Propaganda Book Quotes

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That's the whole point of good propaganda. You want to create a slogan that nobody's going to be against, and everybody's going to be for. Nobody knows what it means, because it doesn't mean anything.
Noam Chomsky
It is possible to argue that the really influential book is not that which converts ten millions of casual readers, but rather that which converts the very few who, at any given moment, succeed in seizing power. Marx and Sorel have been influential in the modern world, not so much because they were best-sellers (Sorel in particular was not at all a widely read author), but because among their few readers were two men, called respectively Lenin and Mussolini.
Aldous Huxley
I suspect that beneath your offensively and vulgarly effeminate façade there may be a soul of sorts. Have you read widely in Boethius?" "Who? Oh, heavens no. I never even read newspapers." "Then you must begin a reading program immediately so that you may understand the crises of our age," Ignatius said solemnly. "Begin with the late Romans, including Boethius, of course. Then you should dip rather extensively into early Medieval. You may skip the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. That is mostly dangerous propaganda. Now that I think of it, you had better skip the Romantics and the Victorians, too. For the contemporary period, you should study some selected comic books." "You're fantastic." "I recommend Batman especially, for he tends to transcend the abysmal society in which he's found himself. His morality is rather rigid, also. I rather respect Batman.
John Kennedy Toole (A Confederacy of Dunces)
Theodora was able to reflect on the events of the past few hours. Her headache had gone, and she felt a lot better after a brandy, a bath and a clean set of clothes. As she smoked her cigarette, and feeling a little more normal, she played back the horror of what had happened in Sussex. Watching the murder of her close friends, the horrendous way they had died … How was she going to tell Charlotte? Not only about the slaying of Christina and Bernard, but also that Jost Krupp was responsible – not just for the murders of Christine and Bernard, but also, it seemed, for Ferdi. And to crown it all, that he was still alive! Charlotte was convinced she had killed him in Auch in 1943.
Hugo Woolley (The Wasp Trap (The Charlotte's War Trilogy Book 3))
The more we die, the stronger we will become
Azar Nafisi (Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books)
When you steal a book, you steal from the world, the Library propaganda said
Rachel Caine (Ink and Bone (The Great Library, #1))
It is from the bystanders (who are in the vast majority) that we receive the propaganda that life is not worth living, that life is drudgery, that the ambitions of youth must he laid aside for a life which is but a painful wait for death. These are the ones who squeeze what excitement they can from life out of the imaginations and experiences of others through books and movies. These are the insignificant and forgotten men who preach conformity because it is all they know. These are the men who dream at night of what could have been, but who wake at dawn to take their places at the now-familiar rut and to merely exist through another day. For them, the romance of life is long dead and they are forced to go through the years on a treadmill, cursing their existence, yet afraid to die because of the unknown which faces them after death. They lacked the only true courage: the kind which enables men to face the unknown regardless of the consequences.
Hunter S. Thompson (The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955-1967)
The lie that abortion is murder is right-wing propaganda designed to demonize Democrats. Abortion is legal all over the world because a fetus without a cerebral cortex cannot think or feel before the 27th week. According to the CDC almost all abortions happen before the 13th week.
Oliver Markus Malloy (Inside The Mind of an Introvert: Comics, Deep Thoughts and Quotable Quotes (Malloy Rocks Comics Book 1))
The best protection against propaganda of any sort is the recognition of it for what it is. Only hidden and undetected oratory is really insidious. What reaches the heart without going through the mind is likely to bounce back and put the mind out of business. Propaganda taken in that way is like a drug you do not know you are swallowing. The effect is mysterious; you do not know afterwards why you feel or think the way you do.
Mortimer J. Adler (How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading)
The qualities that make for excellence in children's literature can be summed up in a single word: imagination. And imagination as it relates to the child is, to my mind, synonymous with fantasy. Contrary to most of the propaganda in books for the young, childhood is only partly a time of innocence. It is, in my opinion, a time of seriousness, bewilderment, and a good deal of suffering. It's also possibly the best of all times. Imagination for the child is the miraculous, freewheeling device he uses to course his way through the problems of every day....It's through fantasy that children achieve catharsis.
Maurice Sendak
People don't believe in God because it's true, but because they were the victims of early childhood indoctrination.
Oliver Markus Malloy (Inside The Mind of an Introvert: Comics, Deep Thoughts and Quotable Quotes (Malloy Rocks Comics Book 1))
Every rock or molotov cocktail thrown should make a very obvious political point. Random violence produces random propaganda results. Why waste even a rock?
Abbie Hoffman (Steal This Book)
I have found so many angels trapped inside undisputed jargon that I find myself digging at the words, in order to release them, from the books that unfairly captured their soul.
Shannon L. Alder
What people always demand of a popular novelist is that he shall write the same book over and over again, forgetting that a man who would write the same book twice could not even write it once. Any writer who is not utterly lifeless moves upon a kind of parabola, and the downward curve is implied in the upward one.
George Orwell (All Art Is Propaganda: Critical Essays)
When she faced the noise, she found the mayor’s wife in a brand-new bathrobe and slippers. On the breast pocket of the robe sat an embroidered swastika. Propaganda even reached the bathroom.
Markus Zusak (The Book Thief)
No library could hold all the books, magazines, newspapers and other publications which attack Marxism-Leninism, no one can calculate or even imagine the quantity and extent of the anti-communist propaganda of imperialism.
Enver Hoxha (Eurocommunism Is Anti-Communism)
History as a discipline began as a confrontation with war propaganda. In the first history book, The Peloponnesian Wars, Thucydides was careful to make a distinction between leaders' accounts of their actions and the real reasons for their decisions.
Timothy Snyder (The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America)
Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. Anyone who has lived long in a foreign country will know of instances of sensational items of news — things which on their own merits would get the big headlines-being kept right out of the British press, not because the Government intervened but because of a general tacit agreement that ‘it wouldn’t do’ to mention that particular fact. So far as the daily newspapers go, this is easy to understand. The British press is extremely centralised, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics. But the same kind of veiled censorship also operates in books and periodicals, as well as in plays, films and radio. At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was ‘not done’ to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.
George Orwell (Animal Farm)
The great ones do not set up offices, charge fees, give lectures, or write books. Wisdom is silent, and the most effective propaganda for truth is the force of personal example. The great ones attract disciples, lesser figures whose mission is to preach and to teach. These are gospelers who, unequal to the highest task, spend their lives in converting others. The great ones are indifferent, in the profoundest sense. They don’t ask you to believe: they electrify you by their behavior. They are the awakeners. What you do with your petty life is of no concern to them. What you do with your life is only of concern to you, they seem to say. In short, their only purpose here on earth is to inspire. And what more can one ask of a human being than that?
Henry Miller (Sexus (The Rosy Crucifixion, #1))
I was diagnosed a thirteen. Paranoid got tacked on about a year later, after I verbally attacked a librarian for trying to hand me propaganda pamphlets for an underground communist force operating out of the basement of the public library. (She'd always been a very suspect type of librarian--I refuse to believe donning rubber gloves to handle books is a normal and accepted practice, and I don't care what anyone says.)
Francesca Zappia (Made You Up)
Something that’s bothered me for a while now is the current profligacy in YA culture of Team Boy 1 vs Team Boy 2 fangirling. [...] Despite the fact that I have no objection to shipping, this particular species of team-choosing troubled me, though I had difficulty understanding why. Then I saw it applied to Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games trilogy – Team Peeta vs Team Gale – and all of a sudden it hit me that anyone who thought romance and love-triangles were the main event in that series had utterly missed the point. Sure, those elements are present in the story, but they aren’t anywhere near being the bones of it, because The Hunger Games, more than anything else, is about war, survival, politics, propaganda and power. Seeing such a strong, raw narrative reduced to a single vapid argument – which boy is cuter? – made me physically angry. So, look. People read different books for different reasons. The thing I love about a story are not necessarily the things you love, and vice versa. But riddle me this: are the readers of these series really so excited, so thrilled by the prospect of choosing! between! two! different! boys! that they have to boil entire narratives down to a binary equation based on male physical perfection and, if we’re very lucky, chivalrous behaviour? While feminism most certainly champions the right of women to chose their own partners, it also supports them to choose things besides men, or to postpone the question of partnership in favour of other pursuits – knowledge, for instance. Adventure. Careers. Wild dancing. Fun. Friendship. Travel. Glorious mayhem. And while, as a woman now happily entering her fourth year of marriage, I’d be the last person on Earth to suggest that male companionship is inimical to any of those things, what’s starting to bother me is the comparative dearth of YA stories which aren’t, in some way, shape or form, focussed on Girls Getting Boyfriends, and particularly Hot Immortal Or Magical Boyfriends Whom They Will Love For All Eternity. Blog post: Love Team Freezer
Foz Meadows
So then, in a pleading tone, he whispers: Why did you make me? I never wanted to be made… For propaganda, of course. It’s all in your own book. How can we persuade others to be good, without evil we can point to?
William T. Vollmann (Europe Central)
The first casualty of war is truth, and the war on drugs is no different
Dominic Milton Trott (The Honest Drug Book: A Chemical & Botanical Journey Through The Legal High Years)
Democrats suck at coming up with catchy propaganda slogans, because they don’t think like Nazis.
Oliver Markus Malloy (How to Defeat the Trump Cult: Want to Save Democracy? Share This Book)
Fun Fact: You know who invented the term Fake News? Not Trump. It was Hitler. Look it up. Hitler loved to describe any newspaper that exposed him for what he was as Luegenpresse, which is German for Fake News.
Oliver Markus Malloy (Inside The Mind of an Introvert: Comics, Deep Thoughts and Quotable Quotes (Malloy Rocks Comics Book 1))
I often have the feeling that even at the best of times literary criticism is fraudulent, since in the absence of any accepted standards whatever -- any external reference which can give meaning to the statement that such and such a book is "good" or "bad" -- every literary judgement consists in trumping up a set of rules to justify an instinctive preference. One's real reaction to a book, when one has a reaction at all, is usually "I like this book" or "I don't like it" and what follows is a rationalisation.
George Orwell (All Art is Propaganda: Critical Essays)
I do not believe the fable that men read travel books to escape from reality: they read to escape into it, from a crazy wonderland of armaments, cant, political speeches at once insincere and illiterate, propaganda, and social injustice which the lunacy of humanity has constructed over a period of years.
Alex Comfort
Until one has some kind of professional relationship with books one does not discover how bad the majority of them are. In much more than nine cases out of ten the only objectively truthful criticism would be “This book is worthless”, while the truth about the reviewer’s own reaction would probably be “This book does not interest me in any way, and I would not write about it unless I were paid to.
George Orwell (All Art is Propaganda: Critical Essays)
It is the purpose of this book to explain the structure of the mechanism which controls the public mind, and to tell how it is manipulated by the special pleader who seeks to create public acceptance for a particular idea or commodity. It will attempt at the same time to find the due place in the modern democratic scheme for this new propaganda and to suggest its gradually evolving code of ethics and practice.
Edward L. Bernays (Propaganda)
People are dying because of ignorance. They are dying because unremitting propaganda is denying them essential safety information. They are dying because legislators and the media are censoring the science, and are ruthlessly pushing an ideological agenda instead. They are dying because the first casualty of war is truth, and the war on drugs is no different.
Dominic Milton Trott (The Honest Drug Book: A Chemical & Botanical Journey Through The Legal High Years)
It's intellectual freedom when a journalist can understand that 2 + 2 = 4; that's what Orwell was writing about in 1984. Everybody here applauds that book, but nobody is willing to think about what it means. What Winston Smith [the main character] was saying is, if we can still understand that 2 + 2 = 4, they haven't taken everything away. Okay? Well, in the United States, people can't even understand that 2 + 2 = 4.
Noam Chomsky (Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky)
I could still feel the glare of his eyes, and the image of them was seared so firmly into my brain that it seemed like my neurotransmitters had gone and printed propaganda posters of him to hang up around the place. Washington, Jane (2015-09-14). Charcoal Tears (Seraph Black Book 1) (Kindle Locations 130-132). . Kindle Edition.
Jane Washington (Charcoal Tears (Seraph Black, #1))
Propaganda against war is itself a form of war propaganda.
Élie Halévy (A History of the English People in 1815, Book 3: Religion and Culture)
The more we have known of the really good things, the more insipid the thin lemonade of later literature becomes, sometimes almost to the point of making us sick. Do you know a work of literature written in the last, say, fifteen years that you think has any lasting quality? I don't. It is partly idle chatter, partly propaganda, partly self-pitying sentimentality, but there is no insight, no ideas, no clarity, no substance and almost always the language is bad and constrained. On this subject I am quite consciously a laudator temporis acti.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Letters and Papers from Prison)
North Korea, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, isn't democratic. The Nazis, the National Socialists, weren't socialists. And America isn't the land of the free. It's all just clever nationalist marketing.
Oliver Markus Malloy (How to Defeat the Trump Cult: Want to Save Democracy? Share This Book)
There’s never been a noble war except in the history books and propaganda movies. It’s a bloody, dirty, cruel, costly mistake in almost every case, as it was in this war that would end so badly. But the young soldiers can be and often are noble, selfless, and honorable. They don’t fight for a flag or a president or mom and apple pie. When it comes down to it they fight and die for each other, and that is reason enough for them, and for me.
Harold G. Moore (We Are Soldiers Still: A Journey Back to the Battlefields of Vietnam)
The strangest thing about fascism in America today is that American facists are so dumb, they don't even know they're fascists. They don't even know what the word fascism means. They vaguely know that it had something to do with Hitler and the Nazis, but that's it. They have no idea that the first words of the Nazi anthem were "Germany above all else" which was their version of "America first." And the way Nazis demonized jews was no different than the way American fascists demonize liberals. Hitler promised to "make Germany great again." And Hitler denounced the newspapers, which exposed him for what he really was, as "Lügenpresse," which is German for "fake news." If the German Nazi party still existed today, they would look exactly like the Republican party under Trump. Hitler's rallies looked no different than Trump's rallies. And Hitler would absolutely love a well-oiled propaganda outlet like Fox News.
Oliver Markus Malloy (Inside The Mind of an Introvert: Comics, Deep Thoughts and Quotable Quotes (Malloy Rocks Comics Book 1))
If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State. —Joseph Goebbels, Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, Deutsches Reich
Vox Day (SJWs Always Lie: Taking Down the Thought Police (The Laws of Social Justice Book 1))
The worst kind of losers are those who silently scavenge for your past mistakes and present them to the public as latest news.
Michael Bassey Johnson (The Book of Maxims, Poems and Anecdotes)
All propaganda must be popular and its intellectual level must be adjusted to the most limited intelligence among those it is addressed to.
Richard J. Evans (The Coming of the Third Reich (The Third Reich Trilogy Book 1))
The NRA brainwashes you into believing that you need to buy a bunch of guns, to protect yourself from all the people with guns.
Oliver Markus Malloy (How to Defeat the Trump Cult: Want to Save Democracy? Share This Book)
BERLIN, October 29 I’ve been looking into what Germans are reading these dark days. Among novels the three best-sellers are: (1) Gone with the Wind, translated as Vom Winde Verweht—literally “From the Wind Blown About”; (2) Cronin’s Citadel; (3) Beyond Sing the Woods, by Trygve Gulbranssen, a young Norwegian author. Note that all three novels are by foreign authors, one by an Englishman. Most sought-after non-fiction books are: (1) The Coloured Front, an anonymous study of the white-versus-Negro problem; (2) Look Up the Subject of England, a propaganda book about England; (3) Der totale Krieg, Ludendorff’s famous book about the Total War—very timely now; (4) Fifty Years of Germany, by Sven Hedin, the Swedish explorer and friend of Hitler; (5) So This is Poland, by von Oertzen, data on Poland, first published in 1928. Three
William L. Shirer (Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-41)
In book 8 of Plato’s Republic, Socrates argues that people are not naturally led to self-governance but rather seek a strong leader to follow. Democracy, by permitting freedom of speech, opens the door for a demagogue to exploit the people’s need for a strongman; the strongman will use this freedom to prey on the people’s resentments and fears. Once the strongman seizes power, he will end democracy, replacing it with tyranny. In short, book 8 of The Republic argues that democracy is a self-undermining system whose very ideals lead to its own demise. Fascists have always been well acquainted with this recipe for using democracy’s liberties against itself; Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels once declared, “This will always remain one of the best jokes of democracy, that it gave its deadly enemies the means by which it was destroyed.” Today is no different from the past. Again, we find the enemies of liberal democracy employing this strategy, pushing the freedom of speech to its limits and ultimately using it to subvert others’ speech.
Jason F. Stanley (How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them)
But we do not ask. We want to be told. One of the most curious things in the structure of our psyche is that we all want to be told because we are the result of the propaganda of ten thousand years. We want to have our thinking confirmed and corroborated by another, whereas to ask a question is to ask it of yourself. What I say has very little value. You will forget it the moment you shut this book, or you will remember and repeat certain phrases, or you will compare what you have read here with some other book – but you will not face your own life. And that is all that matters – your life, yourself, your pettiness, your shallowness, your brutality, your violence, your greed, your ambition, your daily agony and endless sorrow – that is what you have to understand and nobody on earth or in heaven is going to save you from it but yourself.
