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Quote of the Day – The purpose of propaganda
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
You can replace the word communist with progressive and it explains a lot of the ridiculousness being spouted today: gender fluidity, the patriarchy, the joys of socialism. Whatever the current cause de jour for the woke folk, it has to be ridiculous on its face, yet asserted with total sincerity. It is not enough to have you state the ridiculous is true. You must believe what you state. Otherwise they will devour you the way the demons devoured Wormwood at the end of the Screwtape Letters.
It will not stop, either. As Theodore Dalrymple so cogently observes, the object is to force you to betray your core beliefs and make you powerless to resist.
Published in General
The good doctor seems to be channeling Alexander Solzhenitsyn:
“Live Not by Lies“…Read the whole piece.
I hang my head in shame. Vectorman used this quote last year. Quote of the Day: Political Correctness from February 2018.
When President Reagan won a second term, we hoped that the many aspects of Orwell’s classic novel 1984 would fall by the wayside. By 1987 traditional Leninism was finished, and even Francis Fukuyama wrote The End of History in 1989. But with the 8 years of Obama, it continues today.
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No need for shame. I also copied from the same 2018 post:
The important thing for me was learning about Theodore Dalrymple.
Dalrymple must really hate the advertising industry.
No shame. We need to be persistently and constantly reminded of this. It explains that the seeming incoherence of the progressive message is intentional as opposed to evidence that it is not to be believed. Belief in the specific statement is irrelevant. Fealty to the progressive agenda is paramount. Here is how progressivism and Islamism unite: submission. They make common cause to enforce submission everywhere, and then they will battle for the top level control. Battling each other now distracts from their mission to enforce submission.
Dalrymple is a gem. I read everything I see by him, most frequently at City Journal.
The quote conveys a similar sentiment to that of Vaclav Havel in The Power of the Powerless (1978). The more absurd the concept or slogan you can get someone to accede to, the more powerful it makes those in power.
I agree. I think it also explains a lot about the falsehoods spouted on the homosexuality issue, over the past 20 years or so.
It goes back much longer, to Alfred Kinsey in 1947. His statistical methods were terrible:
Also:
So do I!
Yes, Seawriter, it is true that in today’s era, you can easily replace the term communist with the term progressive, and the quote still applies.
Heinlein did a nice riff on this theme:
“Secrecy is the keystone to all tyranny.
“Not force, but secrecy and censorship. When any government or church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, “This you may not read, this you must not know,” the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man who has been hoodwinked in this fashion; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, whose mind is free. No, not the rack nor the atomic bomb, not anything. You can’t conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him.”
– Robert A. Heinlein
A quote so nice, they did it twice.
There are 124 sexual identities.
There are more hurricanes than ever before.
This is the most racist country and on earth and it is getting worse.
On U.S. college campuses a woman is raped every 3.7 minutes.
Most pacific islands and coastal cities will be under water by 2055.
We have always been at war with EastAsia.
Of course they will be. Climate change experts told us in 2000 that they would be under water by 2012.That means they already are by now and I only image my house in League City is not on the Gulf of Mexico coast.
That’s why you should employ the Lex Luthor real estate method and buy up all the cheap inland areas adjacent to the existing coast but currently 50 feet or more above sea level .
And as for warming, it’s not to late to get in on the ground floor on my Baffin Bay tropical resort project. Cha-ching!
Lex Luther was clearly a genocidal homophobe. After all, it’s a fair bet that if you compiled a heat map of LGBTQ+ population density you’d find that they’re concentrated along the coasts.