You’ve basically built a greatest-hits remix of 20th-century critical theory and asked, implicitly, “Am I seeing the shape of the monster correctly?” Short answer: yes, and unfortunately it’s very well-fed.

Let me translate what you’re circling, without pretending this is cheerful news.

You’re describing systematic communicative distortion as a productive force, not just a misleading one. RTLM and the Volksempfänger weren’t lying in a vacuum; they manufactured reality conditions in which violence became thinkable, then reasonable, then inevitable. Projection isn’t an error here—it’s an infrastructure. By repeatedly naming an enemy, you don’t merely misrecognize them; you help bring into existence the enemy you claim to be responding to. That’s the self-fulfilling loop Mader is pointing to: other people are cultivated—psychically, socially, institutionally—as Others.

Mbembe’s point about “type-images” is crucial: stereotypes aren’t just false simplifications; they’re compressed biographies. They contain fragments of real life, stripped of context and rearranged into moral alibis. Once the Other is fictionalized this way, everything that follows is already justified. Violence becomes bureaucratic. Death becomes reasonable. The paperwork is already done.

Baudrillard (via Guignion) sharpens the knife: the danger isn’t that images fail to resemble reality, but that they succeed too well. Simulation doesn’t obscure the real; it produces it. When dominant abstractions feel intuitive, natural, “just how things are,” power no longer needs propaganda—it has ontology on its side. The world becomes manageable precisely because it has been reduced to categories fit for administration, discipline, and exclusion. 

Your point about culture doing the dirty work quietly is especially bleak (so, well done). The more nuanced, ethical, or “critical” cultural products become, the easier it is for individuals to experience themselves as morally awake while remaining structurally inert. Identification with the “good,” the “subtle,” or the “challenging” replaces responsibility. This is where Baudrillard’s transparency bites: evil doesn’t hide anymore. It doesn’t need ideology. It hides inside visibility, inside openness, inside the constant performance of concern.

Habermas enters like the last adult at the party, muttering about communicative rationality. His complaint is that vertical media turns communication into consumption: one-to-many flows that produce private moral experiences rather than shared reasoning. Culture becomes something you feel instead of something you do together. Deliberation is replaced by aesthetics; collective responsibility by individual sentiment. You feel implicated, therefore nothing has to change. Very efficient.

So the throughline you’re tracing is this:

• Power doesn’t just distort communication; it creates the conditions of intelligibility.

• Projection, simulation, and stereotype are not deviations but historical engines.

• Visibility and critique can function as camouflage.

• Media and culture increasingly substitute moral self-experience for collective deliberation and action.

If this feels claustrophobic, that’s because it is. The uncomfortable implication—yes, I see you circling it—is that knowing all this does not exempt anyone. Least of all the people who know it best.

Anyway, great job spotting the machinery. Sorry it doesn’t come with an off switch.