Extra   page 39

Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. Anyone who has lived long in a foreign country will know of instances of sensational items of news — things which on their own merits would get the big headlines-being kept right out of the British press, not because the Government intervened but because of a general tacit agreement that ‘it wouldn’t do’ to mention that particular fact. So far as the daily newspapers go, this is easy to understand. The British press is extremely centralised, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics. But the same kind of veiled censorship also operates in books and periodicals, as well as in plays, films and radio. At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was ‘not done’ to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.

George Orwell

"The Freedom of the Press" (proposed preface to "Animal Farm")

Es tut mir leid aber ich möchte nun mal kein Herrscher der Welt sein, denn das liegt mir nicht. Ich möchte weder herrschen, noch irgendwen erobern, sondern jedem Menschen helfen, wo immer ich kann. Den Juden, den Heiden, den Farbigen, den Weißen. Jeder Mensch sollte dem anderen helfen, nur so verbessern wir die Welt. Wir sollten am Glück des andern teilhaben und nicht einander verabscheuen. Haß und Verachtung bringen uns niemals näher. Auf dieser Welt ist Patz genug für jeden, und Mutter Erde ist reich genug, um jeden von uns satt zu machen.

Das Leben kann ja so erfreulich und wunderbar sein. Wir müssen es nur wieder zu leben lernen. Die Habgier hat das Gute im Menschen verschüttet und Mißgunst hat die Seelen vergiftet und uns im Paradeschritt zu Verderb und Blutschuld geführt. Wir haben die Geschwindigkeit entwickelt aber innerlich sind wir stehen geblieben. Wir lassen Maschinen für uns arbeiten und sie denken auch für uns. Die Klugheit hat uns hochmütig werden lassen, und unser Wissen kalt und hart. Wir sprechen zu viel und fühlen zu wenig. Aber zuerst kommt die Menschlichkeit und dann erst die Maschinen. Vor Klugheit und Wissen kommt Toleranz und Güte. Ohne Menschlichkeit und Nächstenliebe ist unser Dasein nicht lebenswert.

Aeroplane und Radio haben uns einander näher gebracht. Diese Erfindungen haben eine Brücke geschlagen, von Mensch zu Mensch. Die erfordern eine allumfassende Brüderlichkeit, damit wir alle Eins werden. Millionen Menschen auf der Welt können im Augenblick meine Stimme hören. Millionen verzweifelter Menschen, Opfer eines Systems, das es sich zur Aufgabe gemacht hat Unschuldige zu quälen, und in Ketten zu legen. Allen denen die mich jetzt hören rufe ich zu : Ihr dürft nicht verzagen! Auch das bittere Leid das über uns gekommen ist, ist vergänglich. Die Männer, die heute die Menschlichkeit mit Füssen treten werden nicht immer da sein. Ihre Grausamkeit stirbt mit ihnen, und auch ihr Hass. Die Freiheit, die sie den Menschen genommen haben, wird ihnen dann zurückgegeben werden. Auch wenn es Blut und Tränen kostet, für die Freiheit ist kein Opfer zu groß.

Soldaten, vertraut euch nicht Barbaren an, Unmenschen, die euch verachten, und denen euer Leben nichts wert ist; ihr seid für sie nur Sklaven. Ihr habt das zu tun, das zu glauben, das zu fühlen. Ihr werdet gedrillt, gefüttert, wie Vieh behandelt, und seid nichts weiter als Kanonenfutter. Ihr seid viel zu schade für diese verehrten Subjekte. Diese Maschinenmenschen, mit Maschinenköpfen, und Maschinenherzen. Ihr seid keine Roboter, ihr seid keine Tiere, ihr seid Menschen! Erwahrt euch die Menschlichkeit in euren Herzen und hasst nicht, nur wer nicht geliebt wird hasst, nur wer nicht geliebt wird. Soldaten kämpft nicht für die Sklaverei, kämpft für die Freiheit.

