step. When we were alerted to the six influencers being paid by Russia who promote Kremlin narratives, it gave people the opportunity to change their news intake. That the list of an additional 2,800 people being monitored by the Russians was withheld from the public is an example of the ‘information control’ that denies us the ability to protect ourselves and loved ones. We are running from the beast in real life, no advance warning, trying to not get radiated or flattened.
At the end of Godzilla Minus One, after a small group of citizens led by a World War II fighter pilot, delivers a a devastating payload into the mouth of the beast, the team celebrates its victory over a seemingly unbeatable foe.
The final scene shows the beginning of a piece of the beast’s tail regenerating itself.
We have often said on RADICALIZED Truth Survives that fascism must be thoroughly defeated. A partial defeat only allows for regeneration.
I spent the night with people who know the darkness that has descended on our land, and my host’s parting words were a quote from poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht, who fled the Nazis in the ‘30s:
This was the thing that nearly had us mastered;
Don't yet rejoice in his defeat, you men!
Although the world stood up and stopped the bastard,
The bitch that bore him is in heat again.
Bertolt Brecht, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui
Nothing less than a complete and devastating defeat will stop the bastards.
It appears my country followed the predication of Nikita Krushchev: “We will take America without firing a shot. We do not have to invade the US. We will destroy you from within”.
He also reminded me, because he is not fogged by unreality and knows the seriousness of this new axis of evil, to make sure I “don’t forget to have a happy life.”
These monsters are joykillers and soul assassins.
But we may be that small group of citizens that figures a way out.
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More info about Bette Dangerous - This magazine is written by Heidi Siegmund Cuda, an Emmy-award winning investigative reporter/producer, author, and veteran music and nightlife columnist. She is the cohost of RADICALIZED Truth Survives, an investigative show about disinformation and is part of the Byline Media team. Thank you for your support of independent investigative journalism.
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Begin each day with a grateful heart.
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Interesting, informative post.
Thank you.