Review: Evil Empire #2- Fear and Anxiety In Liberal America

Evil Empire is a book very much of it’s time. Like anything ‘political’ it of course will be wildly open to individual interpretation, and what I make of it might not be what you make of it. This concept of political misinterpretation on both the political and social level is explored within this issue, but to say that this book is free of an agenda would be naïve.

So what is the agenda here, as written by writer Max Bemis? Without actually sitting down and chatting to the man himself it appears that what he is doing here is working through his own anxieties about what is happening in the US today. Like most entertainers and writers working in the mainstream today he appears to have been indoctrinated into the Rockefeller funded school of modern liberalism. It’s an ideology of polar opposites, of the right wing being bad, and the left wing being good. Left wing meaning being pro choice, pro women’s right’s, homosexual equality, racial equality, environmentalism etc, and right wing meaning you are some kind of monster who hangs out in a country club being racist, sexist and homophobic with loads of rich white men and Fox news anchors.

If that sounds grossly simplistic it’s because it is. The unfortunate thing though is that university education largely pushes this world view, and especially over the past ten years this left wing good, right wing bad viewpoint has become largely accepted as the standard way that every ‘educated’ moralistic young man and woman should be thinking.

The problem with this simplistic view of looking at ‘politics’ and the way that our governments run things is that the ‘left’ has largely been in control of western governments for quite a few years now, and the utopia of equality and freedom that was promised to the young students as they went through their schooling has largely failed to appear. The elephant in the room of course is President Barack Obama, a man who promised the world, who promised hope and change, yet delivered business as usual for the top 1% who own and control everything and everybody.

This lack of change has caused a great deal of confusion amongst young liberals, as their supposedly left wing, liberal saviour turned out to be as corrupt as all of the right wing politicians they loved to complain about during the George Bush jr years.

I read Evil Empire as a young liberal’s attempt to put a positive spin on the recent years of debt, war and poverty, or business as usual under a hope and change President in the US. With nothing positive to say about what has happened recently the only way that it can be justified is to scare readers about what might happen in the future. What would happen to America if the socialist/collectivist agenda is abandoned and those evil ‘right wing’ white men get into power again?

You’d think that the last six years under President Obama would have demonstrated to young liberals that the difference between right wing and left wing are not really differences at all. You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But no, sometimes when you’ve bought into a belief system you’ll go to the death defending it, even as it collapses all around you, and that’s what you have here in this book.

Issue #2 starts with a good dose of fear, showing what will happen in the future if the liberal elite of the current time is deposed. That future is psychopathic loser cops, drug taking, public sex and random corpses. Morality has died, and Max Bemis’s story in Evil Empire is going to explain how that happened.

This issue follows a Republican politician as he admits to killing his child abusing wife, and his subsequent trial where he exposes an Aleister Crowley ideology of ‘Do what thou wilt.’ He’s portrayed as a right wing extremist, a cult leader who is going to cause a lot of damage because of his beliefs. He’s pretty much a stand in for all of the Fox news anchors, radio show hosts and politicians that liberal Americans fear. He’s portrayed as a hate filled, psychopath who is using revolutionary music to push his Satanic message of lawlessness and doing whatever you like as long as it fits into your own personal sense of morality. I read this man as a right wing politician rather than as some kind of anarchist, because that’s what he’s portrayed as here. Anarchists don’t believe in political representation, they believe in personal freedom, and the villain of this piece is certainly no individual who just wants to be left alone to get on with his life. He’s a political animal, and he has an agenda that I cannot help but to read as being noticeably right wing. How he would ever achieve his goals seems a bit ridiculous though, as he’s portrayed here as an absolute maniac, not somebody who would ever get mass support from the television watching masses.

I also find it quite amusing that Max Bemis believes that a rockstar with a revolutionary message would have so much power to sway public opinion. I cannot even think of one real life musician or band that has a radical message that could be used in such a way. I’m sure there are smaller bands with radical messages about revolution, but what power do they have to sway public discourse? The last big band I can even remember trying to say something revolutionary was Muse, and they’ve stopped doing that now because it was bad for their precious careers.

The main thing I noticed about the art in this book is that it’s mostly focussed on individual faces. There’s the playful 1990’s rock/punk look of the main heroine, and the contrasted image of the evil politician. These two images are what’s most memorable about the art to me, and it also plays into the simplistic left is good, right is bad political paradigm that this book is unfortunately still stuck in. I like the art by Ransom Getty, even if it’s not exactly subtle, and I’d like to see him perhaps working for one of the big two comic book companies, as he has a knack with expressions, and the way he draws overly muscled male bodies would be perfect for the superhero genre.

Check out Evil Empire if you want to read some 2014 left leaning anxiety on what could happen if a good liberal like Hillary Clinton doesn’t win the next US election. I personally found it to be a bit naïve. It completely misses the recent exposure of the left/right political paradigm, and it’s depictions of a hellish future where right wing totalitarianism meets moral collapse and anarchy gave me the very strong message that writer Max Bemis might not be too happy with the current collectivist agenda in the US, but he’s happy to support it because he can’t envisage a happier alternative. I found this to be very illustrative of how the Rockefeller funded indoctrination of young writers and artists still persists, even though all evidence around them should probably be waking them up a bit by now. However, if anxiety is freedom, then this book is as free as you can get.