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Empire of Lies: Are ‘We the People’ Useful Idiots in the Digital Age?
“Back in the heyday of the old Soviet Union, a phrase evolved to describe gullible western intellectuals who came to visit Russia and failed to notice the human and other costs of building a communist utopia. The phrase was “useful idiots” and it applied to a good many people who should have known better. I now propose a new, analogous term more appropriate for the age in which we live: useful hypocrites. That’s you and me, folks, and it’s how the masters of the digital universe see us. And they have pretty good reasons for seeing us that way. They hear us whingeing about privacy, security, surveillance, etc., but notice that despite our complaints and suspicions, we appear to do nothing about it. In other words, we say one thing and do another, which is as good a working definition of hypocrisy as one could hope for.”—John Naughton, The Guardian
“Who needs direct repression,” asked philosopher Slavoj Zizek, “when one can convince the chicken to walk freely into the slaughterhouse?”
In an Orwellian age where war equals peace, surveillance equals safety, and tolerance equals intolerance of uncomfortable truths and politically incorrect ideas, “we the people” have gotten very good at walking freely into the slaughterhouse, all the while convincing ourselves that the prison walls enclosing us within the American police state are there for our protection.
Call it doublespeak, call it hypocrisy, call it delusion, call it whatever you like, but the fact remains that while we claim to value freedom, privacy, individuality, equality, diversity, accountability, and government transparency, our actions and those of our government rulers contradict these much-vaunted principles at every turn.
For instance, we claim to disdain the jaded mindset of the Washington elite, and yet we continue to re-elect politicians who lie, cheat and steal.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
How I sold out to the Putin-Soros-Murdoch conspiracy to destroy Western civilization
How I sold out to the Putin-Soros-Murdoch conspiracy to destroy Western civilization
Why delighted? Because it completes the set of conspiracies to which I can now be accused of belonging. They include:
• The Putin Conspiracy, since I am regularly interviewed on Russia Today (and even worse, I now get paid to write for RT!);
• The Soros Conspiracy, since my research, has been funded by the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET) which he established;
• The Murdoch Conspiracy, since I appear every week on Sky News Australia with Carson Scott, and I used to get paid by News Ltd to write a weekly column; and
• The Alt-Right Conspiracy, since I’ve signed a book contract with Vox Day’s publishing firm Castalia House.
So not only am I a “useful idiot,” I’m a useful idiot for four contradictory conspiracies. Does that make me a double-double agent?
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
