“Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me” – a singsong saying, familiar and given by elders, otherwise known as adults, within my childhood village, words meant to toughen me up, to get me to understand that conflict is part of life – get used to it and get some perspective. Life isn’t fair but don’t give up.
However, words do and can cause harm so why does that saying stay with me, niggle at the back of my mind.
Perhaps because political dialogue is largely broken down to schoolyard name calling and Trump, the prime example of this bullying state of mind, a despotic buffoon that some still think of as strategically minded, rules by whim from America.
Standards are lowered while those in Congress have made themselves appear powerless – perhaps they are.
Year 12 high school pupils, here in Australia, are studying the book 1984. It cheers me up just knowing that someone involved in deciding the curriculum considers this book, as vital now as ever it was, in the showing of the makings and realities of the dystopian societies in which, to some degree, all of us now live.
“The Ministry of Truth” – was it my fevered imagination to recall the British government deciding to manifest this idea – all for our own good, of course?
No – just looked it up, it’s going ahead.
“The UK government is establishing a new agency called the National Centre for Information Defence to combat online disinformation, particularly from hostile foreign states like Russia. This has drawn comparisons to George Orwell's "Ministry of Truth" due to concerns about potential censorship and the agency's oversight.”
I miss R.T. News – Russia Today - it was and probably remains a credible source of news but our collective governments have made it disappear from view. It’s as though it never existed.
Very 1984. I wonder whether copies of this book circulate in China.
Russia is not my enemy but my government, knowing that there was a coup in Ukraine but disregarding that, and knowing that having NATO on Russia’s borders would be the equivalent of the Soviets having missiles in Cuba but disregarded that in favour of what? Beggaring their own economies to prop up as corrupt a government as can be found anywhere. Ukraine is not as it’s presented.
Absurd that I should hold such views albeit based on fact or is it more absurd to think governments know something of recent history which would make sense of their position.
Excellent video below.
William Casey
Director of the CIA
1981
"We'll know our disinformation campaign is complete,
when absolutely everything the American people believe is false."
There are those who say that this quote is a lie.
Well – ‘they’ would say that - just as Netanyahu spouts lies, reverses truth, blames ‘the other’ for his own crimes and continues his country’s path to disaster upon disaster.
The Ministry of Truth - how is it to deal with equating the two words ‘Free Palestine’ with the nonsensical slogan ‘Hate Speech’
Where is the hate?