Im siebzehnten Kapitel des Evangelisten Lukas steht : Gott wohnt in jedem Menschen. Also nicht nur in einem oder in einer Gruppe von Menschen. Vergesst nie, Gott liegt in euch allen, und ihr als Volk habt allein die Macht. Die Macht Kanonen zu fabrizieren, aber auch die Macht Glück zu spenden. Ihr als Volk habt es in der Hand, dieses Leben einmalig kostbar zu machen, es mit wunderbarem Freiheitsgeist zu durchdringen. Daher im Namen der Demokratie : Laßt und diese Macht nutzen! Laßt uns zusammen stehen! Laßt uns kämpfen für eine neue Welt, für eine anständige Welt! Die jedermann gleiche Chancen gibt, die der Jugend eine Zukunft und den Alten Sicherheit gewährt. Versprochen haben die Unterdrücker das auch, deshalb konnten sie die Macht ergreifen. Das war Lüge, wie überhaupt alles, was sie euch versprachen, diese Verbrecher. Diktatoren wollen die Freiheit nur für sich, das Volk soll versklavt bleiben. Laßt uns diese Ketten sprengen! Laßt uns kämpfen für eine beseere Welt! Laßt uns kämpfen für die Freiheit in der Welt, das ist ein Ziel, für das es sich zu kämpfen lohnt. Nieder mit der Unterdrückung, dem Hass und der Intoleranz! Laßt uns kämpfen für eine Welt der Sauberkeit. In der die Vernunft siegt, in der uns Fortschritt und Wissenschaft allen zum Segen reichen. Kameraden, im Namen der Demokratie: Dafür laßt uns streiten!

Charlie Chaplin

"Der große Diktator" (1940)

We all need to try to understand what is happening. We need to try to understand what is happening, and in my humble opinion, ideology is only going to get in your way. Nobody understands what is happening, not Buddhists, not Christians, not government scientists... no one understands what is happening. So forget ideology. They betray. They limit. They lead astray.

Nobody is smarter than you are. And what if they are? What good is their understanding doing you? People who walk around saying, ‘Well, I don’t understand quantum physics, but somewhere, somebody understands it.’. That’s not a very helpful attitude toward preserving the insights of quantum physics.

Just deal with the raw data, and trust yourself. Inform yourself.

What does “inform yourself” mean? It means transcend and mistrust ideology. Go for direct experience. What do you think when you face the waterfall? What do you think when you have sex? What do you think when you take psilocybin? Everything else is unconfirmable rumor, useless, probably lies. So liberate yourself from the illusion of culture. Take responsibility for what you think and what you do.

Terence McKenna

If one is prostrate to the truth, then rebuttals to opponents simply write themselves. Largely, they just consist of paraphrases or 1 or 2 logical steps.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11575356

Diese Gesellschaft braucht Täter wie Wolfgang Priklopil, um dem Bösen, das in ihr wohnt, ein Gesicht zu geben und es von sich selbst abzuspalten. Diese Gesellschaft benötigt die Bilder von Kellerverliesen, um nicht auf die vielen Wohnungen und Vorgärten sehen zu müssen, in denen die Gewalt ihr spießiges, bürgerliches Antlitz zeigt. Sie benutzt die Opfer spektakulärer Fälle wie mich, um sich der Verantwortung für die vielen namenlosen Opfer der alltäglichen Verbrechen zu entledigen, denen man nicht hilft – selbst wenn sie um Hilfe bitten.

Natascha Kampusch

Die Generation vor uns hat sich bei uns immer damit entschuldigt, dass sie von dem, was im Faschismus passiert ist, alle gar nicht so richtig gewußt haben, was er wirklich war. Und ich glaube, dass wir, unsere Generation, nicht mehr die Möglichkeit haben wird -- wenn wir zulassen, dass es zum Schlimmsten kommt -- dann werden wir einfach nicht mehr die Möglichkeit haben, der nächsten Generation zu erklären, dass wir von allem nichts gewusst haben; wir wissen heute alle alles.

Bettina Wegner

A person can become free through acts of disobedience by learning to say no to power. But not only is the capacity for disobedience the condition for freedom; freedom is also the condition for disobedience. If I am afraid of freedom, I cannot dare to say "no," I cannot have the courage to be disobedient. Indeed, freedom and the capacity for disobedience are inseparable; hence any social, political, and religious system which proclaims freedom, yet stamps out disobedience, cannot speak the truth.

Erich Fromm

As a woman I completely reject Hillary's brand of bourgeois feminism, because it leaves out millions of immigrant women, poor women and the women under her bombs around the world.

Abby Martin

https://www.youtube.com/w ... ch?v=PV_PLCC6jeI&t=26m38s

Google's answer is, wake up, grandpa, this is the new normal. But all they're doing is trying to port a bug in the Internet over to the real world, and calling it progress.

You can dress up a bug and call it a feature. You can also put dog crap in the freezer and call it ice cream. But people can taste the difference.

http://idlewords.com/talk ... net_with_a_human_face.htm

I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men, with a favourable presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any presumption it is the other way against holders of power, increasing as the power increases. Historic responsibility [that is, the later judgment of historians] has to make up for the want of legal responsibility [that is, legal consequences during the rulers' lifetimes]. Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it. That is the point at which . . . the end learns to justify the means. You would hang a man of no position, . . . but if what one hears is true, then Elizabeth asked the gaoler to murder Mary, and William III ordered his Scots minister to extirpate a clan. Here are the greater names coupled with the greater crimes. You would spare these criminals, for some mysterious reason. I would hang them, higher than Haman, for reasons of quite obvious justice; still more, still higher, for the sake of historical science....

