The Big Lie as Propaganda

This sort of outrageous bombast was the ‘genius’ of Hitler and his cronies:-

‘Wagner-linked Putin ally: “Dying west thinks Russians are third world scum”

 ‘Putin’s cook’ Yevgeny Prigozhin, left, serving food to Vladimir Putin at a restaurant outside Moscow in 2011.

Yevgeny Prigozhin accused of financing Wagner mercenary group responds to accusations of massacres in Mali. A Russian businessman and close ally of Vladimir Putin accused by the US, EU and others of financing the private military company Wagner Group has said that “a dying-out western civilisation” will be defeated by Russia.

The Guardian had approached Yevgeny Prigozhin seeking his reaction to evidence implicating Wagner fighters in massacres in Mali. In response he said he had “repeatedly said that the Wagner Group does not exist” and that he had “nothing to do with it”. “You are a dying-out western civilisation that considers Russians, Malians, Central Africans, Cubans, Nicaraguans and many other peoples and countries to be third world scum,” the businessman added. “Remember, this is not true …. You are a pathetic endangered bunch of perverts, and there are many of us, billions of us. And victory will be ours!”

Prigozhin said he was “closely following the events taking place in Mali” where “the collective west, namely the USA, Britain, France and other countries trying to pursue a policy of enslaving Africa, have been planting and organising terrorist groups in Mali for years”. This was being done, he said, “in order to keep the population of this country in fear, to plunder its natural wealth and to write off the money allocated for so-called peacekeeping operations”.’

Seems amazing tripe in these days…but only if we ignore history.

 

Could 'The Internet of Things' Be The Greatest Threat To Human Freedom Ever?

from 'A Simple Explanation Of The Internet Of Things' by Jacob Morgan in Forbes #NewTech May 13, 2014

 
The Internet of Things has become an umbrella term for what appliance, transportation and construction businesses hope will be the future for what they sell - an Internet-connected network of sensors and intercommunicating devices in our homes, our offices, our cars and public spaces that, while they may feed data to us, do so more widely to databases and algorithms that will monitor and increasingly manage our days.

The driverless car constantly connected to the Cloud; fridge, washing, heating and other household devices that will soon sense and inform via networks; the audio-video technology, fixed and mobile, that is already connected via the Web to browsers, Netflix, Internet radio providers and others who monitor our ongoing activity and preferences; and the third party monitoring of home security systems that soon will extend inside our doors and windows to cover full household operations, these are just a few of the ways that our daily lives will service what Jennifer Cobbe of the New York Review of Books NYR Daily calls 'surveillance capitalism'.

A few years back a US robotics engineer, Daniel H. Wilson, authored the novel 'Robopocalypse' in which, in the not-too-distant future at a moment no-one will notice, the dazzling technology that will run our world will unite and turn against us through the agency of a powerful artificial intelligence (AI) who uses the interconnectedness of all things to attempt to dominate and exterminate humans. The book is a useful catalogue of how artifacts connected to the Cloud can be used to take over society.  

While the nature and capabilities of future AI is speculative, what we may safely guess is that humans in competing national intelligence agencies are already working on how to use the Internet of Things to cripple their antagonists. The current huge Chinese commercial data thievery and Russian online offshore disinformation campaigns are only a glimpse of what could be to in store for us if we don't strongly resist now rampant surveillance capitalism through our viewing and buying decisions, and, via both the ballot box and the courts, the already widespread but often illegal online personal and social intelligence gathering  of government security agencies like the US CIA.  

In 2014 David Ignatius, a distinguished Washington Post columnist and long-time student of the CIA, published 'The Director', a novel focusing in detail on the illegalities that have long characterized that agency's global endeavours and which had recently been given some air by both Wikileaks and an internal whistle blower. Four years later we can assume nothing has really changed other than the tools and options have got better, and will soon, thanks to the Internet of Things, be much more so.

The Return of Demagoguary and the Big Lie

'This is not an honest man. This is not a trustworthy man. The fact that people believe he’s honest is a result of a failed media that aims its sincerest critique at Clinton’s deficiencies with the truth, but applies an entertainment standard to Trump that corrects falsehoods but doesn’t castigate him for them.

There is no reasonable explanation or saleable excuse for the media’s behaviour this presidential cycle. History will look back at this period and it will not be kind to the Fourth Estate. We will all have to one day ask ourselves, "Where was I on Trump and the truth?” Far too many of us will be found wanting.'  NYT Sept 8th 2016 Opinion

Boris and Trump, Putin and Xi Jinping - the return of the liar to world leadership. A paradox - social media reveals all, yet the lies told by some notable public figures today mimic in their size the Big Lie during the rise of communist and fascist totalitarianism. But Boris and Trump live in functional democracies so how come?

In these democracies, ordinary voters, they who were once the lumpen-proletariat, are now mostly literate,and have vastly improved access to information in comparison to the fascist and communist masses that came before. So why do they swallow lies of the magnitude now widely propagated by both professional and social media? Does this mean that the great C20 liberal experiment has failed; the idea that universal education would produce a rational polity? 

Too many people still seem unwilling to distinguish between hyperbole and falsehood, and demonstrable fact. In an era of increasing secularism where dogmatic belief is more frequently confronted by conclusions drawn from rigorous analysis, how is it that so many are willing to believe and vote for those who base their speeches solely on desired outcome? 

Is it too much information, the feeling of being overwhelmed by complexity so that we are willing to trust anyone who can make it simple? Is it frustration with the search for evidence when having an opinion provided by an admired public figure or celebrity makes for an easier existence? Are there just too many places to look for data and too few hours in a day? Why are decisions so often complex today when they seemed so straightforward 100 years ago? Is the person-on-the-street today just too soft-minded to cope with the nuances of navigating a civil community in the C21st?  

Is the degree to which we choose to trust those to whom media gives exposure a marker for our civilization's integrity and likely longevity? The social order building since the Enlightenment, is it now in self-destruct mode? 

It could well be so.

Russia - The Enemy Of a Lifetime

I was born after the Second German War ended in 1945, a few months before the Japanese Empire was eliminated by an atomic attack. Early in my childhood Churchill's prediction that Stalin's Soviet Union had the potential to be an even worse enemy was proving correct. Soviet espionage, aided by the fascination with Marxism that possessed some Western intellectuals, gifted Russia an atomic bomb after only a few years. My parents joined the Civil Defence, which was charged in Britain with preparing us for Soviet nuclear attack. As they had experience in the Blitz, Mum and Dad were made officers and our family was awarded a space in the underground bunker under our County Hall.

Even at breakneck speed this was a ten minute drive away, yet Soviet ICBMs were calculated to be over London in only four minutes. There was a certain amount of public education about how to survive the initial blast at home, but from the experience at Hiroshima and Nagasaki everyone knew it was basically hopeless. MAD (mutually assured destruction) was the political solution and the nuclear powers, soon joined by a virulently communist China, built up their arsenals, with the West, China and Soviet Union all trying to keep pace.