Herbert Schiller: The content and forms of American communications-the myths and the means of transmitting them-are devoted to manipulation. When successfully employed, as they invariably are, the result is individual passivity, a state of inertia that precludes action. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Aldous Huxley: Hitler's vast propaganda successes were accomplished with little more than the radio and loudspeaker, and without TV and tape and video recording . . . Today the art of mind control is in the process of becoming a science. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Montesquieu: The tyranny of a prince in an oligarchy is not so dangerous to public welfare as the apathy of a citizen in a democracy. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
William H. Hastie: Democracy is a process, not a static condition. It is becoming rather than being. It can easily be lost, but is never fully won. Its essence is eternal struggle. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
The American Heritage Dictionary: Establishment: An exclusive group of powerful people who rule a government or society by means of private agreements or decisions. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Karl Marx: Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Lenin: Marx deepened and developed philosophical materialism to the full, and extended the cognition of nature to include the cognition of human society. His historical materialism was a great achievement in scientific thinking. The chaos and arbitrariness that had previously reigned in views on history and politics were replaced by a strikingly integral and harmonious scientific theory, which shows how, in consequence of the growth of productive forces, out of one system of social life another and higher system develops—how capitalism, for instance, grows out of feudalism. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Samuel Johnson: Power is always gradually stealing away from the many to the few, because the few are more vigilant and consistent. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Bertram Gross: The term "welfare state'' ... contains a germ of truth. Under pressure from communist regimes and movements, the governments of all major capitalist countries have out-Bismarcked Bismarck in taking over socialist demands and enacting a host of programs to provide state-ordained floors under living and working standards. In a broader sense, however, the "welfare state" idea is fundamentally misleading. The welfare provided is not the general well-being of the people. It is welfare, rather, in the narrow and restrictive sense of public assistance to the poor and other programs (usually financed by the lower and middle classes themselves) to take the rough edge off capitalist exploitation, promote docility among the exploited, and thereby help form a more perfect capitalism. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Adam Smith: Wherever there is great property, there is great inequality. For one very rich man, there must be at least five hundred poor, and the affluence of the few supposes the indigence of the many. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
James Madison: I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
R. Palme Dutt: The internal and external aims of Fascism are inseparable. Fascism, the system of violent rule of the most reactionary big monopolist interests, is inevitably at the same time the system of organisation of the State and economy for aggressive war. For many years Fascism succeeded in deceiving, or at any rate in winning the support of large numbers of respectable, influential and educated people in all countries. Blinded by its claim to represent their bulwark against Communism or democratic advance, they became its apologists and sycophants; they palliated its crimes and extolled its supposed virtues. Statesmen, financiers and arms merchants vied with one another in supplying the armaments to Fascism which were subsequently to be used against their own peoples. The worst infamies of Fascism were kept out of the official press; the consular reports on the concentration camps, which were available in the official pigeon-holes through all these years, were not made public property until after the outbreak of war. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
R. Palme Dutt: Hitlerism is German Fascism. A fascist régime is inseparable from war. Fascism is a criminal régime imposed upon people by the most powerful reactionary forces in a country the big trusts, landowners, military caste, etc., for the purpose, first, of holding down the people in absolute and terrorised subjection to their rule, when all other means of checking the advance of the people to freedom have failed; and second of conquering other countries and advancing to the domination of the world. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Lenin: To expect science to be impartial in a wage-slave society is as foolishly naïve as to expect impartiality from manufacturers on the question of whether workers’ wages ought not to be increased by decreasing the profits of capital. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Lenin: The genius of Marx consists precisely in his having furnished answers to questions already raised by the foremost minds of mankind. His doctrine emerged as the direct and immediate continuation of the teachings of the greatest representatives of philosophy, political economy and socialism. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Stalin: Wholesale slaughter of the man power of the nations, wholesale ruin and want, destruction of once flourishing towns and villages, wholesale starvation and lapse into savagery, all in order that a handful of crowned and uncrowned robbers may pillage foreign lands and rake in untold millions-this is where the war is tending. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
George Orwell: Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
George Orwell: Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
George Orwell: To the past, or to the future. To an age when thought is free. From the Age of Big Brother, from the Age of the Thought Police, from a dead man - greetings! wordsmith.social/protestation/…
George Orwell: To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone -- to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone: From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink -- greetings! wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Victor Klemperer: No, the most powerful influence was exerted neither by individual speeches nor by articles or flyers, posters or flags; it was not achieved by things which one had to absorb by conscious thought or conscious emotions. Instead Nazism permeated the flesh and blood of the people through single words, idioms and sentence structures which were imposed on them in a million repetitions and taken on board mechanically and unconsciously. … Language does not simply write and think for me, it also increasingly dictates my feelings and governs my entire spiritual being the more unquestioningly and unconsciously I abandon myself to it. And what happens if the cultivated language is made up of poisonous elements or has been made the bearer of poisons? Words can be like tiny doses of arsenic: they are swallowed unnoticed, appear to have no effect, and then after a little time the toxic reaction sets in after all. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Lenin: History teaches us that the ruling classes have always been ready to sacrifice everything, absolutely everything: religion, liberty and homeland, if it was a question of crushing a revolutionary movement of the oppressed classes. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Mao Zedong: For the revolutionary war is a war of the masses; it can be waged only by mobilizing the masses and relying on them. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Oswald Pohl: The war has brought about a marked change in the structure of the concentration camps and has changed their duties with regard to the employment of prisoners. The custody of prisoners for the sole purposes of security, education, or prevention is no longer the main consideration. The main emphasis has shifted to the economic side. The mobilization of all prisoners who are fit for work, initially for wartime purposes (to increase armaments production), and later for peacetime tasks, is becoming more and more important. This necessitates measures to ensure the gradual transformation of the concentration camps from their previously one-sided political form into organizations more suitable for economic tasks. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
George Orwell: The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought — that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc — should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meanings and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods. This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and by stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meanings whatever. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
George Orwell: Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thought-crime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by eactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
George Orwell: Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
George Orwell: To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just as long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies—all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