J. Krishnamurti (Freedom from the Known)
But you know, a wizard with black hair and a thick mustache put a curse on Moscow, and Petrograd, too, so that no one would be able to tell the truth without lying. If a novelist wrote a true story about how things really happened, no one would believe him, and he might even be punished for spreading propaganda. But if he wrote a book full of lies about things that could never really happen, with only a few true things hidden in it, well, he would be hailed as a hero of the People, given a seat at a writers' café, served wine and ukha, and not have to pay for any of it. He'd get a salaried summer on the dacha, and be feted. Even given a medal by the wizard with the thick mustache." The waiter whistled. "That's a good curse. I should like to shake that wizard's hand and buy him a vodka or two.
Catherynne M. Valente (Deathless)
at bottom it is always a writer’s tendency, his “purpose,” his “message,” that makes him liked or disliked. The proof of this is the extreme difficulty of seeing any literary merit in a book that seriously damages your deepest beliefs.
George Orwell (All Art Is Propaganda: Critical Essays)
I was hungry when I left Pyongyang. I wasn't hungry just for a bookshop that sold books that weren't about Fat Man and Little Boy. I wasn't ravenous just for a newspaper that had no pictures of F.M. and L.B. I wasn't starving just for a TV program or a piece of music or theater or cinema that wasn't cultist and hero-worshiping. I was hungry. I got off the North Korean plane in Shenyang, one of the provincial capitals of Manchuria, and the airport buffet looked like a cornucopia. I fell on the food, only to find that I couldn't do it justice, because my stomach had shrunk. And as a foreign tourist in North Korea, under the care of vigilant minders who wanted me to see only the best, I had enjoyed the finest fare available.
Christopher Hitchens (Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays)
Our textbooks were ridiculous propaganda. The first English sentence we learned was "Long live Chairman Mao!" But no one dared to explain the sentence grammatically. In Chinese the term for the optative mood, expressing a wish or desire, means 'something unreal." In 1966 a lecturer at Sichuan University had been beaten up for 'having the audacity to suggest that "Long live Chairman Mao!" was unreal!" One chapter was about a model youth hero who had drowned after jumping into a flood to save an electricity pole because the pole would be used to carry the word of Mao. With great difficulty, I managed to borrow some English language textbooks published before the Cultural Revolution from lecturers in my department and from Jin-ming, who sent me books from his university by post. These contained extracts from writers like Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and Oscar Wilde, and stories from European and American history. They were a joy to read, but much of my energy went toward finding them and then trying to keep them. Whenever someone approached, I would quickly cover the books with a newspaper. This was only partly because of their 'bourgeois' content. It was also important not to appear to be studying too conscientiously, and not to arouse my fellow students' jealousy by reading something far beyond them. Although we were studying English, and were paid par fly for our propaganda value by the government to do this, we must not be seen to be too devoted to our subject: that was considered being 'white and expert." In the mad logic of the day, being good at one's profession ('expert') was automatically equated with being politically unreliable ('white').
Jung Chang (Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China)
Today, for example, one can imagine a good book being written by a Catholic, a Communist, a Fascist, a pacifist, an anarchist, perhaps by an old-style Liberal or an ordinary Conservative: one cannot imagine a good book being written by a spiritualist, a Buchmanite or a member of the Ku Klux Klan. The views that a writer holds must be compatible with sanity, in the medical sense, and with the power of continuous thought: beyond that what we ask of him is talent, which is probably another name for conviction.
George Orwell (All Art Is Propaganda: Critical Essays)
Sooner or later, all talk among foreigners in Pyongyang turns to one imponderable subject. Do the locals really believe what they are told, and do they truly revere Fat Man and Little Boy? I have been a visiting writer in several authoritarian and totalitarian states, and usually the question answers itself. Someone in a café makes an offhand remark. A piece of ironic graffiti is scrawled in the men's room. Some group at the university issues some improvised leaflet. The glacier begins to melt; a joke makes the rounds and the apparently immovable regime suddenly looks vulnerable and absurd. But it's almost impossible to convey the extent to which North Korea just isn't like that. South Koreans who met with long-lost family members after the June rapprochement were thunderstruck at the way their shabby and thin northern relatives extolled Fat Man and Little Boy. Of course, they had been handpicked, but they stuck to their line. There's a possible reason for the existence of this level of denial, which is backed up by an indescribable degree of surveillance and indoctrination. A North Korean citizen who decided that it was all a lie and a waste would have to face the fact that his life had been a lie and a waste also. The scenes of hysterical grief when Fat Man died were not all feigned; there might be a collective nervous breakdown if it was suddenly announced that the Great Leader had been a verbose and arrogant fraud. Picture, if you will, the abrupt deprogramming of more than 20 million Moonies or Jonestowners, who are suddenly informed that it was all a cruel joke and there's no longer anybody to tell them what to do. There wouldn't be enough Kool-Aid to go round. I often wondered how my guides kept straight faces. The streetlights are turned out all over Pyongyang—which is the most favored city in the country—every night. And the most prominent building on the skyline, in a town committed to hysterical architectural excess, is the Ryugyong Hotel. It's 105 floors high, and from a distance looks like a grotesquely enlarged version of the Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco (or like a vast and cumbersome missile on a launchpad). The crane at its summit hasn't moved in years; it's a grandiose and incomplete ruin in the making. 'Under construction,' say the guides without a trace of irony. I suppose they just keep two sets of mental books and live with the contradiction for now.
Christopher Hitchens (Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays)
It’s no secret that veganism is growing all over the world and has become one of the most prevalent and discussed social movements of this generation. But while most of us will be aware that the primary motivations for people going vegan and adopting plant-based diets include animal rights, the environment, pandemic prevention and personal health, often little is known about the complexity and true scale of these issues, which is exactly what this book aims to do: lay out the enormity of the injustice that is animal exploitation.
Ed Winters (This Is Vegan Propaganda (& Other Lies the Meat Industry Tells You))
When it happens against us, it is a war crime. When it happens against our enemy, it is collateral damage.
Shon Mehta (Lair Of The Monster)
he had nothing to give, except maybe Mein Kampf, and there was no way he'd give such propaganda to a young German girl. That would be like the lamb handing a knife to the butcher.
Markus Zusak (The Book Thief)
Hitler’s Nazi mob didn’t think of themselves as the bad guys. They thought of themselves as the victims of evil foreigners. Just like Trump’s MAGA mob.
Oliver Markus Malloy (How to Defeat the Trump Cult: Want to Save Democracy? Share This Book)
So if you refer to it as source energy there’s only one way to interpret that. Because source energy does not have propaganda.
Dolores Cannon (The Convoluted Universe - Book Five (The Convoluted Universe: Book One 5))
While those who mouth high talk may think themselves high-minded, justice keeps the book on hypocrites and liars.
Heraclitus (Fragments)
The result of feeling that we are separate minds in an alien, and mostly stupid, universe is that we have no common sense, no way of making sense of the world upon which we are agreed in common. It's just my opinion against yours, and therefore the most aggressive and violent (and thus insensitive) propagandist makes the decisions. A muddle of conflicting opinions united by force of propaganda
Alan W. Watts (The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are)
What I do know, is that I refused to compromise with the system and I was obsessed with preventing my work from being manipulated for their propaganda. Even stories about the Holocaust could have been promoted as anti-fascist stories, which they were in a way, but I didn’t want them to be taken only as such. I remember I had a reading in Berlin in the ‘80s and a man in the audience, asked me: ‘Sir, I read your book, I read the stories, you didn’t say who the oppressors were nor who are the people who are suffering.’ And I said, ‘No, I didn’t.’ It was important to me that a Vietnamese reader reading a story about a young boy who is in a camp, can recognize himself, without me saying: the boy is a Jew, the oppressor is a Romanian, or a Nazi, and so on. I wanted to have a more universal approach.
Norman Manea
I was extremely curious about the alternatives to the kind of life I had been leading, and my friends and I exchanged rumors and scraps of information we dug from official publications. I was struck less by the West's technological developments and high living standards than by the absence of political witch-hunts, the lack of consuming suspicion, the dignity of the individual, and the incredible amount of liberty. To me, the ultimate proof of freedom in the West was that there seemed to be so many people there attacking the West and praising China. Almost every other day the front page of Reference, the newspaper which carded foreign press items, would feature some eulogy of Mao and the Cultural Revolution. At first I was angered by these, but they soon made me see how tolerant another society could be. I realized that this was the kind of society I wanted to live in: where people were allowed to hold different, even outrageous views. I began to see that it was the very tolerance of oppositions, of protesters, that kept the West progressing. Still, I could not help being irritated by some observations. Once I read an article by a Westerner who came to China to see some old friends, university professors, who told him cheerfully how they had enjoyed being denounced and sent to the back end of beyond, and how much they had relished being reformed. The author concluded that Mao had indeed made the Chinese into 'new people' who would regard what was misery to a Westerner as pleasure. I was aghast. Did he not know that repression was at its worst when there was no complaint? A hundred times more so when the victim actually presented a smiling face? Could he not see to what a pathetic condition these professors had been reduced, and what horror must have been involved to degrade them so? I did not realize that the acting that the Chinese were putting on was something to which Westerners were unaccustomed, and which they could not always decode. I did not appreciate either that information about China was not easily available, or was largely misunderstood, in the West, and that people with no experience of a regime like China's could take its propaganda and rhetoric at face value. As a result, I assumed that these eulogies were dishonest. My friends and I would joke that they had been bought by our government's 'hospitality." When foreigners were allowed into certain restricted places in China following Nixon's visit, wherever they went the authorities immediately cordoned off enclaves even within these enclaves. The best transport facilities, shops, restaurants, guest houses and scenic spots were reserved for them, with signs reading "For Foreign Guests Only." Mao-tai, the most sought-after liquor, was totally unavailable to ordinary Chinese, but freely available to foreigners. The best food was saved for foreigners. The newspapers proudly reported that Henry Kissinger had said his waistline had expanded as a result of the many twelve-course banquets he enjoyed during his visits to China. This was at a time when in Sichuan, "Heaven's Granary," our meat ration was half a pound per month, and the streets of Chengdu were full of homeless peasants who had fled there from famine in the north, and were living as beggars. There was great resentment among the population about how the foreigners were treated like lords. My friends and I began saying among ourselves: "Why do we attack the Kuomintang for allowing signs saying "No Chinese or Dogs" aren't we doing the same? Getting hold of information became an obsession. I benefited enormously from my ability to read English, as although the university library had been looted during the Cultural Revolution, most of the books it had lost had been in Chinese. Its extensive English-language collection had been turned upside down, but was still largely intact.
Jung Chang (Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China)
I like it too," Angelo said. "I love this country. Much you and anybody, and you know it." "I know it," Prew said. "But I still hate this country. You love the Army. But I dont love the Army. This country's Army is why I hate this country. What did this country ever do for me? Gimme a right to vote for men I cant elect? You can have it. Gimme a right to work at a job I hate? You can have that too. Then tell I'm a Citizen of the greatest richest country on earth, if I dont believe it look at Park Avenue. Carnival prizes. All carnival prizes. [..] They shouldnt teach their immigrants' kids all about democracy unless they mean to let them have a little bit of it, it ony makes for trouble. Me and the United States is dissociating our alliance as of right now, until the United States can find time to read its own textbooks a little." Prew thought, a little sickly, of the little book, The Man Without A Country that his mother used to read to him so often, and how the stern patriotic judge condemned the man to live on a warship where no one could ever mention home to him the rest of his whole life, and how he had always felt that pinpoint of pleased righteous anger at seeing the traitor get what he deserved.
James Jones (From Here to Eternity)
In the Soviet Union under the rule of Joseph Stalin, prosperous farmers were portrayed on propaganda posters as pigs—a dehumanization that in a rural setting clearly suggests slaughter. This was in the early 1930s, as the Soviet state tried to master the countryside and extract capital for crash industrialization. The peasants who had more land or livestock than others were the first to lose what they had.
Timothy Snyder (On Tyranny: The Book to Help You Understand Why Democracy Is Failing In 2025)
Within a decade or two, all Holocaust survivors will likely have passed away so a ticking clock is in effect in this battle between the truth and lies. Keep in mind even those survivors born in a concentration camp during WW2 would be at least 71 years-of-age when this book (the one you are reading now) was released. Those survivors old enough to clearly recall the events of that nightmare will, of course, be older and have much less time left. As the memory of the Holocaust begins to fade away, it will become easier to deny the genocide even occurred unless those of us who are truthseekers are able to embrace the memory of the genocide and educate others do the same. What’s needed in this propaganda war is for the true stories of Holocaust survivors – as well as those of the Nazi perpetrators, their associates and others who witnessed the genocide – to be told loudly and clearly so that there will never, ever be room for doubt in generations to come. After all, nothing is more powerful, credible or damning than eyewitness accounts.
James Morcan (Debunking Holocaust Denial Theories)
A local phrase book, entitled Speak in Korean, has the following handy expressions. In the section 'On the Way to the Hotel': 'Let's Mutilate US Imperialism!' In the section 'Word Order': 'Yankees are wolves in human shape—Yankees / in human shape / wolves / are.' In the section 'Farewell Talk': 'The US Imperialists are the sworn enemy of the Korean people.' Not that the book is all like this—the section 'At the Hospital' has the term solsaga ('I have loose bowels'), and the section 'Our Foreign Friends Say' contains the Korean for 'President Kim Il Sung is the sun of mankind.' I wanted a spare copy of this phrase book to give to a friend, but found it was hard to come by. Perhaps this was a sign of a new rapprochement with the United States, or perhaps it was because, on page 46, in the section on the seasons, appear the words: haemada pungnyoni dumnida ('We have a bumper harvest every year').
Christopher Hitchens (Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays)
Over the years I have had much occasion to ponder this word, the intelligentsia. We are all very fond of including ourselves in it—but you see not all of us belong. In the Soviet Union this word has acquired a completely distorted meaning. They began to classify among the intelligentsia all those who don't work (and are afraid to) with their hands. All the Party, government, military, and trade union bureaucrats have been included. All bookkeepers and accountants—the mechanical slaves of Debit. All office employees. And with even greater ease we include here all teachers (even those who are no more than talking textbooks and have neither independent knowledge nor an independent view of education). All physicians, including those capable only of making doodles on the patients' case histories. And without the slightest hesitation all those who are only in the vicinity of editorial offices, publishing houses, cinema studios, and philharmonic orchestras are included here, not even to mention those who actually get published, make films, or pull a fiddle bow. And yet the truth is that not one of these criteria permits a person to be classified in the intelligentsia. If we do not want to lose this concept, we must not devalue it. The intellectual is not defined by professional pursuit and type of occupation. Nor are good upbringing and good family enough in themselves to produce and intellectual. An intellectual is a person whose interests in and preoccupation with the spiritual side of life are insistent and constant and not forced by external circumstances, even flying in the face of them. An intellectual is a person whose thought is nonimitative.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books III-IV)
This book is not a scholarly volume, it is not a piece of investigative journalism, and most emphatically it is not a work of theory. It is a selection of commentaries and conversations in the long tradition of Balkan socialist propaganda. (p.14)
Andrej Grubačić (Don't Mourn, Balkanize!: Essays after Yugoslavia)
It reminded us that propaganda in some form or other lurks in every book, that every work of art has a meaning and a purpose — a political, social and religious purpose — that our aesthetic judgements are always coloured by our prejudices and beliefs
George Orwell
After Tony [Judt]'s death, in August 2010, I toured to discuss the book we had written together, which he had entitle 'Thinking the Twentieth Century.' I realized as I traveled around the United States that its subject had been forgotten all too well. In hotel rooms, I watched Russian television toy with the traumatic American history of race, suggesting that Barack Obama had been born in Africa. It struck me as odd that the American entertainer Donald Trump picked up the theme not long thereafter.
