illusion of freedom

The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it's profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way, and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.

--Frank Zappa (1977)

Political correctness effects

Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.

-- Theodore Dalrymple, Our Culture, What's Left of It  (2005)

The Power of the Powerless

The citizen has to put a slogan in his window, not in the hope that someone might read it or be persuaded by it, but to contribute, along with thousands of other slogans, to the panorama that everyone is very much aware of.  This panorama, of course, has a subliminal meaning: it reminds people where they are living and what is expected of them. It tells them what everyone else is doing, and indicates to them what they must do as well, if they don’t want to be excluded, to fall into isolation, alienate themselves from society, break the rules of the game, and risk the loss of their peace and tranquility and security.

Whether the slogan is true or not is beside the point. The point is signaling compliance out of fear, not an honest discussion of the evidence, or persuasion, or any mechanism respecting the informed and open consent of the governed. In postings signs of affirmation of the regime, citizens have adapted to the conditions in which they live; but in doing so, they also help to create those conditions. Quite simply, each helps the other to be obedient. Both are objects in a system of control; but at the same time, they are its subjects as well. They are both victims of the system and its instruments.

Citizens’ assistance to a lying and oppressive regime changes those who corrupt themselves. They may learn to be comfortable with their involvement, to identify with it as though it were something natural and inevitable and ultimately come to treat any non-involvement as an abnormality, as arrogance, as an attack on themselves, as a form of dropping out of society.  In other words, falsifying reality brings about more of that falsified reality.

Once people have compromised themselves, they are more likely to identify with their compromise, because it’s embarrassing to admit you were wrong. So instead, people double down. They heap onto their initial cowardice the additional cowardice of refusing to admit they could have been wrong.  This also helps account for the viciousness with which people often treat dissenters. Dissenters are living proof that everyone does not have to comply, that it is possible to live in the truth. This shames those who have chosen temporary comfort over noble sacrifice.

Within the system, every individual is trapped within a dense network of the state's governing instruments, themselves legitimated by a flexible but comprehensive ideology, a "secularized religion." Power relations are therefore best described as a labyrinth of influence, repression, fear, and self-censorship which swallows up everyone within it, at the very least by rendering them silent, stultified, and marked by some undesirable prejudices of the powerful.

-- Vaclav Havel (summarized / paraphrased) 1978

I am the virus

 

Death misery and tears
Calculated waves of fear
Drawn up by think tanks
There's a darkness in the west
Oil swilling
Guzzling corporate
Central banking
Mind-fucking omnipotence


False flags and black ops
Tavistock manufactured shocks
Something's gone horribly wrong
Hot flashes for the neo-con
A population in deep denial
Contagion released from a vial


No one believes in 9/11
Steel frame buildings don't fall in seconds
Murderers in black robes decapitate innocents
The public's blank stare
Did you sleep okay last night, Mr. Blair?

I am the fury, the spirit of outrage
I am the fire
I am the virus
I am the furnace where resentment glows
I am the bias
I am the virus
I am the Hydra headed beast
I am the worm you can never delete
I am the danger that never sleeps

-- Killing Joke (2015)

open your eyes

 

Video games train the kids for war
Army chic in high-fashion stores
Law and order's done their job
Prisons filled while the rich still rob

Assassination politics
Violence rules within our nation's midst
Ignorance is their power tool
You'll only know what they want you to know

The television cannot lie
Controlling media with smokescreen eyes
Nuclear politicians picture show
The acting's lousy, but the blind don't know

 

Open your eyes, see the lies right in front of you
Open your eyes....

They scare us all with threats of war
So we forget just how bad things are
You taste the fear when you're all alone
They gonna get you when you're on your own

The silence of conspiracy
Slaughtered on the altar of apathy
You gotta wake up from your sleep
'Cause meek inherits earth six feet deep

 

-- Bators / James (Lords of the New Church) 1982

Russian Distraction

[T]he demonization of Russia [is] a way more idiotic exercise than the McCarthyite Cold War hysteria of the early 1950s since there is no longer any ideological conflict between us, and all the evidence indicates that the current state of bad relations is America’s fault -- in particular, our sponsorship of the state failure in Ukraine and our avid deployment of NATO forces in war games on Russia’s border....

