Amerika: What does it mean?

I saw this image recently and immediately thought, "Welcome to Amerika."

Then I quickly asked myself, "Why did Amerika flash through my mind rather than America? Why was that word so readily available to my brain's information-retrieval system? Why did that make instant sense?"

The photograph was taken by ABC News reporter Martha Raddatz, and she posted it on her Twitter account. It was taken during protest demonstrations in Washington, D.C. on June 2. These are U.S. soldiers on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. In front of them, and not seen in this image, are protesters demonstrating against police brutality and in support of Black Lives Matter.

Why did the image instantly evoke AMERIKA in my mind?

My first encounter with that spelling was on a poster I had in my bedroom is a kid. Thanks to the Internet, where it seems you can find EVERYTHING, I was able to find an image of that poster.

This poster apparently was created after a Bank of America branch was burned near the University of California Santa Cruz campus in 1970. (You can buy the poster at justseeds.org.) I was 9 years old in 1970. I doubt I bought it that year. But even if I got it several years later, when I had become a teenager, did I understand what AMERIKA meant then?

So after seeing Raddatz's photograph and recalling my burning-bank poster, I looked up the word for some clues about its meaning and history. This is a variant spelling of America for German and Russian sources. (Oddly enough, Adolph Hitler's personal train, a mobile fortress HQ, was called Amerika.) So even though those German and Soviet sources had been describing an enemy when they used the word "Amerika," in the late 1960s the word began to associate the United States with those repressive and fascist governments. For instance, Carl Wittman published "Refugees from Amerika: A Gay Manifesto" in 1970, describing how San Francisco had become a center for people escaping homophobia. "Amerika" associates the United States with the repressive and militaristic regimes that traditionally have been considered its opponents. Rather than suggesting America as promoting freedom, Amerika suggests opposing freedom.

Jump ahead to 1987, and we find Amerika is the title of an ABC series starring Kris Kristofferson  about the Soviet Union taking over the United States.The TV series is discussed briefly by K.E. Roberts and Michael Grasso in "Avenge Me!: American Catharsis in 1980s Soviet Invasion Fantasies" While works like Amerika and Red Dawn (1984) depicted paranoid fantasies about alien invasions, Grasso indicates the Soviet enemy in them was a projection of America's worst impulses rather than an authentic fear of communists: "When the US forces in Iraq undertook their operation to capture Saddam Hussein, they called it… Operation Red Dawn. The irony of using this name for an operation in which we were the invaders was apparently lost on the Pentagon. Americans, it seems, will always take extreme measures to make sure that they psychologically remain the underdogs, that they can still shout “Wolverines!” with that sense of righteous fury, even as American forces more closely resemble [John] Milius’s brutal Soviet soldiers. It turns out that we were the foreign invaders all along."

This irony deficiency continues today, as President Trump declared ANTIFA to be a terrorist organization, despite it being an idea rather than an organization -- and despite the United States having fought costly wars against fascist regimes. So strange to see jingoistic patriots who a few years back embraced small-government Tea Party fantasies now embracing Big Brother oppression of citizens exercising their rights to assemble and to speak freely and of other citizens (Black Lives Matter) who claim their rights to life and liberty. One might say that it is contradictory for a president who loves eliminating regulations to also claim to be the law-and-order president, but it only seems like a contradiction. He and his supporters want to eliminate the laws that restrict their behavior in terms of economic and environmental exploitation and they want to get rid of the limits on their ability to silence and punish dissent. Look, for example, at the several states that have attempted to pass legislation criminalizing protests against oil pipelines. They love freedom: their freedom, not the freedom of others.

When I see armored personnel carriers rolling through residential neighborhoods and police trussed up in so much armor they look like Cylons or a character from Fallout, I wonder to what degree TV shows and films like Amerika were unconsciously prophetic; the United States was taken over by a fascist regime, but from the inside.