Timothy Snyder (The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America)
I emphasise it now; I had little-to-nothing in common with other people. Their values I did not comprehend, their ideals were to me a living horror. Call it ostentatious but I even sought to provide tangible proof of my withdrawal from the world. I posted a sign in the entrance to the building wherein I dwelt; a sign that indicated I had no wish to be disturbed by anyone, for any purpose whatsoever. As these convictions took hold of me and, as I denied, nay even repudiated, the hold that the current society of men possesses over its ranks, as I retreated into a hermitage of the imagination, disentangling my own concerns from those paramount to the age in which I happened to be born, an age with no claim to be more enlightened, significant or progressive than any other, I tried to make a stand for the spirit. Tyranny, in this land, I was told, was dead. But I contend that the replacement of one form of tyranny with another is still tyranny. The secret police now operate not via the use of brute force in dark underground cells; they operate instead by a process of open brainwashing that is impossible to avoid altogether. The torture cells are not secret; they are everywhere, and so ubiquitous that they are no longer seen for what they are. One may abandon television; one may abandon all forms of broadcast media, even the Internet, but the advertising hoardings in every street, on vehicles, inside transport centres, are still there. And they contain the same messages. Only the very rich can avoid their clutches utterly. Those who have obtained sufficient wealth may choose their own surroundings, free from the propaganda of a decayed futurity. And yet, and yet, in order to obtain such a position of freedom it is first necessary to have served the ideals of the tyranny slavishly, thereby validating it. ("The Tower")
Mark Samuels (Best New Horror 23 (The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, #23))
Security ... what does this word mean in relation to life as we know it today? For the most part, it means safety and freedom from worry. It is said to be the end that all men strive for; but is security a utopian goal or is it another word for rut? Let us visualize the secure man; and by this term, I mean a man who has settled for financial and personal security for his goal in life. In general, he is a man who has pushed ambition and initiative aside and settled down, so to speak, in a boring, but safe and comfortable rut for the rest of his life. His future is but an extension of his present, and he accepts it as such with a complacent shrug of his shoulders. His ideas and ideals are those of society in general and he is accepted as a respectable, but average and prosaic man. But is he a man? has he any self-respect or pride in himself? How could he, when he has risked nothing and gained nothing? What does he think when he sees his youthful dreams of adventure, accomplishment, travel and romance buried under the cloak of conformity? How does he feel when he realizes that he has barely tasted the meal of life; when he sees the prison he has made for himself in pursuit of the almighty dollar? If he thinks this is all well and good, fine, but think of the tragedy of a man who has sacrificed his freedom on the altar of security, and wishes he could turn back the hands of time. A man is to be pitied who lacked the courage to accept the challenge of freedom and depart from the cushion of security and see life as it is instead of living it second-hand. Life has by-passed this man and he has watched from a secure place, afraid to seek anything better What has he done except to sit and wait for the tomorrow which never comes? Turn back the pages of history and see the men who have shaped the destiny of the world. Security was never theirs, but they lived rather than existed. Where would the world be if all men had sought security and not taken risks or gambled with their lives on the chance that, if they won, life would be different and richer? It is from the bystanders (who are in the vast majority) that we receive the propaganda that life is not worth living, that life is drudgery, that the ambitions of youth must he laid aside for a life which is but a painful wait for death. These are the ones who squeeze what excitement they can from life out of the imaginations and experiences of others through books and movies. These are the insignificant and forgotten men who preach conformity because it is all they know. These are the men who dream at night of what could have been, but who wake at dawn to take their places at the now-familiar rut and to merely exist through another day. For them, the romance of life is long dead and they are forced to go through the years on a treadmill, cursing their existence, yet afraid to die because of the unknown which faces them after death. They lacked the only true courage: the kind which enables men to face the unknown regardless of the consequences. As an afterthought, it seems hardly proper to write of life without once mentioning happiness; so we shall let the reader answer this question for himself: who is the happier man, he who has braved the storm of life and lived or he who has stayed securely on shore and merely existed?
Hunter S. Thompson
Vladimir Nabokov and George Orwell had quite different gifts, and their self-images were quite different. But, I shall argue, their accomplishment was pretty much the same. Both of them warn the liberal ironist intellectual against temptations to be cruel. Both of them dramatise the tension between private irony and liberal hope. In the following passage, Nabokov helped blur the distinctions which I want to draw: ...'Lolita' has no moral in tow. For me a work of fiction exists only in so far as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm. There are not many such books. All the rest is either topical trash or what some call the Literature of Ideas, which very often is topical trash coming in huge blocks of plaster that are carefully transmitted from age to age until somebody comes along with a hammer and takes a good crack at Balzac, at Gorki, at Mann. Orwell blurred the same distinctions when, in one of his rare descents into rant, "The Frontiers of Art and Propaganda," he wrote exactly the sort of thing Nabokov loathed: You cannot take a purely aesthetic interest in a disease you are dying from; you cannot feel dispassionately about a man who is about to cut your throat. In a world in which Fascism and Socialism were fighting one another, any thinking person had to take sides... This period of ten years or so in which literature, even poetry was mixed up with pamphleteering, did a great service to literary criticism, because it destroyed the illusion of pure aestheticism... It debunked art for art's sake.
Richard Rorty (Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity)
They wanted to forget that there ever had been, in Europe, any other civilization at all. There was so much beauty they had not made, so many books they had not written, so many records of wars in which they had not fought, and so many ideas of human behavior which were anathema to them.
Katharine Burdekin (Swastika Night)
They were so far-fetched, so ridiculous, that only someone with his kind of power would have a vested interest in shifting attention away from the commission. It was a method torn from the pages of the oldest propaganda books. Tell a lowercase lie, and people won’t believe it. Tell a standard lie, and people will doubt it. But tell a lie in all caps, a lie of truly colossal proportions, and that people will have to believe. And although such a colossal lie, when told by a man of power and position, requires little in the way of actual proof, it is still vulnerable to a large enough burden of contrary evidence.
Ted Kosmatka (The Games)
What Power does present is something perhaps equally rare and surely as useful—an abundance of sheer good sense and plain speaking. To read it at the close of this troubled century is to be struck by the prescience of its warnings concerning the dangers of the control of media and propaganda, the shrewdness of its appreciation of the mass appeal of fascism, nazism, and Stalinism, and the wisdom of its admonitions concerning the spread of violence and intolerance even in democratic states. Power thus remains a book whose blend of rare good sense and uncommon wisdom speaks to us with as much eloquence and insight as ever.
Bertrand Russell (Power: A New Social Analysis (Routledge Classics))
The Washington regime’s leading internal thesis-which has not changed since 1933-is that Americans must be “tolerant” of the alien elements (which now number roughly 50% of the population), since, after all, these aliens are “brothers.” “Brotherhood” is glorified on all public occasions, by all public officials, is taught in the schools and preached in the churches, which have been coordinated into the master-plan of the Culturally-alien Washington regime. Newspapers, books, magazines, radio, television, films-all vomit forth the same “Brotherhood.” The “Brotherhood” propaganda is a ghastly caricature of the Christian idea of the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Man, but there is no religious intent to the propaganda. Its sole purpose is to destroy whatever exclusiveness, national feelings, or racial instincts may still remain in the American population after twenty years of national leprosy. The result of the “tolerance” and “brotherhood” campaign is that the alien enjoys a superior position in America-he can demand to be “tolerated.” The American can demand nothing. The tragic fact is that the attenuation of the national instincts has proceeded so far that one cannot envisage how a Nationalist Revolution would be even possible in America.
Francis Parker Yockey
The myth of violated innocence meant that the rebel stockpiling of war supplies in recent months must remain obscure, along with details about the colony’s deft, robust call to arms. A narrative congealed, and with it a brilliant propaganda stratagem: Gage was the aggressor; redcoats fired first; helpless civilians had been slaughtered.
Rick Atkinson (The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777 (The Revolution Trilogy Book 1))
Political indoctrination was geared towards producing activists. The propaganda image of the ideal child was a precocious political orator mouthing agitprop. Communism could not be taught from books, educational thinkers maintained. It had to be instilled through the whole life of the school, which was in turn to be connected to the broader world of politics through extra-curricular activities, such as celebrating Soviet holidays, joining public marches, reading newspapers and organizing school debates and trials. The idea was to initiate the children into the practices, cults and rituals of the Soviet system so that they would grow up to become loyal and active Communists.
Orlando Figes (The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia)
The most important moment in religious history was when Pontius Pilate asked Jesus Christ, “What is truth?” This was the ideal opportunity for “God” to finally explain reality and truth to humanity. What, then, was Christ’s answer? Er, nothing. That dreadful silence reveals everything about mainstream religion and its inability to explain anything.
Mike Hockney (All the Rest is Propaganda (The God Series Book 12))
Judge the powerful by their actions, not their rhetoric; by their deeds, not their words. If democracy is so desirable and wonderful, why aren’t markets, CEOs, managers, bankers, entrepreneurs, monarchs, religious leaders, media moguls, and so on, democratically elected? If they’re not, those in charge don’t rate democracy at all but are advocates of something utterly different. To what is that those who rule us actually subscribe? It’s authoritarian, dictatorial plutocracy – rule by the entrenched, rich elites. That’s the principle by which the world is truly run. Democracy is just a stage show for the marks and suckers, the gullible sheeple that have been so dumbed down that they believe every lie the rich sell them.
Mike Hockney (All the Rest is Propaganda (The God Series Book 12))
Whether people’s sensibilities had been dulled by five years of incessant antisemitic propaganda, or whether their human instincts were inhibited by the clear threat of violence to themselves should they express open condemnation of the pogrom, the result was the same: the Nazis knew that they could take whatever further steps against the Jews they liked, and nobody was going to try to stop them.
Richard J. Evans (The Third Reich in Power (The Third Reich Trilogy Book, #2))
The twentieth century became an age of totalitarianism, culminating in the attempt of Hitler and Stalin to establish a new kind of political order based on total police control, terror, and the ruthless suppression and murder of real or imagined opponents in their millions on the one hand, and continual mass mobilization and enthusiasm whipped up by sophisticated propaganda methods on the other.30
Richard J. Evans (The Coming of the Third Reich (The Third Reich Trilogy Book 1))
*** THE CONTRADICTORY POLITICS OF ALEX STEINER *** Point One: He was a member of the Nazi Party but he did not hate the Jews, or anyone else for that matter. Point Two: Secretly, though, he couldn’t help feeling a percentage of relief (or worse – gladness!) when Jewish shop owners were put out of business – propaganda informed him that it was only a matter of time before a plague of Jewish tailors showed up and stole his customers. Point Three: But did that mean they should be driven out completely? Point Four: His family. Surely, he had to do whatever he could to support them. If that meant being in the Party, it meant being in the Party. Point Five: Somewhere, far down, there was an itch in his heart, but he made it a point not to scratch it. He was afraid of what might come leaking out.
Markus Zusak (The Book Thief)
The nobles had made reading unpopular, as it showed that one couldn’t afford to buy spells or magical devices, since one had to get knowledge to do things the ordinary way; even if this view held little logic, the king himself was known to insult readers as “bookfaces” or “unable to think for themselves, so they need to spout what others have said,” and these opinions became popular, as did most views expressed by the king or his son.
Colleen Chen (Dysmorphic Kingdom)
The biblical writers were human like us, and nothing is gained by thinking otherwise. Someone might say, “Well, okay, sure they were human, obviously, but the biblical writers were also inspired, directed by God in what to write, and so not simply ordinary human writers.” I get the point. To see the Bible as inspired by God is certainly the mainstream view in the history of Christianity (and Judaism), but what that means exactly and how it works out in detail have proved to be quite tough nuts to crack. Answers abound (and conflict) and no one has cracked the code, including me. But any explanation of what it means for God to inspire human beings to write things down would need to account for the diverse (not to mention ancient and ambiguous) Bible we have before us. Any explanation that needs to minimize, cover up, or push these self-evident biblical characteristics aside isn’t really an explanation; it’s propaganda.
Peter Enns (How the Bible Actually Works: In Which I Explain How An Ancient, Ambiguous, and Diverse Book Leads Us to Wisdom Rather Than Answers—and Why That’s Great News)
Only one thing, in those years, drew from her a cry of fury. This was the publication, in 1563, of a single, stout book. It was known as Foxe’s Book of Martyrs; and it was an astonishing feat of propaganda. For this book, carefully written to evoke every man’s pity and rage, described in detail the martyrs of England – by which it meant those Protestants who had perished under Bloody Mary. Of the Catholics who had suffered martyrdom before then, it said not a word. That some of these Protestants, like vicious old Latimer, had been burners and torturers themselves, it conveniently forgot. The sale of the book was prodigious. Soon, it seemed, only Catholic persecution of Protestants had ever existed. “ ’Tis a lie,” Susan would protest. “And I fear it will persist.” It would indeed. Foxe’s Book of Martyrs was destined to be read in families, to give warning to children, and to shape English people’s perception of the Catholic Church for generations.
Edward Rutherfurd (London)
Returning to ourselves is confusing at first. It’s not as simple as listening for the voices inside of us. Because sometimes the voices inside of us, which we’ve assumed speak Truth, are just the voices of human beings who told us what to believe. Often the internal voice telling us who God is and what God approves of is not God; it’s our indoctrination. It’s an echo of the voice of a teacher, a parent, a preacher—someone who has claimed to represent God to us. Many of those people have been well meaning, and others have only sought to control us. Either way, not a single one of them has been God’s appointed spokesperson. Not a single one of them has more God in her than you do. There is no church that owns God. There is no religion that owns God. There are no gatekeepers. None of this is that easy. There is no outsourcing your faith. There is just you and God. Some of the hardest and most important work of our lives is learning to separate the voices of teachers from wisdom, propaganda from truth, fear from love and in this case: the voices of God’s self-appointed representatives from the voice of God Herself. When choosing between something you Know and something other people taught you to believe, choose what you Know. As Whitman said, “Re-examine all you have been told in school or church or in any book, and dismiss whatever insults your own soul.” Having the courage to dismiss what insults your soul is a matter of life or death.
Glennon Doyle (Untamed)
But at bottom it is always a writer’s tendency, his “purpose,” his “message,” that makes him liked or disliked. The proof of this is the extreme difficulty of seeing any literary merit in a book that seriously damages your deepest beliefs. And no book is ever truly neutral. Some or other tendency is always discernible, in verse as much as in prose, even if it does no more than determine the form and the choice of imagery. But poets who attain wide popularity, like Housman, are as a rule definitely gnomic writers.
George Orwell (All Art Is Propaganda: Critical Essays)
This is a political age. War, Fascism, concentration camps, rubber truncheons, atomic bombs, etc., are what we daily think about, and therefore to a great extent what we write about, even when we do not name them openly. We cannot help this. When you are on a sinking ship, your thoughts will be about sinking ships. But not only is our subject-matter narrowed, but our whole attitude towards literature is coloured by loyalties which we at least intermittently realise to be non-literary. I often have the feeling that even at the best of times literary criticism is fraudulent, since in the absence of any accepted standards whatever—any external reference which can give meaning to the statement that such and such a book is “good” or “bad”—every literary judgement consists in trumping up a set of rules to justify an instinctive preference. One’s real reaction to a book, when one has a reaction at all, is usually “I like this book” or “I don’t like it,” and what follows is a rationalisation. But “I like this book” is not, I think, a non-literary reaction; the non-literary reaction is “This book is on my side, and therefore I must discover merits in it.” Of course, when one praises a book for political reasons one may be emotionally sincere, in the sense that one does feel strong approval of it, but also it often happens that party solidarity demands a plain lie. Anyone used to reviewing books for political periodicals is well aware of this. In general, if you are writing for a paper that you are in agreement with, you sin by commission, and if for a paper of the opposite stamp, by omission.
George Orwell (All Art Is Propaganda: Critical Essays)
It is natural if you feel as strongly as most decent people do about racial discrimination to welcome books that give it short shrift; but to assess books on their racial attitude rather than their literary value, and still more to look on books as ammunition in the battle, is to take a further and still more dangerous step from literature-as-morality to literature-as-propaganda—a move toward conditions in which, hitherto, literary art has signally failed to thrive. ("Didacticism in Modern Dress" from Only Connect (2nd ed., 1980).
John Rowe Townsend
I dare to hope that search engines and social media algorithms will be optimized for truth and social relevance rather than simply showing people what they want to see; that there will be independent, third-party algorithms that rate the veracity of headlines, websites, and news stories in real time, allowing users to more quickly sift through the propaganda-laden garbage and get closer to evidence-based truth; that there will be actual respect for empirically tested data, because in an infinite sea of possible beliefs, evidence is the only life preserver we’ve got.
Mark Manson (Everything Is F*cked: A Book About Hope)
Several of the inventions and discoveries which have made the modern world possible (the electric telegraph, the breech-loading gun, india-rubber, coal gas, wood-pulp paper) first appeared in Dickens’s lifetime, but he scarcely notes them in his books. Nothing is queerer than the vagueness with which he speaks of Doyce’s “invention” in Little Dorrit. It is represented as something extremely ingenious and revolutionary, “of great importance to his country and his fellow-creatures,” and it is also an important minor link in the book; yet we are never told what the “invention” is!
George Orwell (All Art Is Propaganda: Critical Essays)
This is the origin of the central idea of August, 1914 which, moreover, coincides with the theme of the military propaganda of Kaiser Germany. Once he took this line, Solzhenitsyn continued to harp on it, vilifying all things Russian. However, the description of fighting in East Prussia in August, 1914, as given in Guchkov's and Solzhenitsyn's books, was a far cry from the actual facts. It is important to keep in mind that Western propaganda has gone to great lengths to present Solzhenitsyn as an authority on the events which he describes supposedly on the basis of his own experience.
