Author Archive | Andrew Dilks

Boston, False Flags and the Strategy of Tension


Via orwellwasright:

The responses in the immediate aftermath of the Boston marathon bombing were predictable: the idea that this may have been a false flag event and the dismissal of such a notion with the derogatory expression “conspiracy theory”. Certainly, there are many who instantly jump to the conclusion that “the government did it” when tragic events such as this occur before waiting for all the evidence to emerge – in the current political climate of seemingly never-ending lies and deception, this knee-jerk reaction is perhaps understandable. Equally, those who dismiss these allegations are right to let the dust settle – new evidence emerges and narratives spin from the wheels of government and media, frequently changing and often contradicting one another.

It came as no surprise to anyone that firebrand radio host Alex Jones was the first to call “false flag”. But perhaps less expected was the manner in which the term itself became something of a meme – Google trends showed a major spike in searches and it even made the mainstream media (although expecting Yahoo News to deal with the subject with even a modicum of accuracy would be optimistic, to say the least).

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Thatcher’s Legacy: Austerity and the Attack on the Poor and Vulnerable

Mob

Via orwellwasright:

If there’s one thing the British government and its media mouthpieces can rely on it’s a general public who are quite happy to spread their propaganda for them – not since the riots of 2011 have I witnessed such a degree of slavish, unthinking  repetition of falsehoods and lies as can be seen on forums and social media networks in response to the recent wave of cuts to the welfare system. This feeling of despair at the gullibility of the general public was compounded by the response by many to the death of former prime minister Margaret Thatcher; the gushing eulogies and beautification of a woman who supported brutal dictators such as Pol Pot and Idonesia’s General Suharto, while decimating British industry. It’s as if people have lost the ability to think for themselves, finding comfort in a patently false narrative which blames the victims of savage austerity while simultaneously ignoring or excusing the crimes of the rich and powerful.… Read the rest

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Art and Physics

Via orwellwasright:

It’s well known that many of the great breakthroughs in science seem to occur both independently and near-simultaneously: Isaac Newton, Gottfried Leibniz and the development of calculus; Nikola Tesla, Guglielmo Marconi and the invention of the radio; Alfred Russel Wallace, Charles Darwin and the theory of evolution are just three famous examples of radical new theories and inventions appearing in apparent isolation from one another. But what if scientific developments are prefigured by artists, who elucidate new concepts and manners of expressing space, light and time which capture the essence of radical new approaches to theoretical physics years before they actually occur? This is the subject for Leonard Shlain’s fascinating book, Art and Physics.

Shlain takes the reader on a journey through history, from the classical art of the Greco-Roman world through the spiritual mosaics of the medieval era and the Age of Reason up to the present day; from Euclidean geometry to Galileo, Newton and the discoveries of Einstein.… Read the rest

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Orwell, Dali and “Degenerate Art”

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/9/90/DaliGreatMasturbator.jpg/320px-DaliGreatMasturbator.jpg

Via orwellwasright:

When the Nazis mounted the exhibition Degenerate Art in Munich in 1937, it could be said that modern art was ironically validated in the eyes of cultural history. After all, a black mark from fascism – which promoted “art” that exalted blood and toil, racial purity and obedience – implies that modern art at that time stood for everything the Nazis opposed. This is, of course, simplistic reasoning – “modern art” at the time stood for many things, sometimes attempting to deliberately eschew ideology altogether, often apolitical and frequently controversial.

But the Nazis weren’t the only ones to see modern art as something controversial, or worse, a threat to the very values that underpin society. George Orwell – who sat about as far away from the political ideology of the Nazis as one can get – also perceived a moral degradation in the output of one of the most notoriously subversive artists of the time, Salvador Dali.… Read the rest

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Royal Babylon and the Power of the Monarchy

Via Orwellwasright

The British press can always be counted on to mask the depradations of the royal family – after all, they’re a national treasure who bring in much-needed revenue through tourism, right? Not quite. While David Icke might refer to them as shape-shifting lizards, others see them as parasites, leeching public money to maintain their palaces, country retreats and lavish lifestyles.

