An intense dialogue is taking place. A 140-character limit, FB post, meme riddled mess of propaganda in the purest Bernay’s sense. Information overload. YouTubers, rogue professors, selfie-taking, tweeting leaders and celebrities, all joined by anyone with an iPhone. Contributing to the jargon at an exponential rate: Alt-right, regressive left, anti-fa, BLM, CIS, Cuck, KEK, Liberals, “Classic Liberals.” Where are we going with all of this? Is it a battle of echo chambers?
“Political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
- George Orwell, ‘Politics and the English Language’, Horizon, April 1946.
Over 70 years later, is there any truth left in words of politics and ideology? It is hard to have real debate about forms of government when people worship their “leaders” like their favorite ball-team. The cult of celebrity for some politicians is at A-lister levels. In practice, it seems there is only one type of government. Cronyism and corruption, the rule of the few over the many, masquerading as a multitude of different political systems. In its execution it gets called socialism, communism, capitalism, tyranny, and all sorts of things to divide us and keep us arguing about an illusion. Our current system is no different. Just better executed.
“We accept such an image as naturally as the baby accepts the tit… Mentally we can identify separate elements, isolate things into categories. But the hologram nevertheless remains seamless in its interconnection of all things that benefit the corporate state generating it. Parsed, divided and isolated, any part contains the entire logic (or governing illogic) of the whole — consuming.”
- Joe Bageant, ‘The Great American Media Mind Warp’, Aug. 2007
We stare at the “hologram.” Arguing amongst ourselves about this and that label it puts on us to confuse and divide us. I often think we need to throw out our preconceived notions and definitions of political science. Many of the terms, philosophies and philosophers have been completely discredited, in the context of public opinion anyway. The Political spectrum is so skewed and confused. Neo-Marxists are the new-new-left and anything right of them risks being labelled “alt-right” if they open their mouth… or tweet.
The roots of political ideologies are a tangled mess. We hear the names of the political philosophers, theorists and ideologues all the time: Marx, Rand, Friedman, Reagan, Mao, Guevera. They are discredited or revered by name alone. They have become meme-fodder for people to easily identify themselves as belonging to one of the approved and mass media defined political divisions which in application do not appear to exist. People can carry around a copy of Atlas Shrugged or wear a Che T-shirt. But do they know Atlas Shrugged is a work of fiction? Have the hipsters in Che T-shirts read up on “The Butcher of Cabaña”?
“The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’. The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another.”
- George Orwell, ‘Politics and the English Language’, Horizon, April 1946.
Perhaps people don’t care that they use a piece of fiction to support a far-right political ideology. Oh, the irony. And maybe the “left” would approve of “Gitmoesque” detention (and summary execution) if someone calling themselves a “People’s Revolutionary” oversaw it? Or maybe we are all so thoroughly duped we have no fucking clue what is what anymore. We have been staring at the hologram for too long. They concoct and drown us in Orwellianism. People laughed at the MSM when the “fake news” story started. But what are we all talking about now? What has become part of our political language?
Yep, that’s right.
We need to obliterate this notion that the news is to inform us. It is not. My father was a journalist, a good one. One of the first things he taught me about the news media is that its main purpose is not to inform, it is to tell people what to think. We are playing the game on their turf and on their terms. The battle we are in is not winnable in this manner.
“The press today is an army with carefully organized weapons, the journalists its officers, the readers its soldiers. The reader neither knows nor is supposed to know the purposes for which he is used and the role he is to play.”
- Oswald Spengler, ‘The Decline of the West’, 1918
Our sensoria are bombarded. Everything is wrapped in salacious, sanctimonious and serpentine swaddle. If we do muster any resistance the results are incited and controlled. Our political dissidence and “counterculture” ideas seem predestined to fail. They have emptied the China shops for our bulls. Do they care if people break some windows or torch some cop cars? It makes good fodder for the concern-peddling-media to use as imagery in Ludovico conditioning of folks with their eyelids figuratively pried open ready to accept the hologram.
Division leaves a void to be filled by the most nefarious among us. Our media and “leaders” wield language like massive crowbars, jammed into the natural fissures of our society and discourse. Prying them apart to form unbridgeable chasms. The sound of voices from either side vibrating through the divide and echoing off the opposing walls. Confirming our biases, stoking our fears, toying with truth and meddling with base desires they cannot control. These chasms permeate our civilization. They have for a long time. What is “Freedom”? What is “Patriotism”? What is realistic? There appears to be no language to bridge the divide… if you could even hear it over all the screaming and name-calling.