Nikolai N. Yakovlev (Solzhenitsyn's Archipelago of Lies)
The Bolsheviks did not intend to sit back and wait for these revolutions to unfold. As the revolutionary vanguard, they hoped to facilitate the coming turmoil through propaganda, subterfuge, and even warfare.61 In the spring of 1919 they had set up the Communist International, popularly known as the Comintern, a body officially dedicated to the overthrow of capitalist regimes according to a Leninist blueprint, as outlined in books such as What Is to Be Done? (Lenin’s furious denunciation of social democracy and left-wing pluralism, published in 1902).62 In practice, as Richard Pipes has written, the Comintern constituted a “declaration of war on all the existing governments.”63
Anne Applebaum (Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956)
In each of the following chapters, dealing in turn with policing and repression, culture and propaganda, religion and education, the economy, society and everyday life, racial policy and antisemitism, and foreign policy, the overriding imperative of preparing Germany and its people for a major war emerges clearly as the common thread. But that imperative was neither rational in itself, nor followed in a coherent way. In one area after another, the contradictions and inner irrationalities of the regime emerge; the Nazi's headlong rush to war contained the seeds of the Third Reich's eventual destruction. How and why this should be so is one of the major questions that run through this book and binds its separate parts together. So do many further questions: about the extent to which the Third Reich won over the German people; the manner in which it worked; the degree to which Hitler, rather than broader systematic factors inherent in the structure of the Third Reich as a whole, drove policy onward; the possibilities of opposition, resistence, and dissent or even non-conformity to the dictates of National Socialism under a dictatorship that claimed the total allegiance of all its citizens; the nature of the Third Reich's relationship with modernity; the ways in which its policies in different areas resembled, or differed from, those pursued elsewhere in Europe and beyond during the 1930s; and much more besides.
Richard J. Evans (The Third Reich in Power (The History of the Third Reich, #2))
When I was a kid people used to say one could travel the entire world just by sitting in a library and reading books. Sadly, in the age of billionaire-controlled social media functioning and governing bodies and minds based on carefully engineered algorithms, I don’t believe this is true anymore. The saying should be revised in our times to be ‘one could hate the entire world and see everyone as a villain or an enemy just by browsing through reels and social posts carefully selected to confirm one’s limited knowledge, perspective, and prejudices.’ With that in mind, we need more than ever to master the art of traveling, whether we go near or far. We need to undo the unreasonable, amplified, and exaggerated fear of strangers." [From “Can We Travel Without Being Tourists?” published on CounterPunch on March 15, 2024]
Louis Yako
Abrahamism is set up in such a way that God cannot punish anyone, only reward them with heaven. Someone else has to do the punishing, hence “Satan”. But if Satan is God’s sworn enemy why would he do God’s punishing for him? Why wouldn’t he reward those who rejected God, exactly as he’d done? They’re on his side. They’re allies, not souls to be punished. Abrahamism promotes a notion that the “good guys” can never punish anyone, but Abrahamism is also based on the eternal punishment of the “bad guys”. So, the logic, or rather illogic, of Abrahamism requires the bad guys to organise their own punishment. But why would they? What’s in it for them? Moreover, the bad guy head honcho is supposed to be the punisher in chief. But why would he punish people who had disobeyed God? Why wouldn’t he have a party with them? Abrahamism is wholly devoid of sense.
Mike Hockney (All the Rest is Propaganda (The God Series Book 12))
Ricorderete certo questa scena vista in decine di brutti film: un ragazzo e una ragazza si tengono per mano e corrono in un bel paesaggio primaverile (o estivo). Corrono, corrono, corrono e ridono. Le risa dei due corridori devono annunciare al mondo intero e agli spettatori di tutti i cinema: siamo felici, siamo contenti di essere al mondo, siamo d'accordo con l'essere! È una scena stupida, uno stereotipo, e tuttavia esprime un atteggiamento umano fondamentale: il riso serio, il riso al di là dello scherzo. Tutte le chiese, tutti i fabbricanti di biancheria, tutti i generali, tutti i partiti politici sono d'accordo su questo riso e tutti si precipitano a piazzare l'immagine dei due che corrono ridendo sui manifesti che fanno propaganda alla loro religione, ai loro prodotti, alla loro ideologia, al loro popolo, al loro sesso e al loro detersivo.
Milan Kundera (The Book of Laughter and Forgetting)
Science? The Savage frowned. He knew the word. But what it exactly signified he could not say. Shakespeare and the old men of the pueblo had never mentioned science, and from Linda he had only gathered the vaguest hints: science was something you made helicopters with, some thing that caused you to laugh at the Corn Dances, something that prevented you from being wrinkled and losing your teeth. He made a desperate effort to take the Controller's meaning. "Yes," Mustapha Mond was saying, "that's another item in the cost of stability. It isn't only art that's incompatible with happiness; it's also science. Science is dangerous; we have to keep it most carefully chained and muzzled." "What?" said Helmholtz, in astonishment. "But we're always saying that science is everything. It's a hypnopædic platitude." "Three times a week between thirteen and seventeen," put in Bernard. "And all the science propaganda we do at the College …" "Yes; but what sort of science?" asked Mustapha Mond sarcastically. "You've had no scientific training, so you can't judge. I was a pretty good physicist in my time. Too good–good enough to realize that all our science is just a cookery book, with an orthodox theory of cooking that nobody's allowed to question, and a list of recipes that mustn't be added to except by special permission from the head cook. I'm the head cook now. But I was an inquisitive young scullion once. I started doing a bit of cooking on my own. Unorthodox cooking, illicit cooking. A bit of real science, in fact." He was silent. "What happened?" asked Helmholtz Watson. The Controller sighed. "Very nearly what's going to happen to you young men. I was on the point of being sent to an island.
Aldous Huxley (Brave New World)
Hitler, then, as his future Reichsbank president and Minister of Economics says, was beginning to see the men in Germany who had the money, and he was telling them more or less what they wanted to hear. The party needed large sums to finance election campaigns, pay the bill for its widespread and intensified propaganda, meet the payroll of hundreds of full-time officials and maintain the private armies of the S.A. and the S.S., which by the end of 1930 numbered more than 100,000 men—a larger force than the Reichswehr. The businessmen and the bankers were not the only financial sources—the, party raised sizable sums from dues, assessments, collections and the sale of party newspapers, books and periodicals—but they were the largest. And the more money they gave the Nazis, the less they would have for the other conservative parties which they had been supporting hitherto.
William L. Shirer (The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany)
In the same month that Corey extended his invitation for food or caffeine, a major American publisher issued my follow-up to I Hate the Internet. It was a novel that ended up with the title The Future Won’t Be Long. It was a massive commercial failure. Less than 300 copies sold in its first six months! I Hate the Internet sold 300 copies in its first two weeks! Reader, this was shocking. If for no other reason than the simple fact that The Future Won’t Be Long was published by Penguin Random House. Penguin Random House is the biggest publishing conglomerate in the world. It’s a multibillion-dollar multinational corporation owned by another multibillion-dollar multinational corporation called Bertelsmann, which spent much of World War Two producing Nazi propaganda and using Jewish slaves to work in its factories. My book was backed by Nazi money! And it still failed!
Jarett Kobek (Only Americans Burn in Hell)
[Huxley's Perennial Philosophy is concerned with] the need to love the earth and respect nature instead of following the example of those who 'chopped down vast forests to provide the newsprint demanded by that universal literacy which was to make the world safe for intelligence and democracy, and got wholesale erosion, pulp magazines, and organs of Fascist, Communist, capitalist, and nationalist propaganda.' He attacked 'technological imperialism' and the mechanisation which was 'increasing the power of a minority to exercise a co-ersive control over the lives of their fellows' and 'the popular philosophy of life... now moulded by advertising copy whose one idea is to persuade everybody to be as extroverted and uninhibitedly greedy as possible, since of course it is only the possessive, the restless, the distracted, who spend money on the things that advertisers want to sell.
Nicholas Murray (Aldous Huxley: A Biography (Thomas Dunne Books))
Allowing the war-prone individuals, bent on evil, to gain power in governments must be one of the most significant reasons that wars erupt. Individuals with prowar inclinations are naturally aggressive and seek power over others. As Friedrich Hayek argued in his book The Road to Serfdom, “the worst get on top.” The power seekers also convince themselves that they are superior to average people and have a moral responsibility to use force to mold the world as they see fit. The propaganda is that war is for the sake of “goodness and righteousness.” Isabel Paterson described it in her book The God of the Machine as “the humanitarian with a guillotine.” Those who are more prone to peace tend to be complacent and to not resist the propaganda required to mobilize otherwise peaceful people to fight and die for the lies told and the false noble goals proposed by the self-appointed moral leaders.
Ron Paul (Swords into Plowshares: A Life in Wartime and a Future of Peace and Prosperity)
And all the while everyone who uses his brain knows that Socialism, as a world-system and wholeheartedly applied, is a way out. It would at least ensure our getting enough to eat even if it deprived us of everything else. Indeed, from one point of view, Socialism is such elementary common sense that I am sometimes amazed that it has not established itself already. The world is a raft sailing through space with, potentially, plenty of provisions for everybody; the idea that we must all cooperate and see to it that everyone does his fair share of the work and gets his fair share of the provisions seems so blatantly obvious that one would say that no one could possibly fail to accept it unless he had some corrupt motive for clinging to the present system. Yet the fact that we have got to face is that Socialism is not establishing itself. Instead of going forward, the cause of Socialism is visibly going back. At this moment Socialists almost everywhere are in retreat before the onslaught of Fascism, and events are moving at terrible speed. As I write this the Spanish Fascist forces are bombarding Madrid, and it is quite likely that before the book is printed we shall have another Fascist country to add to the list, not to mention a Fascist control of the Mediterranean which may have the effect of delivering British foreign policy into the hands of Mussolini. I do not, however, want here to discuss the wider political issues. What I am concerned with is the fact that Socialism is losing ground exactly where it ought to be gaining it. With so much in its favour—for every empty belly is an argument for Socialism—the idea of Socialism is less widely accepted than it was ten years ago. The average thinking person nowadays is not merely not a Socialist, he is actively hostile to Socialism. This must be due chiefly to mistaken methods of propaganda. It means that Socialism, in the form of which it is now presented to us, has about it something inherently distasteful—something that drives away the very people who ought to be nocking to its support.
George Orwell (The Road to Wigan Pier)
If it appears that the black mass developed from a literary invention of the church, to a depraved commercial actuality, to a psychodrama for dilettantes and iconoclasts, to an ace in the hold for popular media... then where does it fit into the true nature of Satanism - and who was practicing Satanic magic in those years beyond 1666? The answer to this riddle lies in another. Is the person generally considered to be a Satanist really practicing Satanism in its true sense, or rather from the point of view taken by opinion makers of heavenly persuasion? It has often been said, and rightly so, that all of the books about the Devil have been written by the agents of God. It is, therefore, quite easy to understand how a certain breed of devil worshippers was created through the inventions of theologians. This erstwhile "evil" character is not necessarily practicing true Satanism. Nor is he a living embodiment of the element of untrammeled pride or majesty of self which gave the post-Pagan world the church-man's definition of evil. He is instead the by-product of later and more elaborate propaganda.
Anton Szandor LaVey (The Satanic Bible)
Like ending the life of a czar in their native Russia, Goldman and Berkman were convinced that Frick’s death would be a mortal blow to the ruling class. To them, it was not murder. “A revolutionist would rather perish a thousand times than be guilty of what is ordinarily called murder,” Berkman said. But this was different. “To remove a tyrant is an act of liberation, the giving of life and opportunity to an oppressed people.” “Could anything be nobler than to die for a sublime cause?” Berkman asked. He located his copy of The Science of Revolutionary Warfare by Johann Most. The author, who had been one of Goldman’s bedmates, was the best-known anarchist in New York. He was notorious for promoting the “propaganda of the deed,” the idea of conducting violent political acts to inspire others. The book convinced Berkman that the best course of action would be to construct a bomb with a fuse. This way, he could survive the attack and use his trial to justify his actions. “Of course,” he told Goldman, “I will be condemned to death. I will die proudly in the assurance that I gave my life for the people.
James McGrath Morris (Revolution By Murder: Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, and the Plot to Kill Henry Clay Frick (Kindle Single))
On the question of genetics and behavior, the egalitarians and the liberal media have tightly controlled public discourse, so for decades, only their side has been presented to the public. Is it any wonder the public accepts what they say uncritically? It’s certainly not anyone’s fault for believing it. If I didn’t happen to study and do research on IQ, I’d probably believe it, too. But then maybe someday, I might think to myself, “Why not just see what the other side has to say?” Many, many people are incapable of doing this, because they’re terrified the other side might be right, and to discover that they’ve been completely wrong would be such a jolt to their psyches they might never recover. Anyway, just imagine I summoned up the courage to venture into forbidden territory – I might read one really good book, such as The Bell Curve, by Herrnstein and Murray. I’d think to myself, “Gee, what a totally different world this is! It’s not a pretentious piece of propaganda like Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man– it’s down-to-earth, clearly stated, interesting, even engrossing. Hmmm . . . kind of exciting!
Marian Van Court
Close to forty thousand Germans gathered in front of Berlin’s opera house on May 10, 1933, as a parade of swastika-wearing students and beer-hall thugs carrying torches tossed books into a huge bonfire. Ordinary citizens poured forth carrying volumes looted from libraries and private homes. “Jewish intellectualism is dead,” propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, his face fiery, yelled from the podium. “The German soul can again express itself.” What happened in Germany in 1933 was not just a brutality perpetrated by thuggish leaders and abetted by ignorant mobs. It was also, as Einstein described, “the utter failure of the so-called intellectual aristocracy.” Einstein and other Jews were ousted from what had been among the world’s greatest citadels of open-minded inquiry, and those who remained did little to resist. It represented the triumph of the ilk of Philipp Lenard, Einstein’s longtime anti-Semitic baiter, who was named by Hitler to be the new chief of Aryan science. “We must recognize that it is unworthy of a German to be the intellectual follower of a Jew,” Lenard exulted that May. “Heil Hitler!” It would be a dozen years before Allied troops would fight their way in and oust him from that role.41 Le
Walter Isaacson (Einstein: His Life and Universe)
WHO WAS J.F. LEHMANN? This book postulates that Adolf Hitler made a subtle, but all-important shift from proselytizing the myth of Germans as the oppressed victims of an “international Jewish conspiracy” to that of the superior race and oppressor because of J.F. Lehmann. It is not until after J.F. Lehmann brought Hitler the infamous Baur-Fischer-Lenz book on eugenics that Hitler’s speeches shifted from the stab-in-the-back myth, or the “Dolchstoßlegende,” with Germans as the oppressed victims of betrayal, to the eugenic propaganda of Germans as the pinnacle of white-supremacy. Weakness and superiority are incompatible attributes, and J.F. Lehmann is responsible for the shift away from the weakness inherent in victimhood to a racial superiority. Thus, it begs to question, who was this pivotal figure in Adolf Hitler's life, and why is his name and history not part of the commonly accepted history of The Holocaust? Nothing of The Holocaust or World War II can be understood without documenting who was Julius Friedrich Lehmann. Yet, J.F. Lehmann barely makes it onto the radar of even the most thorough books on the subject, and then only to name him as the person who delivered the Baur-Fischer-Lenz book to Adolf Hitler at Landsberg prison.
A.E. Samaan (From a "Race of Masters" to a "Master Race": 1948 to 1848)
No ordinary person in history has willingly gone to war on behalf of the rich elite. It has been said that no one would ever fight in the name of capitalism. There are no martyrs for capitalism, no fiery, inspiring speeches, no people pledging to fight for it to their last breath. Who would go to the stake for the credo “Greed is good”? Capitalism never stirs the blood. It makes no contact with people’s souls. It has no heart. It’s all about the Profit Principle. It’s about private wealth and public exploitation. People would fight against capitalism, never for it. So, capitalism cunningly rebranded itself as “Freedom and Democracy”, and those are things for which people would and do fight. Whenever you hear the rhetoric of freedom and democracy, you can be sure you are listening to the propaganda of a cabal of superrich capitalists, manipulating you to fight on their behalf, in defence of their extortionate profits. Dumbocracy – A political system in which stupid people think they have power when, in fact, all decisions are taken by the rich. Freedumb and Dumbocracy – only the most stupid people on earth would fall for the lies of the rich. Freedom for what – to go shopping for capitalist goods? Democracy – freedom to vote for whomever the rich elite put on your ballot paper. Wake up!
Adam Weishaupt (OWO (The Anti-Elite Series Book 5))
Yes, do that,” Ignatius said excitedly. “Begin organizing at every level.” “Oh, I never guessed that you would be such a fun person to know. You were so hostile in that dreadful, tacky bar.” “My being has many facets.” “You amaze me.” The young man stared at Ignatius’ outfit. “To think that they’re letting you run around loose. In a way, I respect you.” “Thank you very much.” Ignatius’ voice was smooth, pleased. “Most fools don’t comprehend my worldview at all.” “I wouldn’t imagine so.” “I suspect that beneath your offensively and vulgarly effeminate façade there may be a soul of sorts. Have you read widely in Boethius?” “Who? Oh, heavens no. I never even read newspapers.” “Then you must begin a reading program immediately so that you may understand the crises of our age,” Ignatius said solemnly. “Begin with the late Romans, including Boethius, of course. Then you should dip rather extensively into early Medieval. You may skip the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. That is mostly dangerous propaganda. Now that I think of it, you had better skip the Romantics and the Victorians, too. For the contemporary period, you should study some selected comic books.” “You’re fantastic.” “I recommend Batman especially, for he tends to transcend the abysmal society in which he’s found himself. His morality is rather rigid, also. I rather respect Batman.
