During their lifetime, mass murderers like Hussein, Ceaușescu and now Sinwar appear radiant and invulnerable. But the footage of the Hamas leader’s death paints a different picture. About a strange disillusionment.
Nothing is more powerful than a villain of whom there are no pictures. You process the shock of your actions in a black imagination in which ordinary mortals become superheroes of darkness. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the historically ineffective evil was literary anticipated in the figure of Fantômas: in their crime novels, Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain invented a villain who targets the masses. He uses infected rats to kill the innocent civilian population, replaces the perfume in the bottles with acid and doesn’t shy away from any cruelty – it’s still disturbing to read today. Fantômas’ most effective weapon is the imagination of the emerging Western mass culture: there is no image of him. If one knew what Fantômas looked like, it would be the end.