Rather, the Evil Russia meme seems a projection of our country’s own insecurities and contradictions. For instance, we seem to think that keeping Syria viciously destabilized is preferable to allowing its legitimate government to restore some kind of order there. Russia has been on the scene attempting to prop up the Assad government, while we are on the scene there doing everything possible to keep a variety of contestants in a state of incessant war. U.S. policy in Syria has been both incoherent and tragically damaging to the Syrians.

Russians stood aside while the U.S. smashed up Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya. We demonstrated adequately that shoving sovereign nations into civic failure is not the best way to resolve geopolitical tensions. Why would it be such a bad thing for the U.S. to stand aside in Syria and see if the Russians can rescue that country from failure? Because they might keep a naval base there on the Mediterranean? We have scores of military bases around the region.

It’s actually pretty easy to understand why the Russians might be paranoid about America’s intentions. We use NATO to run threatening military maneuvers near Russia’s borders. We provoked Ukraine — formerly a province of the Soviet state — to become a nearly failed state, and then we complained foolishly about the Russian annexation of Crimea — also a former territory of the Soviet state and of imperial Russia going back centuries. We slapped sanctions on Russia, making it difficult for them to participate in international banking and commerce.

What’s really comical is the idea that Russia is using the Internet to mess with our affairs — as if the USA has no cyber-warfare ambitions or ongoing operations against them (and others, such as hacking Angela Merkel’s personal phone). News flash: every country with access to the Internet is in full hacking mode around the clock against every other country so engaged. Everybody’s doing it.

-- James Howard Kunstler (The Daily Reckoning ) Oct. 29, 2016

war is a racket

War is just a racket.  A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people.  Only a small, inside group knows what it is about.  It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses.

I believe in adequate defense at the coastline and nothing else.  If a nation comes over here to fight, then we’ll fight....  I wouldn’t go to war again as I have done to protect some lousy investment of the bankers.  There are only two things we should fight for.  One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights.  War for any other reason is simply a racket.

-- Major General Smedley Darlington Butler, USMC.  1933 speech

central planning fails

Aristotelian logic came to dominate Western thought after the Renaissance. It was essentially a forerunner of positivism — which is supposedly based on objective conditions and scientific reasoning. “Give me the facts,” says the positivist, confidently. “Let me apply my rational brain to them. I will come up with a solution!”  This is fine, if you are building the Eiffel Tower or organizing the next church supper. But positivism falls apart when it is applied to schemes that go beyond the reach of the “herald’s cry.”  That’s what Aristotle said. He thought only a small community could work at all. Because only in a small community would all the people share more or less the same information and interests.

In a large community, you can’t know things in the same direct, personal way. So it’s hard for people to work together in the same way.  In a large community, you have no idea who made your sausage or what they put in it. You have to rely on “facts” that are no longer verifiable by direct observation or personal acquaintance.  Instead, the central planners’ facts usually are nothing more than statistical mush, wishful thinking or theoretical claptrap — like Weapons of Mass Destruction, the unemployment rate and the Übermensch.  Large-scale planning fails because the facts upon which it is built are unreliable, frequently completely bogus.  And it fails because people don’t really want it.

-- Bill Bonner, The Daily Reckoning (March 6, 2013)

Radio Clash

This is Radio Clash, stealing all transmissions.
Beaming from the mountaintop, using aural ammunition.
With extreme prejudice on a terminator mission.
This is Radio Clash, consider your position.

Breaking news flash:  Assassination!
The whole country has been shot.
Evil will abate in revelation -- the ministry of whitewash.

This is Radio Clash from pirate satellite
Orbiting your living room, cashing in the Bill of Rights.
Cuban army surplus or refusing all third lights
This is Radio Clash on pirate satellite.