John Kennedy Toole (A Confederacy of Dunces)
On the playground, “cooties” seems harmless and innocuous (unless you’ve been on the other end of that game). But sociomoral disgust can quickly scale up in intensity and become the engine behind the very worst of human atrocities. During times of social stress or chaos, those persons or populations already associated with disgust properties will provide the community a location of blame, fear, and paranoia. In short, sociomoral disgust is implicated in the creation of monsters and scapegoats, where outgroup members are demonized and selected for exclusion or elimination. As David Gilmore writes in his book Monsters, a monster is “the demonization of the ‘Other’ in the image of the monster as a political device for scapegoating those whom the rules of society deem impure or unworthy - the transgressors and deviants.” These deviants are considered to be “deformed, amoral, [and] unsocialized to the point of inhumanness.” Take, for an example, the Nazi propaganda film The Eternal Jew, where an early shot in the film showed rats emerging from a sewer juxtaposed with a crowd of Jewish persons in a Polish city. In America, as another example, proponents of anti-gay legislation have circulated pamphlets claiming that gay men eat human feces and drink human blood. In each of these instances, sociomoral disgust is used to demonize and scapegoat populations, creating “monsters” who are threatening to society.
Richard Beck (Unclean: Meditations on Purity, Hospitality, and Mortality)
After years of fighting, the war was a complete stalemate and would have ended almost immediately in a negotiated settlement (as had most other European conflicts) had not the U.S. declared war on Germany.   As soon as Wilson's re-election had been engineered through the "he kept us out of war" slogan, a complete reversal of propaganda was instituted. In those days before radio and television, public opinion was controlled almost exclusively by newspapers. Many of the major newspapers were controlled by the Federal Reserve crowd. Now they began beating the drums over the "inevitability of war." Arthur Ponsonby, a memebr of the British parliament, admitted in his book Falsehood In War Time (E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., New York, 1928): "There must have been more deliberate lying in the world from 1914 to 1918 than in any other period of the world's history." Propaganda concerning the war was heavily one-sided. Although after the war many historians admitted that one side was as guilty as the other in starting the war, Germany was pictured as a militaristic monster which wanted to rule the world. Remember, this picture was painted by Britain which had its soldiers in more countries around the world than all other nations put together. So-called "Prussian militarism" did exist, but it was no threat to conquer the world. Meanwhile, the sun never set on the British Empire! Actually, the Germans were proving to be tough business competitors in the world's markets and the British did not approve.
Gary Allen (None Dare Call It Conspiracy)
If “bullshit,” as opposed to “bull,” is a distinctively modern linguistic innovation, that could have something to do with other distinctively modern things, like advertising, public relations, political propaganda, and schools of education. “One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit,” Harry Frankfurt, a distinguished moral philosopher who is professor emeritus at Princeton, says. The ubiquity of bullshit, he notes, is something that we have come to take for granted. Most of us are pretty confident of our ability to detect it, so we may not regard it as being all that harmful. We tend to take a more benign view of someone caught bullshitting than of someone caught lying. (“Never tell a lie when you can bullshit your way through,” a father counsels his son in an Eric Ambler novel.) All of this worries Frankfurt. We cannot really know the effect that bullshit has on us, he thinks, until we have a clearer understanding of what it is. That is why we need a theory of bullshit. Frankfurt’s own effort along these lines was contained in a paper that he presented more than three decades ago at a faculty seminar at Yale. Later, that paper appeared in a journal and then in a collection of Frankfurt’s writings; all the while, photocopies of it passed from fan to fan. In 2005, it was published as On Bullshit, a tiny book of sixty-seven spaciously printed pages that went on to become an improbable breakout success, spending half a year on the New York Times bestseller list.
Jim Holt (When Einstein Walked with Gödel: Excursions to the Edge of Thought)
Gadgetry will continue to relieve mankind of tedious jobs. Kitchen units will be devised that will prepare ‘automeals,’ heating water and converting it to coffee; toasting bread; frying, poaching or scrambling eggs, grilling bacon, and so on. Breakfasts will be ‘ordered’ the night before to be ready by a specified hour the next morning. Communications will become sight-sound and you will see as well as hear the person you telephone. The screen can be used not only to see the people you call but also for studying documents and photographs and reading passages from books. Synchronous satellites, hovering in space will make it possible for you to direct-dial any spot on earth, including the weather stations in Antarctica. [M]en will continue to withdraw from nature in order to create an environment that will suit them better. By 2014, electroluminescent panels will be in common use. Ceilings and walls will glow softly, and in a variety of colors that will change at the touch of a push button. Robots will neither be common nor very good in 2014, but they will be in existence. The appliances of 2014 will have no electric cords, of course, for they will be powered by long- lived batteries running on radioisotopes. “[H]ighways … in the more advanced sections of the world will have passed their peak in 2014; there will be increasing emphasis on transportation that makes the least possible contact with the surface. There will be aircraft, of course, but even ground travel will increasingly take to the air a foot or two off the ground. [V]ehicles with ‘Robot-brains’ … can be set for particular destinations … that will then proceed there without interference by the slow reflexes of a human driver. [W]all screens will have replaced the ordinary set; but transparent cubes will be making their appearance in which three-dimensional viewing will be possible. [T]he world population will be 6,500,000,000 and the population of the United States will be 350,000,000. All earth will be a single choked Manhattan by A.D. 2450 and society will collapse long before that! There will, therefore, be a worldwide propaganda drive in favor of birth control by rational and humane methods and, by 2014, it will undoubtedly have taken serious effect. Ordinary agriculture will keep up with great difficulty and there will be ‘farms’ turning to the more efficient micro-organisms. Processed yeast and algae products will be available in a variety of flavors. The world of A.D. 2014 will have few routine jobs that cannot be done better by some machine than by any human being. Mankind will therefore have become largely a race of machine tenders. Schools will have to be oriented in this direction…. All the high-school students will be taught the fundamentals of computer technology will become proficient in binary arithmetic and will be trained to perfection in the use of the computer languages that will have developed out of those like the contemporary “Fortran". [M]ankind will suffer badly from the disease of boredom, a disease spreading more widely each year and growing in intensity. This will have serious mental, emotional and sociological consequences, and I dare say that psychiatry will be far and away the most important medical specialty in 2014. [T]he most glorious single word in the vocabulary will have become work! in our a society of enforced leisure.
Isaac Asimov
I tell you, my friends, the trouble with this whole country is that so many are selfish! Here's a hundred and twenty million people, with ninety-five per cent of 'em only thinking of self, instead of turning to and helping the responsible business men to bring back prosperity! All these corrupt and self-seeking labor unions! Money grubbers! Thinking only of how much wages they can extort out of their unfortunate employer, with all the responsibilities he has to bear! "What this country needs is Discipline! Peace is a great dream, but maybe sometimes it's only a pipe dream! I'm not so sure—now this will shock you, but I want you to listen to one woman who will tell you the unadulterated hard truth instead of a lot of sentimental taffy, and I'm not sure but that we need to be in a real war again, in order to learn Discipline! We don't want all this highbrow intellectuality, all this book-learning. That's good enough in its way, but isn't it, after all, just a nice toy for grownups? No, what we all of us must have, if this great land is going to go on maintaining its high position among the Congress of Nations, is Discipline—Will Power—Character!" She turned prettily then toward General Edgeways and laughed: "You've been telling us about how to secure peace, but come on, now, General—just among us Rotarians and Rotary Anns—'fess up! With your great experience, don't you honest, cross-your-heart, think that perhaps—just maybe—when a country has gone money-mad, like all our labor unions and workmen, with their propaganda to hoist income taxes, so that the thrifty and industrious have to pay for the shiftless ne'er-do-weels, then maybe, to save their lazy souls and get some iron into them, a war might be a good thing?
Sinclair Lewis (It Can't Happen Here)
After turning their backs on working-class issues, traditionally one of the core concerns of left parties, Democrats stood by while right-wing demagoguery took root and thrived. Then, after the people absorbed a fifty-year blizzard of fake populist propaganda, Democrats turned against the idea of “the people” altogether.17 America was founded with the phrase “We the People,” but William Galston, co-inventor of the concept of the Learning Class, urges us to get over our obsession with popular sovereignty. As he writes in Anti-Pluralism, his 2018 attack on populism, “We should set aside this narrow and complacent conviction; there are viable alternatives to the people as sources of legitimacy.”18 There certainly are. In the pages of this book, we have seen anti-populists explain that they deserve to rule because they are better educated, or wealthier, or more rational, or harder working. The contemporary culture of constant moral scolding is in perfect accordance with this way of thinking; it is a new iteration of the old elitist fantasy. The liberal establishment I am describing in this chapter is anti-populist not merely because it dislikes Donald Trump—who is in no way a genuine populist—but because it is populism’s opposite in nearly every particular. Its political ambition for the people is not to bring them together in a reform movement but to scold them, to shame them, and to teach them to defer to their superiors. It doesn’t seek to punish Wall Street or Silicon Valley; indeed, the same bunch that now rebukes and cancels and blacklists could not find a way to punish elite bankers after the global financial crisis back in 2009. This liberalism desires to merge with these institutions of private privilege, to enlist their power for what it imagines to be “good.
Thomas Frank (The People, No: The War on Populism and the Fight for Democracy)
The First World War legitimized violence to a degree that not even Bismarck’s wars of unification in 1864-70 had been able to do. Before the war, Germans even of widely differing and bitterly opposed political beliefs had been able to discuss their differences without resorting to violence.152 After 1918, however, things were entirely different. The changed climate could already be observed in parliamentary proceedings. These had remained relatively decorous under the Empire, but after 1918 they degenerated all too often into unseemly shouting matches, with each side showing open contempt for the other, and the chair unable to keep order. Far worse, however, was the situation on the streets, where all sides organized armed squads of thugs, fights and brawls became commonplace, and beatings-up and assassinations were widely used. Those who carried out these acts of violence were not only former soldiers, but also included men in their late teens and twenties who had been too young to fight in the war themselves and for whom civil violence became a way of legitimizing themselves in the face of the powerful myth of the older generation of front-soldiers.153 Not untypical was the experience of the young Raimund Pretzel, child of a well-to-do senior civil servant, who remembered later that he and his schoolfriends played war games all the time from 1914 to 1918, followed battle reports with avid interest, and with his entire generation ‘experienced war as a great, thrilling, enthralling game between nations, which provided far more excitement and emotional satisfaction than anything peace could offer; and that’, he added in the 1930s,‘has now become the underlying vision of Nazism.’154 War, armed conflict, violence and death were often for them abstract concepts, killing something they had read about and had processed in their adolescent minds under the influence of a propaganda that presented it as a heroic, necessary, patriotic act.155
Richard J. Evans (The Coming of the Third Reich (The Third Reich Trilogy Book 1))
We said that if you don't quench those flames at once, they will spread all over the world; you thought we were maniacs. At present we have the mania of trying to tell you about the killing, by hot steam, mass-electrocution and live burial of the total Jewish population of Europe. So far three million have died. It is the greatest mass-killing in recorded history; and it goes on daily, hourly, as regularly as the ticking of your watch. I have photographs before me on the desk while I am writing this, and that accounts for my emotion and bitterness. People died to smuggle them out of Poland; they thought it was worth while. The facts have been published in pamphlets, White Books, newspapers, magazines and what not. But the other day I met one of the best-known American journalists over here. He told me that in the course of some recent public opinion survey nine out of ten average American citizens, when asked whether they believed that the Nazis commit atrocities, answered that it was all propaganda lies, and that they didn't believe a word of it. As to this country, I have been lecturing now for three years to the troops and their attitude is the same. They don't believe in concentration camps, they don't believe in the starved children of Greece, in the shot hostages of France, in the mass-graves of Poland; they have never heard of Lidice, Treblinka or Belzec; you can convince them for an hour, then they shake themselves, their mental self-defence begins to work and in a week the shrug of incredulity has returned like a reflex temporarily weakened by a shock. Clearly all this is becoming a mania with me and my like. Clearly we must suffer from some morbid obsession, whereas the others are healthy and normal. But the characteristic symptom of maniacs is that they lose contact with reality and live in a phantasy world. So, perhaps, it is the other way round: perhaps it is we, the screamers, who react in a sound and healthy way to the reality which surrounds us, whereas you are the neurotics who totter about in a screened phantasy world because you lack the faculty to face the facts. Were it not so, this war would have been avoided, and those murdered within sight of your day-dreaming eyes would still be alive.
Arthur Koestler
When you have an honest heart, you do not get engaged nor get involved with any smear campaigns nor black propaganda! When you have an honest heart, you do not malign nor take advantage of generous people who helped and trusted you! When you have an honest heart, you do not shit on people whom you used and abused for three years! Do not fall into a political naïvety and become a victim or a doormat nor have your generosity and honest heart be used and abused by unscrupulous political movers, abusive, aggressive political harridans who scam gullible generous hearts by asking donations, funds, services, foods, urgent favours, and after using you and abusing your generosity, trust, and kindness; whereby these unscrupulous and deceptive political movers, abusive, aggressive political harridans intentionally and maliciously create forged screenshots of evidence convincing their audience or political groups that you are a mentally ill person, a brain-damaged person as they even brand you as "Sisang Baliw," or crazy Sisa, a threat, a risk, a danger, they maliciously and destructively red-tag your friends as communists, and they resort to calumny, libel and slander against you, to shame you, defame you, discredit you, blame you, hurt you, make you suffer for having known the truth of their deceptive global Operandi, and for something you didn’t do through their mob lynching, calumny, polemics mongering, forgery, and cyberbullying efforts. Their character assassination through libel and slander aims to ruin your integrity, persona, trustworthiness, and credibility with their destructive fabricated calumny, lies, identity theft, forged screenshots of polemics mongering, and framing up. Amidst all their forgery, fraud, libel and slander they committed: you have a right to defy and stop their habitual abuse without breaking the law and fight for your rights against any forms of aggression, public lynching, bullies, threats, blackmail, and their repetitive maltreatment or abuse, identity theft, forgery, deceptions fraud, scams, cyber libel, libel, and slander. When you defend human rights, you fight against corruption and injustice, help end impunity: be sure that you are not part of any misinformation, disinformation, smear campaigns and black propaganda. Do not serve, finance, or cater directly or indirectly for those dirty politicians. Those who are engaged in abusively dishonest ways do not serve to justify their end. Deceiving and scamming other people shall always be your lifetime self-inflicted karmic loss. Be a law-abiding citizen. Be respectful. Be honest. Be factual. Be truthful. You can be an effective human rights defender when you have clean and pure intentions, lawful and morally upright, and have an honest heart." ~ Angelica Hopes, an excerpt from Calunniatopia Book 1, Stronzata Trilogy Genre: inspirational, political, literary novel © 2021 Ana Angelica Abaya van Doorn
Angelica Hopes
With the false claim that the Germans murdered six million Jews, mostly in gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland during WWII, since the end of WWII, the world has been saturated with films, documentaries and books on the Holocaust. Anyone worldwide who dares to investigate the Jewish Holocaust claims, is branded an Anti-Semite and Holocaust Denier. In our democratic world, a person who is accused of a crime is deemed innocent until irrefutable evidence proves them guilty. What has happened to democracy in Germany, Poland, France and Switzerland where people accused of Holocaust Denial are not allowed to provide any evidence that would prove that they are not guilty? In the Middle Ages, people accused of being witches, were also allowed no defence and were burned at the stake. As burning at the stake and crucifiction is not allowed in today's world, the best that the Jewish leaders and holocaust promoters can achieve is incarceration where no one can hear claims backed by years of very thorough research. The Jewish success in blocking my book "The Answer Justice", their failed attempts to stop the book "Chutzpah" written by Norman Finkelstein whose mother and father were held in German concentration camps, the incarceration of revisionists Ernst Zundel and Germar Rudolf in Germany and David Irving in Austria: these are all desperate attempts to end what they call Holocaust Denial. The English historian David Irving was refused entry to Australia in 2003 at the behest of the Jewish community (representing only 0.4% of the Australian population) thus denying the right of the other 99.6% to hear what David Irving has to say. Proof of Jewish power was the blocking of the public viewing of David Irving's film. The Jewish owners of the building locked the film presentation out which resulted in the headline in the "Australian" newspaper of: " Outrage at Jewish bid to stop the film by David Irving called "The Search For Truth in History" . Sir Zelman Cowan who was Governor General of Australia and a man much reverred in the Jewish community, has stated in the Jewish Chronicle (London) that "The way to deal with people who claim the holocaust never happened, is to produce irrefutable evidence that it did happen". I agree 100% with Sir Zelman Cowan. I am quite certain that he and other Zionist Jewish (Ashkenazim) world leaders are aware that a United Nations or International forensic examination of the alleged gas chamber at No. 2 Crematorium at Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland, would irrefutably prove the truth to the world that xyclon B cyanide has never been used as alleged by world Jewry to kill Jews. In 1979 Professor W.D. Rubenstein stated: "If the Holocaust can be shown to be a Zionist myth, the strongest of all weapons in Israels's propaganda armory collapses. The Falsification of history by Zionist Jews in claiming the murder of six million Jews by Germany, constitutes the GREATEST ORGANISED CRIME that the world has known.
