Those images of people-powered revolutions articulated the victory of democracy over oppression, connected to a whole vocabulary passed down from the struggles of dissidents and civil rights movements. But what if a cleverer sort of ruler could find other ways to undermine the dissidents, rid them of a clear enemy to fight, climb inside the images, ideas, stories of those great people-power protests, and suck them dry from the inside, until they were devoid of meaning? Could they even use the same language and tactics as “the democrats” but for opposite aims?
