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Scarmoge posted an update 5 years, 2 months ago
… not necessarily related to anything specific but possibly to many things in general … the first sentence is often quoted, the lines that follow almost never … and the lines that follow are equally, if not more important
“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
The Giza Forum (Legacy)
Closed Archive of The Old Forum
In time of universal deceit,
telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
In response to Dana – Many years ago I worked in a small independent bookstore. In the store we had an entire wall, roughly 30 ft. long (6 bookcases each case being 5 ft. wide by 7 ft. tall with each containing about 200 volumes [some stacked on the tops of course] filled with sundry volumes of Russian history with many specifically dealing with the Soviet period. As a young naive (a polite word for stupid) young man I remember walking by or working that wall and thinking how sad it was that the vast majority of that Soviet material was not true and how glad I was of the fact that at least the majority of “our” history was true and complete. Wait, what’s that I hear? Oh, yes. It is the sound of your laughter. Little did I know that the same was/is true for us as well.
The spell was broken with my first foray into graduate work. I became interested in of course, what else, Nazi Germany. To paraphrase the wonderful Graham Chapman speaking as Dr. Kargol in “The Mouse Problem Sketch”, “Who of us hasn’t become interested in the Weimar Period in Germany leading up to the Nazi take over. I know I have”. I proceeded to muck around in Modern European History with an emphasis in European diplomacy between the wars. The study of that period was shall we say “a real eye opener”. I think it probable that at least one contribution to our inability to deal with “The Goebbels Doctrine” has something to do with being saturated with advertising (I am using that word in the broadest, most general way possible). As examples of saturation … in the late 90’s and early 00’s in the USSA advertising began appearing on small panels on the backs of gas guns and we had Channel 1 introduced into our high schools (little content, mostly a means of advertising to high school students during the school day) appearing in the school on CCTV. As I was teaching a course in Theory of Knowledge (Basic Epistemology) for our local high school IB Program Channel 1 provided much fodder for classroom discussion. The cable companies were willing to wire the schools for free provided they carried the Channel 1 content. The Channel came on automatically after morning announcements and ran for about 10-15 minutes and then automatically ceased transmission. As Dana said above “You can’t make this stuff up”.
A major example that comes to mind … several years ago there appeared a television program titled “The Swan”. Ostensibly it was about providing to hideously naturally disfigured people a great deal of plastic surgery (gratis) so that they might appear “human” or “normal” (the Twilight Zone episode titled “Eye of the Beholder” should come to mind here, also a possible connection to Transhumanism?). One finally realizes that the program was in fact an hour long, well disguised, advertisement for plastic surgery (in the credits one sees that the group behind the program was either the American Society or Board of Plastic Surgeons I can’t recall which). Like the Cable Companies generous gesture … Brilliant but insidiously Evil.