This sound does not subscribe to the international plan
In the psycho shadow of the white right hand.
Them that see ghettology as an urban Vietnam
Giving deadly exhibitions of murder by napalm.

Forces have been looting my humanity.
Curfews have been curbing -- the end of liberty.
Hands of law have sorted through my identity
But now this sound is brave and wants to be free!

-- The Clash (1981)

war is hell

"I am sick and tired of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have never fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, more vengeance, more desolation. Some say that war is all glory, but I tell you, boys, it is all hell."
-- William Tecumseh Sherman (1879)

war and patriotism

"Of course, the people do not want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to the farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don't want war . . . that is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along -- whether it is a democracy or a fascist dicatorship or a parliament or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country."

-- Hermann Goering (Luftwaffe commander, German Third Reich) 1946

myth vs. truth

"The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie -- deliberate, contrived and dishonest, but the myth -- persistent, persuasive and unrealistic."
-- John F. Kennedy (1962)

misinformation

"If you don't read the newspaper, you're uninformed.
If you read the newspaper, you're misinformed."
-- Mark Twain

just think

"Five percent of the people think; ten percent of the people think they think; and the other eighty-five percent would rather die than think."
-- Thomas A. Edison

fight club

"You are not your job. You're not how much money you have in the bank. You're not the car you drive. You're not the contents of your wallet."

"The things you own end up owning you.... It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything.... Only after disaster can we be resurrected."

-- Tyler Durden (Chuck Palahniuk / Jim Uhls / David Fincher)

inflation not anticipated

"Will the Federal Reserve's actions to combat the crisis lead to higher inflation down the road? The answer is no; the Federal Reserve is committed to keeping inflation low and will be able to do so. In the near term, elevated unemployment and stable inflation expectations should keep inflation subdued, and indeed, inflation could move lower from here."
-- Ben Bernanke, speech to the Economic Club of Washington, D.C. (Dec. 7, 2009)

take it from the man

it's just like i said -- they're fucking with your head
you ain't safe in your bed or even when you're dead
they're out to school you, so they can rule you
they try to fool you or just get to you

and i seen it coming down, so i headed out of town
because i'm quick like that

i seen them on tv -- they even look like me
they said they'd set me free, but that can never be
but i know it's coming down, so i'm headed out of town
because i'm quick like that, always bounce right back

stupid magazines to sell you useless things
silly as it seems, they even steal your dreams
and i know it's coming down, so i'm headed out of town
cause i'm quick like that, never coming back

man i know it's coming down, so i'm heading far from town
cause i'm smart like that; i'm not coming back

-- anton newcombe (brian jonestown massacre) 1996

witch hunt

The night is black, without a moon.
The air is thick and still.
The vigilantes gather on the lonely torchlit hill.

Features distorted in the flickering light,
Faces are twisted and grotesque.
Silent and stern in the sweltering night,
The mob moves like demons possessed.
Quiet in conscience, calm in their right,
Confident their ways are best.

The righteous rise with burning eyes of hatred and ill-will.
Madmen fed on fear and lies to beat and burn and kill.

They say there are strangers who threaten us --
Our immigrants and infidels.
They say there is strangeness to danger us
In our theatres and bookstore shelves,
That those who know what's best for us
Must rise and save us from ourselves.

Quick to judge, quick to anger, slow to understand --
Ignorance and prejudice and fear walk hand in hand.

Neal Peart (Rush) 1981

airwaves

they seem near, but they are far away.
they knew last year what you'd want today.
they're controlling everything you do.
all your dreams, all your ambitions
are sent to you in their transmissions.
airwaves -- everything you know is in the air

they will always find you where you are.
if it's peaceful, they can start a war.
they're translating everything you feel.
they will make your troubles fade away.
when you're sad, they'll make you feel so gay.
airwaves -- everything you know is in the air.

-- Action Plus (1996)

blind faith

"I think we should just trust our president in every decision he makes and should just support that, you know, and be faithful in what happens."
-- Britney Spears (2003)