Alexander McClelland
No sound strategy for studying fascism can fail to examine the entire context in which it was formed and grew. Some approaches to fascism start with the crisis to which fascism was a response, at the risk of making the crisis into a cause. A crisis of capitalism, according to Marxists, gave birth to fascism. Unable to assure ever-expanding markets, ever-widening access to raw materials, and ever-willing cheap labor through the normal operation of constitutional regimes and free markets, capitalists were obliged, Marxists say, to find some new way to attain these ends by force. Others perceive the founding crisis as the inadequacy of liberal state and society (in the laissez-faire meaning of liberalism current at that time) to deal with the challenges of the post-1914 world. Wars and revolutions produced problems that parliament and the market—the main liberal solutions—appeared incapable of handling: the distortions of wartime command economies and the mass unemployment attendant upon demobilization; runaway inflation; increased social tensions and a rush toward social revolution; extension of the vote to masses of poorly educated citizens with no experience of civic responsibility; passions heightened by wartime propaganda; distortions of international trade and exchange by war debts and currency fluctuations. Fascism came forward with new solutions for these challenges. Fascists hated liberals as much as they hated socialists, but for different reasons. For fascists, the internationalist, socialist Left was the enemy and the liberals were the enemies’ accomplices. With their hands-off government, their trust in open discussion, their weak hold over mass opinion, and their reluctance to use force, liberals were, in fascist eyes, culpably incompetent guardians of the nation against the class warfare waged by the socialists. As for beleaguered middle-class liberals themselves, fearful of a rising Left, lacking the secret of mass appeal, facing the unpalatable choices offered them by the twentieth century, they have sometimes been as ready as conservatives to cooperate with fascists. Every strategy for understanding fascism must come to terms with the wide diversity of its national cases. The major question here is whether fascisms are more disparate than the other “isms.” This book takes the position that they are, because they reject any universal value other than the success of chosen peoples in a Darwinian struggle for primacy. The community comes before humankind in fascist values, and respecting individual rights or due process gave way to serving the destiny of the Volk or razza. Therefore each individual national fascist movement gives full expression to its own cultural particularism. Fascism, unlike the other “isms,” is not for export: each movement jealously guards its own recipe for national revival, and fascist leaders seem to feel little or no kinship with their foreign cousins. It has proved impossible to make any fascist “international” work.
Robert O. Paxton (The Anatomy of Fascism)
The Tale of Human Evolution The subject most often brought up by advocates of the theory of evolution is the subject of the origin of man. The Darwinist claim holds that modern man evolved from ape-like creatures. During this alleged evolutionary process, which is supposed to have started 4-5 million years ago, some "transitional forms" between modern man and his ancestors are supposed to have existed. According to this completely imaginary scenario, four basic "categories" are listed: 1. Australopithecus 2. Homo habilis 3. Homo erectus 4. Homo sapiens Evolutionists call man's so-called first ape-like ancestors Australopithecus, which means "South African ape." These living beings are actually nothing but an old ape species that has become extinct. Extensive research done on various Australopithecus specimens by two world famous anatomists from England and the USA, namely, Lord Solly Zuckerman and Prof. Charles Oxnard, shows that these apes belonged to an ordinary ape species that became extinct and bore no resemblance to humans. Evolutionists classify the next stage of human evolution as "homo," that is "man." According to their claim, the living beings in the Homo series are more developed than Australopithecus. Evolutionists devise a fanciful evolution scheme by arranging different fossils of these creatures in a particular order. This scheme is imaginary because it has never been proved that there is an evolutionary relation between these different classes. Ernst Mayr, one of the twentieth century's most important evolutionists, contends in his book One Long Argument that "particularly historical [puzzles] such as the origin of life or of Homo sapiens, are extremely difficult and may even resist a final, satisfying explanation." By outlining the link chain as Australopithecus > Homo habilis > Homo erectus > Homo sapiens, evolutionists imply that each of these species is one another's ancestor. However, recent findings of paleoanthropologists have revealed that Australopithecus, Homo habilis, and Homo erectus lived at different parts of the world at the same time. Moreover, a certain segment of humans classified as Homo erectus have lived up until very modern times. Homo sapiens neandarthalensis and Homo sapiens sapiens (modern man) co-existed in the same region. This situation apparently indicates the invalidity of the claim that they are ancestors of one another. Stephen Jay Gould explained this deadlock of the theory of evolution although he was himself one of the leading advocates of evolution in the twentieth century: What has become of our ladder if there are three coexisting lineages of hominids (A. africanus, the robust australopithecines, and H. habilis), none clearly derived from another? Moreover, none of the three display any evolutionary trends during their tenure on earth. Put briefly, the scenario of human evolution, which is "upheld" with the help of various drawings of some "half ape, half human" creatures appearing in the media and course books, that is, frankly, by means of propaganda, is nothing but a tale with no scientific foundation. Lord Solly Zuckerman, one of the most famous and respected scientists in the U.K., who carried out research on this subject for years and studied Australopithecus fossils for 15 years, finally concluded, despite being an evolutionist himself, that there is, in fact, no such family tree branching out from ape-like creatures to man.
Harun Yahya (Those Who Exhaust All Their Pleasures In This Life)
From 1961-1982 it was the most censored book in libraries and high schools across the US. School principals have branded it communist propaganda and teachers have been fired for assigning it to
James Morcan (The Orphan Conspiracies: 29 Conspiracy Theories from The Orphan Trilogy)
- Hitler prepared for battle by infiltrating Frances airwaves. Germany hired native-French broadcasters to unsuspecting listeners to tune in to amusing radio shows and music. Many listeners were oblivious to the propaganda was subtly included. These radio commentators expressed worry over the German army’s dominance and military strength, and predicted that France could not withstand an attack, The doubt Hitler’s radio programs planted in French minds quickly spread. Edmond Taylor, a correspondent for the Chicago Tribune who lived in France during this period, witnessed Hitler’s intricately choreographed propaganda campaign and how it crumbled Frances resolve. Describing it as a “strategy of terror,’ Taylor reported that Germany spent enormous amounts on propaganda and even bribed French newspapers to publish stories that confirmed the rumors of Germany’s superiority. According to Taylor, Germany’s war of ideas planted a sense of dread “in the of France that spread like a monstrous cancer, devouring all ocher emotional faculties [with] an irrational fear [that was] … uncontrollable.” So weakened was the confidence of the French that something as innocuous as a test of Frances air-raid-siren system generated ripples of panic; the mere innuendo of invasion somehow reinforced the idea that France would undoubtedly be defeated. Although the French government made a late attempt at launching an ideological counteroffensive by publicizing the need to defend freedom, it was as effective as telling citizens to protect themselves from a hurricane by opening an umbrella. When the invasion finally did come, France capitulated in six weeks. By similarly destroying the resolve of his enemies before invading them, Hitler defeated Poland, Finland, Denmark, Norway. Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg in addition to France, all in under a year. Over 230 million Europeans, once free, fell under Nazi rule.
Molly Guptill Manning (When Books Went to War: The Stories That Helped Us Win World War II)
No book can sell as the author.
Ljupka Cvetanova (The New Land)
We believe that the reduction of the citizen to an object of propaganda, private and public, is one of the greatest dangers to democracy. A prevalent notion is that the great mass of the people cannot understand and cannot form an independent judgment upon any matter; they cannot be educated, in the sense of developing their intellectual powers, but they can be bamboozled. The reiteration of slogans, the distortion of the news, the great storm of propaganda that beats upon the citizen twenty-four hours a day all his life long mean either that democracy must fall a prey to the loudest and most persistent propagandists or that the people must save themselves by strengthening their minds so that they can appraise the issues for themselves.
Mortimer J. Adler (Great Books of the Western World)
Novelists write fiction. Lawyers speak fiction.
Mike Hockney (All the Rest is Propaganda (The God Series Book 12))
The Big Lie: This is a propaganda technique and logical trick (fallacy). The expression was coined by Adolf Hitler, when he dictated his 1925 book, Mein Kampf, about the use of a lie so “colossal” that no one would believe that someone “could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.” The source of the big lie technique is in a particular passage, taken from chapter 10 of James Murphy’s translation of Mein Kampf. (Adolf Hitler,
Thomas Horn (Shadowland: From Jeffrey Epstein to the Clintons, from Obama and Biden to the Occult Elite, Exposing the Deep-State Actors at War with Christianity, Donald Trump, and America's Destiny)
The father of American propaganda, Edward Bernays,[cc] wrote in 1928 nearly a century ago in his seminal book Propaganda:
Joachim Hagopian (Pedophilia & Empire: Satan, Sodomy, & The Deep State: Chapter 2: Elite’s Sinister Agenda to Normalize and Decriminalize Pedophilia)
spouted leftist propaganda and anti-American hatred. In other words, there had been no significant changes at the network since the country fell apart.
Kurt Schlichter (Overlord (Kelly Turnbull/PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC Book 8))
This amounts to nothing more than misleading propaganda. The purpose is to create a climate of acceptance for the passage of legislation which will turn the majority of parents into criminals of the most heinous kind-those whose victims are defenseless children. The resulting body of law will play directly into the hands of ultraliberal social engineers as well as social activists within the professional community. The outward motive-the protection of children-conceals several more insidious ones: • The desire to expand and consolidate the power of the helping professions. At the present time, there is no law that says an individual must, under certain circumstances, submit to psychological evaluation and counseling. If they are written as is being suggested, however, antispanking laws will require exactly that. They will give helping professionals the power to define when the law has been broken, who is in need of "help" and how much, and when a certain parent's "rehabilitation" is complete. It is significant to note that in all of history the only other state to confer this much power on psychologists and their ilk was the former Soviet Union. • The desire to manipulate the inner workings of the American family; specifically, the desire to exercise significant control over the child-rearing process. Take it from someone who was, at one time, similarly guilty, a significant number of helping professionals possess a "save the world" mentality. They believe they know what's best for individuals, families, and children. The only problem, as they see it, is that most people are "in denial"-unwilling to recognize their need for help. This self-righteousness fuels a zealous, missionary attitude. And like the first missionaries to the New World, many helping professionals seem to believe that their vision of a perfect world justifies whatever means they deem necessary, including licensing parents, taking children away from parents they define as unfit, and the like. (For a close look at the social engineering being proposed by some professionals, see Debating Children's Lives, Mason and Gambrill, eds., Sage Publications, 1994).
John Rosemond (To Spank Or Not To Spank (John Rosemond Book 5) (Volume 5))
The Israeli social media strategy aimed to involve both domestic and global supporters of its military missions. By doing so, and asking backers to post their own supporting tweets, Face-book posts, or Instagram images, the IDF created a collective mission that other nations could easily mimic by stirring up nationalist fervor online. During Operation Pillar of Defense, the IDF encouraged supporters of Israel to both proudly share when “terrorists” were killed while at the same time reminding a global audience that the Jewish state was a victim. It was a form of mass conscription to the cause through the weaponization of social media.12 This was war as spectacle, and the IDF was spending big to make it happen. The IDF media budget allowed at least 70 officers and 2,000 soldiers to design, process, and disseminate official Israeli propaganda, and almost every social media platform was flooded with IDF content. Today, the IDF Instagram page regularly features pro-gay and pro-feminist messaging alongside its hard-line militaristic iconography.13 On October 1, 2021, the IDF posted across its social media platforms a photo of its headquarters swathed in pink light with this message: “For those who are fighting, for those who have passed, and for those who have survived, the IDF HQ is lit up pink this #BreastCancerAwarenessMonth.” Palestinian American activist Yousef Munayyer responded on Twitter: “An untold number of women in Gaza suffer from breast cancer and are routinely denied adequate treatment and timely lifesaving care because this military operates a brutal siege against over 2 million souls.” On Instagram, however, most of the comments below the post praised the IDF.
Antony Loewenstein (The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World)
The fact that so many were acting as repeater stations for anti-American propaganda was a difficult pill to swallow. These otherwise good and patriotic people simply couldn’t be bothered to do even a modicum of fact-checking. While disheartening, there would always be a percentage of disengaged citizens who didn’t live up to their societal responsibilities. The people who knew better, however, were the ones that really got his blood boiling. Next to corrupt politicians, the media grifters and digital con artists were the worst in his book. These people made their living not by telling people the truth, but by telling them anything and everything they wanted to hear. No lie was too outrageous.
Brad Thor (Dead Fall (Scot Harvath #22))
In February 1948, the Communist leader Klement Gottwald stepped out on the balcony of a Baroque palace in Prague to harangue hundreds of thousands of citizens massed in Old Town Square. That was a great turning point in the history of Bohemia. A fate­ful moment of the kind that occurs only once or twice a millennium. Gottwald was flanked by his comrades, with Clementis standing close to him. It was snowing and cold, and Gottwald was bareheaded. Bursting with solicitude, Clementis took off his fur hat and set it on Gottwald's head. The propaganda section made hundreds of thou­sands of copies of the photograph taken on the balcony where Gottwald, in a fur hat and surrounded by his comrades, spoke to the people. On that balcony the history of Communist Bohemia began. Every child knew that photograph, from seeing it on posters and in schoolbooks and museums. Four years later, Clementis was charged with trea­son and hanged. The propaganda section immediately made him vanish from history and, of course, from all photographs. Ever since, Gottwald has been alone on the balcony. Where Clementis stood, there is only the bare palace wall. Nothing remains of Clementis but the fur hat on Gottwald's head.
Milan Kundera (The Book of Laughter and Forgetting)
Unscrupulous political movers, dishonest politicians, and Machiavellian manipulators are among the endless toxic snakes of any society. ~ Angelica Hopes, an excerpt from Calunniatopia Book 1, Stronzata Trilogy
Angelica Hopes
What John did in the Book of Revelation, among other things, was create anti-Roman propaganda that drew its imagery from Israel’s prophetic traditions—above all, the writings of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel.
Elaine Pagels (Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation)
Then came the British Museum Massacre. Two thousand culture fans gassed with dichlorethyl sulphide. In the end, the Controllers realized that force was no good. The slower but infinitely surer methods of ectogenesis, Neo-Pavlovian conditioning and hypnopaedia. The discoveries of Pfitzner and Kawaguchi were at last made use of. An intensive propaganda against vivaparous reproduction accompanied by a campaign against the Past; by the closing of museums, the blowing up of historical monuments (luckily most of them had already been destroyed during the Nine Years' War); by the suppression of all books published before A.F. 150. There were some things called pyramids, for example and a man called Shakespeare. There was a thing called Christianity, the ethics and philosophy of under-consumption which was essential when there was under-production. But in an age of machines and the fixation of nitrogen they are positively a crime against society. All crosses had their tops cut and became T's. There was also a thing called God. We have the World State now. And Ford's Day celebrations, and Community Sings, and Solidarity Services. There was a thing called Heaven; but all the same they used to drink enormous quantities of alcohol. Like meat, like so much meat. There was a thing called the soul and a thing called immortality but they used to take morphia and cocaine. Two thousand pharmacologists and bio-chemists were subsidized in A.F. 178. Six years later it was being produced commercially. The perfect drug. Euphoric, narcotic, pleasantly hallucinant. All the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects. Take a holiday from reality whenever you like, and come back without so much as a headache or a mythology. It only remained to conquer old age. Gonadal hormones, transfusion of young blood, magnesium salts. All the physiological stigmata of old age have been abolished. And along with them, of course all the old man's mental peculiarities. Work, play – at sixty our powers ans tastes are what they were at seventeen. Old men in the bad old days used to renounce, retire, take to religion, spend their time reading, thinking – thinking!
Aldous Huxley (Brave New World)
The whole miserable and regrettable Capital incursion fiasco, where 4 Trump supporters died, was effectively turned around and dropped onto the head of President Trump and his movement as, in classic communist agitprop style, Trump and his movement were now to be blamed and denounced.
Charles Moscowitz (Toward Fascist America: 2021: The Year that Launched American Fascism (2021: A Series of Pamphlets by Charles Moscowitz Book 2))
Examples of this type of propaganda include the false and debunked portrayal of Trump as having mocked a disabled person, the false claim that Trump supported white supremacists and Nazis at the Charlottesville Virginia riots and the false claim that Trump supported a “Muslim ban.
Charles Moscowitz (Toward Fascist America: 2021: The Year that Launched American Fascism (2021: A Series of Pamphlets by Charles Moscowitz Book 2))
Indeed, the propaganda by the liberal elite that the Trump resistance is white supremacist, an idiom of propaganda which itself is indicative of a trend toward Nazism by employing the classic tactic of the big lie, has not worked and it will not likely fly regardless of their dominance over the main institutions of culture and media.
Charles Moscowitz (Toward Fascist America: 2021: The Year that Launched American Fascism (2021: A Series of Pamphlets by Charles Moscowitz Book 2))
The Trump model of nationalism, in contrast, and in spite of the propaganda and the lies that were directed against it by the other side, constitutes support for a limited state operating within the confines of a constitution that separates powers so as to better preserve, protect and defend individual liberty.
Charles Moscowitz (Toward Fascist America: 2021: The Year that Launched American Fascism (2021: A Series of Pamphlets by Charles Moscowitz Book 2))
It was later revealed, after the damage was done to the presidents reputation, that the Capitol incursion was already well underway before the president had finished delivering his speech where he said: I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.
