Don t Tread on Me Meme Make America Great Again in German
Asuka: Originally from a Japanese anime, she's now an online anti-Semitic meme.
In the week since my column on Donald Trump was published, I've been avalanched by several hundred anti-Semitic tweets. Pictures of me in a gas chamber, pictures of Trump saying "you're fired" next to a death campsite oven and hundreds of hate tweets calling me a kike, a traitor, a rat and far worse. Others have written about similar experiences but it has been a harrowing, educational experience.
One meme, however, grabbed my attending. Posted several times, it featured a female, catlike anime character wearing a "Make America Smashing Again" hat, her easily/paws in attack mode. Despite a fair amount of googling and searching databases of memes, I couldn't find anyone decoding this detail image.
So I did it myself.
It turns out, the image is of Asuka, a grapheme in the controversial, critically heralded anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion, created by Hideaki Anno in 1995. Evangelion created a mythology that makes Lost look like Processed-Land, blending together gnostic, Kabbalistic, Christian, and conspiracy theory themes and incorporating many of Anno's own struggles with mental affliction.
I of those themes concerns a shadowy organization chosen SEELE, which is essentially a mythologized alloy of the world Zionist conspiracy (a la Protocols of the Elders of Zion), Illuminati, and United Nations. According to the Evangelion wiki, SEELE is "a underground and mysterious organisation with influence over the earth's governments and organizations." Its name comes from the German discussion for soul.
The United Nations is a participant in this hush-hush system, which has amongst its goal the uniting of all humanity and the erasure of national boundaries. Their ultimate motives are sinister, withal, culminating in SEELE's own control of the globe (to greatly oversimplify). SEELE too has some specifically Jewish elements, in particular its knowledge of the Expressionless Bounding main Scrolls, which in Evangelion are prophetic, gnostic texts.
Asuka (full name: Asuka Langley Soryu) is a fighter pilot who becomes the dandy enemy of SEELE. A 14 year erstwhile girl, she is the dearest interest of Evangelion's tormented hero, Shinji. But she is also a warrior in her own right, destroying SEELE'due south weapons, giant humanoid robots called Evangelions. (Fittingly for the dark serial, these efforts are ultimately unsuccessful and ending rains upon Earth.)
In other words, and over again oversimplifying somewhat, Asuka is the warrior against the secret Illuminati/Jewish conspiracy to have over the world. And in the meme posted on my Twitter thread, she is Trump, wearing his signature hat.
Having decoded the meaning of the image, I and so set virtually trying to document how and where it entered the utilize of the white supremacist fringe.
I didn't find much — but I did find something. On a reddit-like thread from January, 2016, I found a dissimilar image of Asuka-as-Trump as well as one postal service saying "If elected, Trump will flop the shit out of SELEE [sic] and take their oil." While this would seem to align SEELE with Arab states rather than Jews, if ane takes the conspiratorial worldview that, in fact, the dandy conspiracy (Jewish, UN, Masonic, whatever) controls everything, then of form they too orchestrate the world'due south wars over scarce resource. SEELE is every bit much behind Kingdom of saudi arabia and Iran as it is behind State of israel.
As for where the exact meme originated, or whether white supremacists know any of this history, I don't know. I'm certainly not going to appoint with whatever of them in club to ask.
It's too unclear how much all of this is really in Evangelion itself. Certainly, Anno incorporated conspiratorial themes into the series, and SEELE in particular. It's also well-known that Japanese social club often displays a curious blend of philo- and anti-Semitism, often admiring Jews for our disproportionate impact on society, media, and politics. This is true both in the mainstream of Japanese lodge (the Protocols of the Elders of Zion has ofttimes been a bestseller) and on the fringes (radical, conspiratorial antisemitism was part of the ideology of the murderous Aum Shinrikyo cult.
Japanese anti-Semitism experienced a surge in the 1980s and 1990s, with several books alleging that the United States was controlled by Jews and was plotting to destroy Japan. Aum Shinrikyo in particular developed fantastic myths in which the world would be destroyed and replaced with some other one — myths quite like to the plot of Evangelion, which appeared around the same time.
At the same time, Evangelion was deliberately synthetic by Anno equally a complex multi-narrative in which different viewers could see what they wanted to see. It is filled with dark sexual imagery and paranoid imaginings of all kinds. SEELE is office of that, but certainly non the sum of it. There is no trace of anti-Semitism in Anno'due south political behavior or other work. It seems more than probable that the cultural familiarity of conspiracy theories provided a rich ground for Evangelion's paranoid tapestry, without whatsoever particular counterinsurgency or credo.
Somehow, though, the obscure mythology of a 1990s Japanese animated series has found its mode into the 2022 presidential election, with Donald Trump himself cast in the role of warrior against the international Jewish conspiracy.
It remains a mystery how Asuka became the Donald. Maybe a single anime fan connected the dots. Possibly there were more than detailed conversations in inaccessible parts of the 'nighttime spider web' or on 4chan. Or possibly no one really knows where the prototype came from, only it at present serves as a kind of calling card, an prototype whose apparent innocence enables bigotry to hide in manifestly view.
Source: https://forward.com/opinion/342905/decoding-an-anti-semitic-meme-donald-trump-supporters-took-from-anime/
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