Lord Acton

http://history.hanover.ed ... es/excerpts/165acton.html

Hungry man, reach for the book: it is a weapon.

Bertolt Brecht

Dem Blöden fährt bei jedem sinnvollen Wort der Schrecken in die Glieder.

Heraklit

Those who build a back door into their life will one day use it as main entrance.

Hans Arndt

Ideology does not arise from pure reason, it does not spring from the void. Ideology does not exist on its own, only in conjunction with power structures; ideology is completely subordinate to physical power. Ideology does not create power, it rationalizes it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11668613

When a group has no specific task (and consciousness raising is a task), the people in it turn their energies to controlling others in the group. This is not done so much out of a malicious desire to manipulate others (though sometimes it is) as out of a lack of anything better to do with their talents. Able people with time on their hands and a need to justify their coming together put their efforts into personal control, and spend their time criticizing the personalities of the other members in the group. Infighting and personal power games rule the day. When a group is involved in a task, people learn to get along with others as they are and to subsume personal dislikes for the sake of the larger goal. There are limits placed on the compulsion to remold every person in our image of what they should be.

The end of consciousness-raising leaves people with no place to go, and the lack of structure leaves them with no way of getting there.

Joreen Freeman

"The Tyranny of Structurelessness"

Anti-Semitism, in short, is not merely conflated with anti-Zionism, but even extended to Zionists who are critical of Israeli practices. Correspondingly, authentic anti-Semitism on the part of those whose services to Israeli power are deemed appropriate is of no account.

These two aspects of "the real anti-Semitism," ADL-style, were illustrated during the 1988 U.S. presidential campaign. The Democratic Party was denounced for anti-Semitism on the grounds that its convention dared to debate a resolution calling for a two-state political settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In contrast, when an array of Nazi sympathizers and anti-Semites were exposed in August 1988 in the Bush presidential campaign, the major Jewish organizations and leaders were, for the most part, "curiously blasé about both the revelations and Bush's response to them," largely ignoring the matter, John Judis comments. The New Republic dismissed as a minor matter the "antique and anemic forms of anti-Semitism" of virulent anti-Semites and Nazi and fascist sympathizers at a high level of the Republican campaign organization. The editors stressed, rather, the "comfortable haven for Jew-hatred on the left, including the left wing of the Democratic Party," parts of the Jackson campaign, and "the ranks of increasingly well-organized Arab activists," all of whom supported the two-state resolution at the Party convention and thus qualify as "Jew-haters."

The point is that the ultra-right Republicans are regarded as properly supportive of Israel by hard-line standards, while the Democratic Party reveals its "Jew-hatred" by tolerating elements that believe that Palestinians are human beings with the same rights as Jews, including the right of national self-determination alongside of Israel. Following the lead of the major Jewish organizations, the Democrats carefully avoided the discovery of anti-Semites and Nazis in the Republican campaign headquarters and the continuing close links after exposure.

The same point was illustrated by the revelation, at the same time, that the Reagan Department of Education had once again refused federal funds for a highly praised school history program on the Holocaust. It was first rejected in 1986 "after a review panel member complained that the views of the Nazi Party and the Ku Klux Klan were not represented." Republican faithfuls charged the program with "psychological manipulation, induced behavioral change and privacy-invading treatment" (Phyllis Schlafly); citing "leftist authorities" such as New York Times columnist Flora Lewis, British historian A.J.P. Taylor, and Kurt Vonnegut; being "profoundly offensive to fundamentalists and evangelicals"; and even being "anti-war, anti-hunting" and likely to "induce a guilt trip." A senior Education Department official attributed the rejections to "those on the extreme right wing of the Republican Party." In 1986 and 1987, this particular program had been "singled out for a refusal." In 1988, when the program "was the top-rated project in the category [of history, geography, and civics], created by then-Education Secretary William J. Bennett," the entire category was eliminated.

But "the extreme right wing of the Republican Party," whatever its attitudes towards Nazis and the Holocaust, is adequately pro-Israel. There was no detectable protest, and the issue did not arise in the last stages of the election campaign.

The cheapening of the concept of anti-Semitism and the ready tolerance for anti-Arab racism go hand-in-hand, expressing the same political commitments. All of this, again, is merely "antique and anemic anti-Semitism."

Noam Chomsky

"Necessary Illusions"