Charles Moscowitz (Toward Fascist America: 2021: The Year that Launched American Fascism (2021: A Series of Pamphlets by Charles Moscowitz Book 2))
Windbag leftwing commentators, with their phony British accents and their odor of pseudointellectualism, could now drone on interminably with such garbage as comparing the Capital incursion to the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001 and to Pearl Harbor.
Charles Moscowitz (Toward Fascist America: 2021: The Year that Launched American Fascism (2021: A Series of Pamphlets by Charles Moscowitz Book 2))
Indeed, these destructive articles of propaganda, pounded into the minds of all of us by the anti-Trump media, have become articles of faith for the Trump deranged and their unwitting followers.
Charles Moscowitz (Toward Fascist America: 2021: The Year that Launched American Fascism (2021: A Series of Pamphlets by Charles Moscowitz Book 2))
Besides grabbing the opportunity to promote Trump as a racist, this side-step on the part of the media may have been a means by which to divert attention away from the legitimate issues that Trump raised, issues that were not helpful to the liberal narrative.
Charles Moscowitz (Toward Fascist America: 2021: The Year that Launched American Fascism (2021: A Series of Pamphlets by Charles Moscowitz Book 2))
Mohammed was a narcissist and egoist, determined that no one else should ever rival his glory and importance and so he deliberately set out to make it impossible for any Muslim to surpass him. It was very clever for Mohammed to call himself the seal of prophets and thus for the Koran to be the last word – cutting off any future changes, and making Mohammed’s elevated status as God’s messenger permanent. The Koran is asserted to be the verbatim word of God, the last word of God, the final revelation. One has to wonder why God had to make several attempts at his revelation in the first place, using several prophets. Why not just one prophet and one revelation, explaining everything forever? Why bother with a string of Jewish prophets, before inexplicable switching to an Arab prophet to be the most important prophet of all? Muslims believe that not Mohammed but Allah was the founder of Islam. Why did Allah not simply appear to the world and declare his message? Why use these bizarre intermediaries – these strange prophets? It makes no sense at all.
Mike Hockney (All the Rest is Propaganda (The God Series Book 12))
Islam is unquestionably sexist, patronising, paternal and patriarchal – just look at how it operates. Who has all the power, and who is covered up and left at home? The Koran openly states that women are inferior to men and men are allowed to beat them. Rationally, all Muslim women should reject and denounce Islam. However, no practising Muslim women are rational, so they have to invent all sorts of ways to explain why Islam is wonderful for women. Yes, it’s cognitive dissonance again. Insanely, they claim that wearing a burqa is empowering, liberating, and that they are choosing to wear it rather than being ordered to wear it (although most of them then admit that they interpret the Koran as mandating the wearing of the burqa). They say that they love being in the home rather than in the workplace. They say that they don’t need education because the Koran contains everything they need to know, and so on. People can explain away absolutely anything to themselves! Muslims are the masters at it.
Mike Hockney (All the Rest is Propaganda (The God Series Book 12))
L. Frank Baum’s book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which appeared in 1900, is often held to be a parable for the Populist campaign of William Jennings Bryan, who twice ran for president on the Free Silver platform—vowing to replace the gold standard with a bimetallic system that would allow the free creation of silver money alongside gold.22 As with the Greenbackers, one of the main constituencies for the movement was debtors: particularly, Midwestern farm families such as Dorothy’s, who had been facing a massive wave of foreclosures during the severe recession of the 1890s. According to the Populist reading, the Wicked Witches of the East and West represent the East and West Coast bankers (promoters of and benefactors from the tight money supply), the Scarecrow represented the farmers (who didn’t have the brains to avoid the debt trap), the Tin Woodsman was the industrial proletariat (who didn’t have the heart to act in solidarity with the farmers), the Cowardly Lion represented the political class (who didn’t have the courage to intervene). The yellow brick road, silver slippers, emerald city, and hapless Wizard presumably speak for themselves.23 “Oz” is of course the standard abbreviation for “ounce.”24 As an attempt to create a new myth, Baum’s story was remarkably effective. As political propaganda, less so.
David Graeber (Debt: The First 5,000 Years)
Descartes conceived of a malicious demon intent on deceiving us as much as possible. The Matrix has been characterised as an example of the work of the malicious demon. But surely Abrahamism is his greatest work. The malicious demon is the Abrahamic God. Has anyone ever told more lies than the prophets of this God? Are there any texts more full of deceit than the Torah, Bible and Koran? We are told that all religions promote peace and follow a divine Commandment of Thou Shalt Not Kill. Of course, this is nonsense. The Bible and Koran are full of death sentences for just about everything. What religion actually says is that you should be peaceful towards all those slavishly worshipping your God and mindlessly obeying every Commandment, but you should be deadly towards everyone else. “Peace” is peace on God’s terms, not those of human beings. All heretics, apostates, infidels, and transgressors are to be killed.
Mike Hockney (All the Rest is Propaganda (The God Series Book 12))
There are no “innocent” theories in science. All of them are ideologically, dogmatically, paradigmatically designed to deny idealism, rationalism and any hint of religion. There is not a single scientific theory that is not wholly predicated on the denial of idealism, rationalism and religion. You would not be allowed to be a scientist if you ever openly advanced any idealist, rationalist or religious arguments. If you did, you would be fired, or marginalised, or called a crank. Your funding would definitely be cut. All of this makes science a pseudoscience, a quasi-religion, a Church of Meaninglessness, a faith in purposelessness, a cult of irrationalism. Outside mainstream religion, it’s the most closedminded subject in the world. It’s the opposite of what its propaganda trumpets. It’s as bad in its own way as Islam.
Mike Hockney (The Sam Harris Delusion (The God Series Book 22))
Palestinian and Israeli narratives diverge over far more than the words that are commonly used for their respective national heroes, not least over the nature of the long and unresolved struggle between them over the same small territory on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean. Both are reflected throughout this book. Each is authentic, even if dismissed by the other side as propaganda or lies. Neither can be ignored. The conflict between these two peoples can only be understood by paying attention to how they see themselves and their history as well as each other. Narrative, in its simplest definition, is ‘the story a nation tells itself about itself’.
Ian Black (Enemies and Neighbors: Arabs and Jews in Palestine and Israel, 1917-2017)
Arendt wondered what drives an ordinary person to participate in or at least tolerate an industrialized plan to commit genocidal murder. Arendt sought to find out the main elements of Nazism to trace them back and to discover the underlying real political problems. In 1951 she published an iconic and controversial book on the subject the origins of totalitarianism. It is a wide ranging volume encompassing the rise of anti-Semitism, the role of propaganda and imperialism's fusion of racism and bureaucracy, but at the end of the book she turns to what appears to be a surprising factor loneliness. Totalitarianism bases itself on loneliness which is amongst the most radical and desperate experiences of man. Finding it said Arendt in those whose chief characteristic is not brutality and backwardness at his isolation and lack of normal social relationships, she argues that for those who feel they have no place in society it is through surrendering their individual selves to ideology that the lonely rediscover their purpose and self respect. Loneliness or the experience of not belonging to the world at all, is she writes the essence of totalitarian government, preparation of it’s executioners and victims. The loneliness Arendt echoes key aspects of my definition, feelings of marginalization and powerlessness, of being isolated, excluded, and bereft of status and support, and these dimensions of loneliness are clear and growing danger here and now in the 21st century.
Noreena Hertz (The Lonely Century: How to Restore Human Connection in a World That's Pulling Apart)
The novel predicted the triumphs of the post-1968 PMC: the moral rectitude of the virtuous lawyer and his high-spirited daughter renders the solution to racism attractive to the establishment—work on individual capacities for empathy and walking in another human being’s shoes; read books; have righteous feelings. To Kill a Mockingbird was an extraordinarily effective piece of Cold War anti-Communist propaganda: based on a liberal fantasy that antiracism is about good white people defending helpless black people against bad (poor) white people, it created an image of American liberalism that was a powerful tool for winning hearts and minds at home and around the world.
Catherine Liu (Virtue Hoarders: The Case against the Professional Managerial Class)
Third Reich’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, “If you repeat a lie a thousand times, people are bound to start believing it.
Russ Scalzo (Many Crowns: The battle rages in the heavens and on the earth. Nonstop twists and turns. (Hidden Thrones Book 6))
Other states also reoriented their telling of regional and national history. In Maharashtra, in the rewriting of history textbooks, a drastic cut was made in the book for class 7: the chapter on the Mughal Empire under Akbar was cut down to three lines.78 Uttar Pradesh simply deleted the Mughal Empire from some of its history textbooks,79 while the University of Delhi drastically reduced the study of this period in its history curriculum.80 In the syllabus of Nagpur University, a chapter that discussed the roles of the RSS, the Hindu Mahasabha, and the Muslim League in the making of communalism has been replaced by another one titled “Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) Role in Nation Building.”81 Alongside official examinations in Uttar Pradesh, the Sangh Parivar organized a test of general culture open to all schools in the state. According to the brochure designed to help students prepare for this test, which Amit Shah released in Lucknow in August 2017, India was a Hindu Rashtra, and Swami Vivekananda had defended Hindutva in Chicago in 1893.82 In Karnataka, after canceling Tipu Sultan Jayanti, the festival that the state used to organize to celebrate the birth of this eighteenth-century Muslim ruler, the BJP government also dropped the chapter dealing with this historical figure from the class 7 textbook in 2019.83 This decision was made in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic that had led the government of India to ask all states to reduce syllabi for students in classes 1 through 10 by 30 percent, in light of the learning challenges brought about by the lockdown.84 The decision of the Karnataka government, in fact, fit in with a larger picture. Under cover of the pandemic, the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE), India’s largest education board, decided that all over India “government-run schools no longer have to teach chapters on democratic rights, secularism, federalism, and citizenship, among other topics.”85 To foster assimilation of knowledge that amounted to propaganda, final exams have increasingly focused on the heroic deeds of Hindu icons and reforms initiated by the Modi government, even on the person of the prime minister.
Christophe Jaffrelot (Modi's India: Hindu Nationalism and the Rise of Ethnic Democracy)
One can see very clearly how the conditioning begins, how two thousand years of propaganda in the Christian world has made it worship its culture, while the same kind of thing has been going on in the East.
J. Krishnamurti (The Flight Of The Eagle (Krishnamurti Classics Series Book 3))
The propaganda section made hundreds of thousands of copies of the photograph taken on the balcony where Gottwald, in a fur hat and surrounded by his comrades, spoke to the people. On that balcony the history of Communist Bohemia began. Every child knew that photograph, from seeing it on posters and in schoolbooks and museums.
Milan Kundera (The Book of Laughter and Forgetting)
Bernays not only knew how to manipulate people, he knew how to get people excited about being manipulated, a process he describes in detail in his 1947 book, The Engineering of Consent. The book enumerates a variety of persuasive techniques, including propaganda, advertising, and other forms of mass communication, that he used to create seemingly any desired response from the public.
Cate Shanahan (Dark Calories: How Vegetable Oils Destroy Our Health and How We Can Get It Back)
[Huxley's Perennial Philosophy is concerned with] the need to love the earth and respect nature instead of following the example of those who 'chopped down vast forests to provide the newsprint demanded by that universal literacy which was to make the world safe for intelligence and democracy, and got wholesale erosion, pulp magazines, and organs of Fascist, Communist, capitalist, and nationalist propaganda.' He attacked 'technological imperialism' and the mechanisation [sic] which was 'increasing the power of a minority to exercise a co-ersive control over the lives of their fellows' and 'the popular philosophy of life... now moulded by advertising copy whose one idea is to persuade everybody to be as extroverted and uninhibitedly greedy as possible, since of course it is only the possessive, the restless, the distracted, who spend money on the things that advertisers want to sell.
Nicholas Murray (Aldous Huxley: A Biography (Thomas Dunne Books))
the quality of men who are selected by these modern democratic methods of adult franchise gradually deteriorates because of lack of thinking and the noise of propaganda . . . He [the voter] reacts to sound and to the din, he reacts to repetition and he produces either adictator or a dumb politician who is insensitive. Such a politician can stand all the din in the world and still remain standing on his two feet and, therefore, he gets selected in the end because the others have collapsed because of the din. Guha, Ramachandra (2011-02-10). India After Gandhi (Kindle Locations 3272-3276). Pan Books. Kindle Edition.
Ramachandra Guha (India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy)
In Russia, the person who put Sevastopol on the literary map was Leo Tolstoy, a veteran of the siege. His fictionalized memoir The Sebastopol Sketches made him a national celebrity. Already with the first installment of the work published, Tsar Alexander II saw the propaganda value of the piece and ordered it translated into French for dissemination abroad. That made the young author very happy. Compared with Tolstoy’s later novels, The Sebastopol Sketches hasn’t aged well, possibly because this is not a heartfelt book. As the twenty-six-year-old Tolstoy’s Sevastopol diaries reveal, not heartache but ambition drove him at the time. Making a name as an author was just an alternative to two other grand plans—founding a new religion and creating a mathematical model for winning in cards (his losses during the siege were massive even for a rich person).
Constantine Pleshakov (The Crimean Nexus: Putin’s War and the Clash of Civilizations)
in the past no government had the power to keep its citizens under constant surveillance. The invention of print, however, made it easier to manipulate public opinion, and the film and the radio carried the process further. With the development of television, and the technical advance which made it possible to receive and transmit simultaneously on the same instrument, private life came to an end. Every citizen, or at least every citizen important enough to be worth watching, could be kept for twenty-four hours a day under the eyes of the police and in the sound of official propaganda, with all other channels of communication closed. The possibility of enforcing not only complete obedience to the will of the State, but complete uniformity of opinion on all subjects, now existed for the first time.
George Orwell (Animal Farm (with Bonus novel '1984' Free))
The desire to be exalted or thought as, if not superior, at least distinct, by the rest of humanity is a widespread impulse. One of the most widely shared beliefs seems to be that the “the rest of people” are idiots or manipulable fools. Concerning “media effects,” if you ask anybody, the victims of propaganda, yellow journalism, bad entertainment, or stupid books are always “other people,” never oneself.
Xavier Lastra (Dangerous Gamers: The Commentariat and its war against video games, imagination, and fun)
For propaganda, of course. It’s all in your own book. How can we persuade others to be good, without evil we can point to?
William T. Vollmann (Europe Central)
Known as “Leni,” Helene Bertha Amalie Riefenstahl was born on August 22, 1902. During the Third Reich she was known throughout Germany as a close friend and confidant of the Adolf Hitler. Recognized as a strong swimmer and talented artist, she studied dancing as a child and performed across Europe until an injury ended her dancing career. During the 1920’s Riefenstahl was inspired to become an actress and starred in five motion pictures produced in Germany. By 1932 she directed her own film “Das Blaue Licht.” With the advent of the Hitler era she directed “Triumph des Willens” anf “Olympia” which became recognized as the most innovative and effective propaganda films ever made. Many people who knew of her relationship with Hitler insisted that they had an affair, although she persistently denied this. However, her relationship with Adolf Hitler tarnished her reputation and haunted her after the war. She was arrested and charged with being a Nazi sympathizer, but it was never proven that she was involved with any war crimes. Convinced that she had been infatuated and involved with the Führer, her reputation and career became totally destroyed. Her former friends shunned her and her brother, who was her last remaining relative, was killed in action on the “Eastern Front.” Seeing a bleak future “Leni” Riefenstahl left Germany, to live amongst the Nuba people in Africa. During this time Riefenstahl met and began a close friendship with Horst Kettner, who assisted her with her acknowledged brilliant photography. They became an item from the time she was 60 years old and he was 20. Together they wrote and produced photo books about the Nuba tribes and later filmed marine life. At that time she was one of the world's oldest scuba divers and underwater photographer. Leni Riefenstahl died of cancer on September 8, 2003 at her home in Pöcking, Germany and was laid to rest at the Munich Waldfriedhof.
Hank Bracker
On a number of occasions, Tamara joined “Che” on his sorties into the Bolivian highlands, without incident. However, on March 24, 1967, a guerrilla fighter who had been captured by the Bolivian army betrayed her by giving away Tamara’s location. Although she escaped, the Bolivian soldiers found an address book in her Jeep and came after her in hot pursuit. With no other place to hide, she made her way back to “Che” Guevara’s forces. It was considered an open secret that Tamara had been intimate with “Che” but now the troops could not help but notice what was going on. The way they looked into each other’s eyes, and whispered sweet nothings, left no doubt in anyone’s mind, but that she was his lover…. The Bolivian highlands are notorious for the infestation of the Chigoe flea parasite, which infected Tamara. Having a leg injury and running a high fever, she and 16 other ailing fighters were ordered out of the region by Guevara. On August 31, 1967, up to her waist in the Rio Grande of Bolivia, and holding her M 1 rifle above her head, she and eight men were shot and killed in a hail of gunfire by Bolivian soldiers. Leaving their bodies in the water, it was several days before they were recovered downstream. Piranhas had attacked the bodies and their decomposing carcasses were polluting the water. Since the water was being used for drinking purposes by the people in a nearby village, the soldiers were ordered to clear the bodies out of the river. As they were preparing to bury Tamara’s remains in an unmarked grave, a local woman protested what was happening, and demanded that a woman should receive a Christian burial. When he received the news of what had happened, Guevara was stunned and refused to accept it, thinking it was just a propaganda stunt to demoralize him. In Havana Fidel Castro declared her a “Heroine of the Revolution.” There is always the possibility that Tamara was a double agent, whose mission it was to play up to “Che” when they met in Leipzig and then report back to the DDR (Democratic German Republic), who would in turn inform the USSR of “Che’s” activities. The spy game is a little like peeling an onion. Peel off one layer and what you find is yet another layer.
