His torso is a birdcage housing a black couple dancing the jitterbug, sarcastically labeled, “The Triumph of Civilization.” From its marching-drum pelvis a shapely female leg and a welded-pipe leg ending in a bloodied bomb emerge. A banner emblazoned with a Jewish star serves as loincloth. Allegorical female figures — Miss America in an Indian headdress and Miss Victory in a drum majorette’s cap — celebrate the invasion. Nearly enveloped in the advancing dust cloud, a small, cartoonishly gnomish man awaits,“all ears,” holding a placard reading, in Norwegian, “The USA will save Europe’s culture from destruction.” European civilization is represented by nearby ornate architecture. Four tiny figures, resembling the phantoms in Tintoretto’s “The Stealing of the Dead Body of St. Mark,” or various apparitional avatars as visualized by Giorgio de Chirico or Salvador Dalí, flee from the giant. Damleth, who served prison time after the war for his politics, asks bitterly, of this proposed rescue, “By what right?”

While the Damleth image remains memorably weird, its anti-American message takes on new meaning as America’s historical sins — against Native Americans and Blacks in particular — have become better known, to the frustration of conservative American exceptionalists. It is ironic, especially if we remember that European fascists admired our homegrown white supremacism, that a Norwegian fascist should have misused American democratic ideals, which we have foolishly taken for granted in recent decades, to attack the supposed barbarians at the gate.