Of course, when the Queen gets the shits and has to spend a couple of days in her Freemasonic hospital, we can rely on the BBC and the Daily Mail to litter their screens and pages with endless coverage of this non-event; as for the thousands of “ordinary people” dying under the failing NHS – a system the Queen is quite happy to assist in the dismantling of – the same media is largely silent. Upon her release she was unfit to perform her public duties, but nevertheless found the time to sign the Commonwealth Charter, ensuring the interests of the realm continued to be protected.… Read the rest

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Ominous Parallels and the Slide Towards Totalitarianism

Via orwellwasright:

Erich Fromm once said, “Anyone who will think about it knows the machinations of propaganda, the method by which critical judgment is destroyed, how the mind is lulled into submission by clichés, how people are made dumb because they become dependent and lose their capacity to trust their eyes and judgment. They are blinded to reality by the fiction they believe.”

This goes some way to explaining why, although many people seem to be aware that history repeats itself, few really seem to react when they actually witness it happening. With the rise of the internet and alternative news sources, often the fiction is proven to be just that, a  fabrication. And yet the machine of propaganda continues on, its power lying in the repetition of “the Big Lie,” and the same fictions are tweaked slightly and once again resold to the public as absolute truths.

A recent example of this is Iraq’s alleged “weapons of mass destruction” and Iran’s alleged “nuclear weapons program”: the same repetitious, baseless fear-mongering across the spectrum of the mainstream media, then finally (in the case of Iraq after the country had been invaded) the admission that there was no evidence after all.… Read the rest

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Feminism in the 21st Century

Via orwellwasright:

I’ve never really looked into feminism until recently. I’m aware of the fundamental principles feminists adhere to – the liberation of women from an oppressive patriarchal society and the somewhat problematic expression “equality for women” (which seems something of an oxymoron to me, since surely equality should apply to everyone) – but, having never come across feminism beyond an awareness of its existence as an ideology, and personally knowing no women who call themselves feminists, it’s been something of an “unknown” to me.

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You Are What You Eat

WARNING: Video features the slaughter and consumption of animals.


If you were to visit China in the 21st century, you may well stumble across one of the popular speed cooking competitions, where frenetically paced chefs transform live animals into animated culinary oddities: snakes are decapitated then chopped up into inch-long segments, which squirm on the plate several feet away from their freshly-severed heads; Ying Yang fish, their sides deep-fried and coated in sweet and sour sauce are devoured as they stare up, still breathing (if the fish isn’t breathing, naturally the chef is disqualified).

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Leo Tolstoy and the State

In every human society there are always ambitious, unscrupulous, cruel men, who, I have already endeavoured to show, are ever ready to perpetrate any kind of violence, robbery or murder for their own advantage; and that in a society without Government these men would be robbers, restrained in their actions partly by strife with those injured by them (self-instituted justice, lynching), but partly and chiefly by the most powerful weapon of influence upon men – public opinion. Whereas in a society ruled by coercive authority, these same men are those who will seize authority and will make use of it, not only without the restraint of public opinion, but, on the contrary, supported, praised and extolled by a bribed and artificially maintained public opinion.

Written in 1905, Tolstoy’s The End of the Age: An Essay on the Approaching Revolution could well have been written today, given how little has changed with the nature of State power and the governments of the world.… Read the rest

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A Triple Bill of Deception

Via orwellwasright.

Sometimes you watch something with a premise so implausible, so outrageous it has to be true. Some things remind you of the reality of the human condition: our willingness to accept and live lies; the ease with which we can be deceived and manipulated even when everything points to a con. It is hard to say whether this psychological trait is a product of gullibility and stupidity. Perhaps it is neither – perhaps it says more about our readiness to accept things at face value based on the assumption that people are basically decent and wouldn’t tell such obvious lies. More than a few people have found out the hard way the naïveté of this outlook, as the documentaries The Imposter and Catfish and the film based on a true story Compliance clearly show.

The Imposter is a textbook example of such a premise that, were it a work of fiction, you’d probably switch it off for being too far-fetched. Three years after the disappearance of 13 year old Texan Nicholas, he is found alive half way around the world in Spain. He tells a story of kidnap and torture and is returned to his family in the States, who appear to be oblivious to the increasing number of glaring inconsistencies with the son who disappeared and the teenager before them sporting stubble, a different appearance and a European accent. Their unquestioning acceptance of this rather obvious imposter is as notable as the audacity of the con itself.

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