Hank Bracker
STYLE & STRUCTURE LANGUAGE Simple, clear; effectively creates the atmosphere of a world that, on the surface, is down-to-earth and unsophisticated, but that on a deeper level is complex and contains many conflicting forces. NARRATOR Invisible, third-person narrator who emphasizes the thoughts, feelings, and actions of animals. FABLE (Short tale that teaches a moral lesson, with animals as characters.) The animals act in accordance with their animal nature, but their ideas and emotions are those of human beings: Benjamin is skeptical about the chances of improving his lot and feels just as disillusioned about their new society as a human would; Clover, the gentle, patient elderly mare, reacts to tragic events with the compassionate tears of a human being. It is obvious that Orwell sympathizes with the plight of the animals, whether they are ruled by Jones or Napoleon. His treatment of animals makes them believable as individuals, not just as types. IRONY (Use of words to express a meaning opposite to the literal meaning.) Orwell sees the animals’ flaws as well as their positive qualities; treats circumstances of their lives with persuasive irony: the Rebellion occurs not merely because of a bloodthirsty desire for revenge on the animals’ part, but also because Jones has forgotten to feed them and they are desperately hungry. STRUCTURE Ten chapters. Rising action: First five chapters tell of the animals’ Rebellion. Crisis (turning point): Napoleon launches the surprise attack that drives Snowball into exile, thus eliminating a rival for the position of power. The novel’s second half tells how Napoleon firmly establishes his power by making clever use of propaganda and terrorist tactics. Several unexplained events are cleared up as the story develops: why Napoleon took puppies (he raises them as a police force); what happened to the cows’ milk (it is reserved exclusively for the pigs’ use); the reason for the pigs’ moving into farmhouse (they are secretly learning to acquire human habits); the strange negotiations with Foxwood and Pinchfield Farms (Napoleon attempts to deal with humans on terms advantageous to him).
W. John Campbell (The Book of Great Books: A Guide to 100 World Classics)
As soon as the painting was finished, two new rituals, Morning Repentance and Evening Report, began. Now every morning as I returned from the market in the cool morning air, I saw a group at the foot of the propaganda wall. Five or six people who had been landlords or counterrevolutionaries or rightists—people in the Five Black Categories—bowed in front of Chairman Mao. They waved their copies of the Selected Quotations from the Writings of Chairman Mao, the Precious Red Book, in the air and chanted, “Long life to Chairman Mao! Long life! Long life! Long life!” Then one by one they confessed their guilt. In the evening they had to do it again.
Ji-li Jiang (Red Scarf Girl)
Schoolchildren were asked to collect propaganda posters and caricatures ‘for your race book and arrange them according to racial schemes’.
Alexandra Richie (Faust’s Metropolis: A History of Berlin)
Atheists tend to pity the inhabitants of religiously dominated societies for the extent of the propaganda they have to endure, but this is to overlook secular societies’ equally powerful and continuous calls to prayer. A libertarian state truly worthy of the name would try to redress the balance of messages that reach its citizens away from the merely commercial and towards a holistic conception of flourishing. True to the ambitions of Giotto’s frescoes, these new messages would render vivid to us the many noble ways of behaving that we currently admire so much and so blithely ignore. We simply will not care for very long about the higher values when all we are given to convince us of their worth is an occasional reminder in a modestly selling, largely ignored book of essays by a so-called philosopher – while, in the city beyond, the superlative talents of the globe’s advertising agencies perform their phantasmagorical alchemy and set our every sensory fibre alight in the name of a new kind of cleaning product or savoury snack.
Alain de Botton (Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion)
The “Publicity” in the title was for English purposes; the Chinese name was the Central Propaganda Department, and it was one of the People’s Republic’s most powerful and secretive organizations—a government agency with the power to fire editors, silence professors, ban books, and recut movies.
Evan Osnos (Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China)
The church is assailed by Islamic fundamentalism in the East and secular fundamentalism in the West. I hate going into book stores because the religion section is soiled with volumes filled with ultraliberal, antiorthodox propaganda, wishy-washy nonsense of spiritual fuzzy-wuzzy feelings, biographical ramblings of Christian apostates, and greedy charlatans promising wealth and prosperity as if God were some kind of slot machine. I’m not bothered so much that people write these books, but I’m deeply troubled by the fact that so many people buy them. The world is cold, brutal, and dark, and it is only getting worse. If this is the hour approaching the millennium, I tremor to think what a tribulation might be like! Evidently postmillennialists do not receive email updates from Christian parachurch groups that minister to the persecuted church like Voice of the Martyrs and Barnabas Fund because Christians in Sudan, Iran, and North Korea know full well that the millennium ain’t getting closer from their point of view.
Michael F. Bird (Evangelical Theology: A Biblical and Systematic Introduction)
They were nowhere near as biased as the mainstream media when it came to how they reported the news. Long ago, before she was born, the media had surrendered to being told by the government what to report. Her grandfather said that it was similar to what the Soviet Union had. He told her when she was younger that Pravda was the official news program or newspaper of the country and reported on whatever the government wanted them to report on, propaganda twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and three-hundred-sixty-five days of the year.
Cliff Ball (Times of Trial: Christian End Times Thriller (The End Times Saga Book 3))
Kremlin, the regime has passed laws that ban ‘propaganda for homosexuality’, and imposed a criminal liability for libel.
Nick Cohen (You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom)
I was scripting for a series on the Arts programme which was shown very late on a Sunday evening, and I was sent off to get the low down on several up and coming musicians who would be featured each week. To the music world, they may have been up and coming, I would have preferred them to be down and going and preferably out of range.
Lucinda E. Clarke (Truth Lies Propaganda: in Africa (Truth Lies and Propaganda Book))
Non fatte mai amicizia con gli imbroglioni, i bugiardi, gli ingannatori, gli agitatori, i sabotatori, i traditori, i malfattori, i calunniatori, i pugnalatori alle spalle, le canaglie, i collezionisti disonesti di fondi con dei loro truffatori indossando abiti eleganti fingendosi come dei buoni samaritani i quali usano i donazioni raccolti per la politica partigiana, patrocinio politico, propaganda sporca, e per il loro frequenti viaggi intercontinentali. Mai accettare l’amicizia dai promotori senza scrupoli, i propagandisti fraudolenti, i consulenti disonesti dei candidati politici, gli corrieri diffamatori degli disinformazioni, gli aggressivi incitatori di odio, le mascalzone, i truffatori, i manipolatrici dei golpisti falliti, e le cagne e gli stronzi strumenti dei politici sporchi. Loro non fanno la vera amicizia perché ti usano solo per le loro interessi e mascalzonata." ~ Ana Angelica Abaya van Doorn writing as Angelica Hopes Citazione da Sfidatopia, Book 2, Solo la verità è bella Trilogy © Ana Angelica Abaya van Doorn
Angelica Hopes
Who determines the illegality of books—of anything for that matter? Who says information and history is prohibited? The Government, and why? All documents are conspiring documents in their eyes. Audio disturbs the peace. Pictures disturb the minds and hearts of their people. Compound those subjective terms with words like “propaganda” and “conspiracy” and you have an organization like the Nine and their Oligarchy whose sole purpose and drive in life is the accumulation of power and control.
Kawika Miles (Saga of the Nine: Origins)
When the inbuilt human tendency to conform is exacerbated by the forces of compulsory state education, ambient propaganda, and monitoring and control of thought and speech, then you have a heady mix indeed.
Andrew Lynn (Classic Political Philosophy for the Modern Man (Classics for the Modern Man Book 3))
He (Bresnahan-a potter interviewed in the book) described a recent trip to China. In every city he visited, he witnessed alarmingly high levels of inhumanity, pollution, and industrial development 'without any stepping back and saying, "How did we get here?" and "Where are we going?" He described what he witnessed in China as the turning from the 'propaganda of communism to the propaganda of absolute consumerism with not even skipping a beat.
David Carlson (Peace Be with You: Monastic Wisdom for a Terror-Filled World)
I’d rather listen to the ramblings of a drunkard than get myself engrossed with the media and its appalling news.
Michael Bassey Johnson (The Book of Maxims, Poems and Anecdotes)
But the propaganda accompanying collectivization placed emphasis on the elimination of rural “exploiters,” to divert attention from the fact that by far the most numerous victims of collectivization were ordinary peasants.
Richard Pipes (Communism: A History (Modern Library Chronicles Series Book 7))
There was no fate. There was what people tell others and those others believe. There was conspiracy and propaganda and inspiration, not fate. Fate was only someone else’s idea of how the world worked, a story people inherit, a lie they’re told. If he’d learned anything, Jacob thought, he’d learned that. That there was no thing that should be, that must be, even the world.
Elizabeth Knox (The Absolute Book)
Nazis realized that if there was something that gave more power than merely destroying the word, it was owning and controlling it. There was a power in books. Words could act as weapons, resounding long after the rumbling of artillery had stopped. They are weapons not only as propaganda, but also in the form of memories. Whoever owns the word has the power to not only interpret it, but also to write history.
Anders Rydell (The Book Thieves: The Nazi Looting of Europe's Libraries and the Race to Return a Literary Inheritance)
Nazis are portrayed in propaganda as ignorant anti-intellectuals. But the leaders know just how powerful knowledge is. That’s why they want to control it so strictly.
Brianna Labuskes (The Librarian of Burned Books)
Too many men and governments the life of the human mind is a danger to be feared more than any other danger, and the Word which cannot be purchased, cannot be falsified, and cannot be killed is the enemy most hunted for and hated. It is not necessary to speak of the burning of the books in Germany, or of the victorious lie in Spain, or of the terror of the creative spirit in Russia, or of the hunting and hounding of those in this country who insist that certain truths be told and who will not be silent. These things are commonplace. They are commonplace to such a point that they no longer shock us into anger. Indeed it is the essential character of our time that the triumph of the lie, the mutilation of culture, and the persecution of the Word no longer shock us into anger.
Felix Frankfurter (Their Correspondence, 1928-45)
In the North there are no words for things like "shopping malls," "liberty," or even "love," at least as the rest of the world knows it. The only true "love" we can express is worship for the Kims, a dynasty of dictators who have ruled North Korea for three generations. The regime blocks all outside information, all videos and movies, and jams radio signals. There is no World Wide Web and no Wikipedia. The only books are filled with propaganda telling us that we live in the greatest country in the world, even though at least half of North Koreans live in extreme poverty and many are chronically malnourished.
Yeonmi Park (In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl's Journey to Freedom)
And when I saw this small, dignified man emerge from the plane, bow, and then stand rigidly at attention for his ovation, I suddenly realized that he was something I had not seen—a man who was still living in 1944! Or at least only a few days out of it. A man who for the past thirty years must have been carrying around in his head the forgotten wartime propaganda of those times.
Hiroo Onoda (No Surrender: My Thirty-Year War (Bluejacket Books))
Right-wing TV networks did not exist in 1917, but in that year was born a presidential tool even more powerful, a lavishly financed government propaganda agency that operated in every medium of the day: films, books, posters, newspaper articles, and a corps of 75,000 speakers who gave more than seven million talks everywhere from movie houses to revival tents. In addition, the federal government also attacked the press, both during and well after the First World War.
Adam Hochschild (American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis)
Propaganda is like a recreational drug: it feels good, it feels right, but it eventually corrupts you, and kills you.
Isaac Petrov (Advent of Dreamtech: A First Contact Epic (Dreamtech Trilogy Book 1))
I stressed to Neto that the way we treat the population is key to gaining their support. . . . I stressed how the thuggish behavior of the FNLA (robberies, assaults, murders, rapes, unbelievable savagery) engenders widespread hatred even among people who are not politicized. Later, there will be [time for] propaganda, political education, . . . but simply treating people well . . . can garner the massive support of the population.50
Piero Gleijeses (Piero Gleijeses' International History of the Cold War in Southern Africa, Omnibus E-Book: Includes Conflicting Missions and Visions of Freedom)
Can a market place an accurate value on anything? If a junk novel sells one hundred million copies, and a book that answers all of the problems of existence sells one hundred copies, did the market get it right? The market has nothing to do with value, quality, rational assessment, and worth. It’s all about vulgar taste, greed, fear, fashion, fads, populism, emotionalism, sentimentality, propaganda, brainwashing, indoctrination, mind control and conditioning. The market knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing.
Michael Faust
Disinformation is false information spread deliberately to deceive.This is a subset of misinformation, which also may be unintentional. The English word disinformation is a loose translation of the Russian dezinformatsiya,[derived from the title of a KGB black propaganda department. Joseph Stalin coined the term, giving it a French-sounding name to claim it had a Western origin. Russian use began with a "special disinformation office" in 1923.[Disinformation was defined in Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1952) as "false information with the intention to deceive public opinion”. Wikipedia
Larry Elford (Farming Humans: Easy Money (Non Fiction Financial Murder Book 1))
Lui started a nonprofit organization called Unify Carmel, which was among the first groups in the country to bring up to their school boards that shockingly explicit books were in their school libraries. After discovering the books, Lui says, “We read the sexually explicit and gender-propaganda books during open comments at a school board meeting.
Bethany Mandel (Stolen Youth: How Radicals Are Erasing Innocence and Indoctrinating a Generation)
The first thing the President had done when he came to power in 2000 was to seize control of television. It was television through which the Kremlin decided which politicians it would ‘allow’ as its puppet opposition, what the country’s history and fears and consciousness should be. And the new Kremlin won’t make the same mistake the old Soviet Union did: it will never let TV become dull. The task is to synthesise Soviet control with Western entertainment. Twenty-first-century Ostankino mixes show business and propaganda, ratings with authoritarianism. And at the centre of the great show is the President himself, created from a no one, a grey fuzz via the power of television, so that he morphs as rapidly as a performance artist among his roles of soldier, lover, bare-chested hunter, businessman, spy, tsar, superman. ‘The news is the incense by which we bless Putin’s actions, make him the President,’ TV producers and political technologists liked to
Peter Pomerantsev (Nothing is True and Everything is Possible: Adventures in Modern Russia)
This is a new type of Kremlin propaganda, less about arguing against the West with a counter-model as in the Cold War, more about slipping inside its language to play and taunt it from inside. In the ad for Larry King’s show, keywords associated with the journalist flash up on screen: ‘reputation’, ‘intelligence’, ‘respect’, more and more of them until they merge into a fuzz, finishing with the jokey ‘suspenders’ (i.e. braces). Then King, sitting in a studio, turns to the camera and says: ‘I would rather ask questions to people in positions of power instead of speaking on their behalf. That’s why you can find my new show, Larry King Now, right here on RT. Question more.
Peter Pomerantsev (Nothing is True and Everything is Possible: Adventures in Modern Russia)
The title of our book was the name of a series of magazines published by the Haqqanis in the 1980s and 1990s, as well as a media “studio” that has been producing and distributing Haqqani propaganda videos in more recent years. It is, in other words, the Haqqanis’ brand.
Vahid Brown (Fountainhead of Jihad: The Haqqani Nexus, 1973-2012)
I'm writing this book as a citizen; as an advocate for factual journalism; and as a new dad who thinks about what kind of world my children are going to inherit. This story is about a rot at the core of our politics. It's about an ongoing attack on the very idea of a free and fair press. It's about the difference between news and propaganda. It's about the difference between state media and the fourth estate.
Brian Stelter (Hoax: Donald Trump, Fox News, and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth)
That book is a truly brilliant piece of age-old propaganda,’ he’d remind me many times. It still is, and was written to control the ignorant peoples of the world by instilling fear into them.
Jess Smith (Way of the Wanderers: The Story of Travellers in Scotland)
The book is a toxic piece of reactionary propaganda. It takes the stance of pure historical idealism and espouses a doomsday theory. Under the guise of discussing environmental problems, it seeks to justify the ultimate corruption of the capitalist world. The content is extremely reactionary.
Liu Cixin (The Three-Body Problem (Remembrance of Earth’s Past, #1))
I had written of Germans as men not super men and this was considered a very weak attitude to take. I couldn't make much sense out of this, and it seems absurd now that we know the Germans were men, and this fallible, even defeatable. It was said that I didn't know anything about the war, and this was perfectly true, though how Park Avenue commandos found me out I can't conceive.
John Steinbeck
The continued existence of freedom is based on educated citizens who understand their own history, government, economics, and God-given values. Every day we have to sort out information from propaganda, due to the fact that the media of this world are full of “journalists” with a cause.
Larkin Spivey (Stories of Faith and Courage from the Korean War (Battlefields and Blessings Book 6))