Jane Clark Scharl
Ridley Scott’s TV adaptation of Phillip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle came to Amazon in November, and bluntly put, it’s a horrifying ten hours. The premise says it all: What if the Allies had lost World War II? We see America divided between a Nazi regime in the east and a Japanese empire in the west, where people must discover what resistance to totalitarianism looks like in a world in which American police wear swastikas on their sleeves and Hitler is führer of half the globe.
Despite the fascist iconography in nearly every frame, the setting is more reminiscent of Stalinist Russia than Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan. The show is set in 1962; there is no war to “justify” atrocity. Instead, atrocity is simply part of survival. It’s more The Lives of Others than Army of Shadows. The only ray of hope is not a weapon or a revolutionary political leader: It’s a myth.
A myth is not a falsehood or a fairy story, as people often think, it’s a narrative that offers, however obscurely, an explanation of the relationship among God, oneself, and the world. The myth in The Man in the High Castle is so powerful than anyone exposed to it is changed: either they become obsessed with destroying it, or they find in it the strength to resist evil.
The Totalitarian Myth
Vaclav Havel, the leader of the Velvet Revolution that overthrew the Soviet Union in Czechoslovakia twenty-six years ago, would approve. As a playwright and philosopher living under Soviet tyranny, he became convinced that totalitarianism derived its strength not solely from power or even from fear, but from myths. An oppressive regime must somehow convince citizens that it is more rational, even more humane, to go along with its machinations than to resist.  » Read More
https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2025/01/man-high-castle-jane-clark-scharl.html