The revolutionary act of telling the truth
George Orwell said, "In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act."
These
are dark times, in which the propaganda of deceit touches all our
lives. It is as if political reality has been privatised and illusion
legitimised. The information age is a media age. We have politics by
media; censorship by media; war by media; retribution by media;
diversion by media - a surreal assembly line of clichés and false
assumptions.
Wondrous technology has become both our friend
and our enemy. Every time we turn on a computer or pick up a digital
device - our secular rosary beads - we are subjected to control: to
surveillance of our habits and routines, and to lies and manipulation.
Edward
Bernays, who invented the term, "public relations" as a euphemism for
"propaganda", predicted this more than 80 years ago. He called it, "the
invisible government".
He wrote, "Those who manipulate
this unseen element of [modern democracy] constitute an invisible
government which is the true ruling power of our country... We are
governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested,
largely by men we have never heard of... "
The aim of this
invisible government is the conquest of us: of our political
consciousness, our sense of the world, our ability to think
independently, to separate truth from lies.
This is a form
of fascism, a word we are rightly cautious about using, preferring to
leave it in the flickering past. But an insidious modern fascism is now
an accelerating danger. As in the 1930s, big lies are delivered with the
regularity of a metronome. Muslims are bad. Saudi bigots are good. ISIS
bigots are bad. Russia is always bad. China is getting bad. Bombing
Syria is good. Corrupt banks are good. Corrupt debt is good. Poverty is
good. War is normal.
