1984: Thread

grarpamp grarpamp at gmail.com
Sun May 14 23:57:52 PDT 2023


Elites' Lies Meant To Deliver Us From Reality

https://amgreatness.com/2023/05/13/deliver-us-from-reality/

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/origins-of-totalitarianism-hannah-arendt/1100278208?ean=9780156701532

Authored by Roger Kimball via American Greatness

“Because he can.”

That’s the answer one has to give to those who ask how Alvin Bragg, a
local district attorney in office by the slimmest of margins - and
then only because of a huge subsidy from the anti-American billionaire
George Soros - can get away with antics like indicting Donald Trump, a
former (and, possibly, future) president of the United States, and,
now, with charging former Marine Daniel Penny with manslaughter
because he (along with at least two others) intervened to stop Jordan
Neely from attacking fellow passengers on a New York subway.

Because he can.

As a friend remarked when digesting the spectacle of Penny being led
away in handcuffs, totalitarian movements often start slowly, almost
timidly, but as they gain power, they become more brazen. After a
certain point, they do outrageous things just to intimidate the public
and demonstrate their power.

We now know that the FBI, the CIA, and other elements of America’s
security apparatus intervened directly in the decision making of
Twitter and other social media companies to influence the course of
the 2020 election. One part of that intervention had to do with
organizing 51 senior former intelligence figures to sign a letter
declaring that Hunter Biden’s laptop was “Russian disinformation.”

That was a lie. They knew it was a lie. It didn’t matter. They did it
because they knew they could get away with it.

The United States is on the verge of being inundated with thousands
upon thousands of illegal aliens. Many are from South or Central
America. Hundreds are from China, even though they are crossing that
notional line we used to be able to call, without irony, our southern
border. Why did the Biden Administration decide to enact a real-life
Camp of the Saints invasion of the United States?

Because it could. There was no immediate price to pay.

In her classic study, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt
makes several observations that bear on our current situation. “There
is no doubt,” she observes,

    that the elite was pleased whenever the underworld frightened
respectable society into accepting it on an equal footing. The members
of the elite did not object at all to paying a price, the destruction
of civilization, for the fun of seeing how those who had been excluded
unjustly in the past forced their way into it. They were not
particularly outraged at the monstrous forgeries in historiography of
which all totalitarian regimes are guilty and which announce
themselves clearly enough and totalitarian propaganda.

It’s not only the compact between the elite and the underclass that is
relevant to our experience in the United States today. There is also
the incontinent deployment of the word “democracy,” not as a term
describing a specific form of political organization but rather as a
cognitively empty but talismanic vocable around which political animus
can be nurtured and set to work. The latest variation is Our
DemocracyTM, dragged out whenever the process of political
demonization needs a boost.

    “It has been frequently pointed out,” Arendt notes, “that
totalitarian movements use and abuse democratic freedoms in order to
abolish them.”

The reaction to the January 6, 2021 jamboree at the Capitol—an event
egged on and at least in part organized by (alleged) state actors like
Ray Epps—is a case in point. As he showed last week in his exchange
with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, Donald Trump began trying to diffuse the
potential for violence at that protest the day before, on January 5,
and he continued through the day on January 6. No matter. The script
called for him to be the villain of the piece, so the villain he is
publicly accounted to be.

So many things in our social and political life today seem surreal.

The prospect that “misgendering” someone might be against the
law—i.e., a tort that did not even exist yesterday is now illegal; the
whole phenomenon of so-called “transgenderism,” a revolt against
reality if there ever was one; the bizarre obsession with race,
involving the demonization of whites and the fabrication of an
imaginary sin called “white supremacy,” on the one hand, and the
groveling obeisance of phantasmagoric “reparations” to blacks, on the
other. You can’t tune into the internet these days without being
confronted with scenes of blacks rampaging through fast-food
restaurants, school corridors, or shops like Target and Walmart. They
smash and steal and smash and what happens to them? Nothing. All this
and more is part of what Arendt called totalitarianism’s “experiment
against reality.”

“Before they seize power and establish a world according to their
doctrines,” she pointed out,

    "totalitarian movements conjure up a lying world of consistency
which is more adequate to the needs of the human mind than reality
itself; in which, through sheer imagination, uprooted masses can feel
at home and are spared the never-ending shocks which real life and
real experiences deal to human beings and their expectations."

“The shocks which real life and real experiences deal to human
beings.” That is what our masters are pretending to insulate us from
with their fantastic lies about human nature, economic reality, and
empirical truth.

The only silver lining in this minatory storm cloud is the fact that
such movements, though unconscionably cruel, arbitrary, and
destructive, are also astonishingly fragile.

The last word goes to Arendt.

“Nothing is more characteristic of the totalitarian movements in
general, and of the quality of fame of their leaders in particular
than the startling swiftness with which they are forgotten and the
startling ease with which they can be replaced.”


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