Orwellian or Kafkaesque?

July 23, 2023 By Mark C. Ross 

Or both?  There's no doubt that these are atypical times.  And it is human nature to find some kind of template in which to fit them. Longstanding suspicions of the evil nature of many powerful members of our government(s) are now being confirmed.  Their collaborators in the media have already squandered much of their credibility.  Meanwhile, we are being constantly told how polarized we've become.  What that really means is that some of us are still believing the lies that we're being told.  The rest of us are yearning for all of this to come to an end.

Eric Blair changed his name to George Orwell so he wouldn't embarrass his family when he published his factual account of his life as a vagrant — a lifestyle he assumed in order to write Down and Out in Paris and London.  The term "Orwellian" is used to describe vivid literary descriptions of a dystopic future. A native of Prague Bohemia, which is now in Czechia, Franz Kafka's work was somewhat more fantastic than Orwell's but nonetheless also did a good job of revealing the dark institutional side of human nature.  Most famously, The Trial portrayed a hapless Josef K — who could never even learn what it was that he was being accused of.  Kafka's day job was with an insurance company, with which his law degree helped.  He died fairly young at 40 from tuberculosis, which wasn't all that unusual back in those days........To Read More.........

Orwell was Right: Control the Language, Control the World

December 18, 2021 By Bill Rice, Jr.

Of all the elements of today’s “New Normal,” the most ominous is the “reform” that effectively changed the meanings of previously accepted words or terms. The following glossary illustrates how changes to our vocabulary played a central role in making the world a more dangerous and frightening place.

New Normal - “Normal” is something that has long been the norm and is accepted as the norm. The key point is that the “old” normal no longer applies. This change in thinking provided authority figures the license to enact reforms that would not have been widely accepted in the past. 

In the old normal, a citizen might not have complied with authoritarian mandates, but in the New Normal, most will… that is, if one accepts the premise that we now have a New Normal, a premise most people now accept.

Vaccine -- Previously a vaccine was an injection that provided “immunity” or prevented diseases, as well as the spread of diseases. Today, at least as it involves the COVID “vaccines,” vaccines simply (and allegedly) reduce the probability someone will develop a severe case of this disease or die from this disease...........

Safe...........New Normal.........Effective ......Harm.......Misinformation or Disinformation ......Science and “The science” ..........Anti-vaxxer ..............Free or freedom ..........Patriotism or patriot.........Public health.........

All of the above was made possible by changes in accepted language. George Orwell was right. If you want to control people, first control the language.

COVID, a virus that poses no significant health risk to 98 percent of the population, has given us a “New Normal” where “vaccines” are not vaccines, where “freedom” is now a privilege granted to those who obey, and where unelected public health officials have made billions of dollars for pharmaceutical companies............To Read More....

Book Burning, Name Calling, And The Democrats Praetorian Guard

By Vince Coyner When Barack 

Obama ran in 2008, I was virulently opposed to his candidacy. I wasn’t a huge McCain fan, but at least I knew he had America’s best interests at heart, something I never felt about Obama. Four years later I had issues with Romney, but for similar reasons, I voted for him.

Once Obama was in office, I disagreed with almost everything he did for eight years, whether Obamacare, DACA, GM, DADT, or virtually everything race-related. I disagreed with his trading for Bowie Bergdahl, his pardon of Chelsea Manning, and his commutation of the sentence of FLAN terrorist Oscar Lopez Rivera. I disagreed with his signing the Paris Climate Agreement, the Iran deal, and his servile posture towards China. I disagreed with his policies on housing, on education, and on energy. Essentially, there was nothing I agreed with Barack Obama on. He could have been Chinese or Italian or Jewish or Klingon…I didn’t care. I thought everything he did was simply wrong............

But a funny thing happened on the way to Obama’s inauguration: Apparently, I magically transformed into a racist. Who knew?.............

And so today, we find that Democrats, having fraudulently eliminated the single biggest threat to the leviathan of government power in a century, have decided to eliminate all potential to resurrect any such threats. Not only are leftists seeking to bar Trump from ever running again, but they’re also seeking to demonize and ostracize his supporters.

How? Language. You’re labeled a racist, a terrorist, or a fascist on social media for all the world to see. The terrorist designation used to be for people who blow up planes, kill innocents in discos, or set fire to churches. No longer. Today, simply stating you believe the Democrats stole the 2020 election is sufficient to get you labeled as such, as is voicing your support for Trump or an investigation into election anomalies................  To Read More.....

Our Mounting Orwellian Nightmare

January 16, 2021 By Jeffrey Folks

So we are to imagine that those who objected to Biden's having stolen the election are responsible for the violence at the Capitol?  And that, going forward, any public official who questions Biden's win should be removed from office, and that any corporate leader who objects should be fired?  All this when the truth is that Trump in all likelihood won the election.

It is the perfect example of Orwellian speech.  In his classic essay "Politics and the English Language," Orwell spoke of the condition where "words and meaning have almost parted company."  If that "almost" is a measure of Orwellian speech, then today's Democrat leaders are beyond Orwellian.  Their words and meaning have parted company entirely.

As Orwell also stressed, the decline of language is both cause and effect of the decline of politics.  When politicians and media begin speaking nonsense, it is the symptom of an underlying corruption of political thinking.  The idea that the president should be removed from office for having defended the electoral process is truly bizarre, but it has been repeated throughout the liberal media and by most liberal politicians and even by some conservatives.

One might say progressives like Nancy Pelosi have become "unhinged," but that would let them off the hook.  It would suggest that they don't quite realize what they are doing.  But what they are doing is the result of crafty political calculation.  They want to tie President Trump with the Capitol violence to the point that he can never run again.  The same political deviousness lies behind suggestions that he should not be in control of the nation's nuclear arsenal because of his supposed mental instability............To Read More....

Feel the Bern: Leftism is a Mental Disorder.

By Rich Kozlovich

Today, June 9, 2018, Paul Gottfried posted the article, Orwell the Leftist, discussing David Ramsay Steele's work regarding George Orwell, who published two books that haven't been read by enough people, Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, both of which villify "totalitarian collectivism".

He points out both are well known, but "frequently ignored."  He notes that "there is a veritable cottage industry for singing the praises of Orwell. In these tributes Orwell is celebrated as a uniquely independent thinker and a "habitual dissident," who just happened to be a socialist until his last day on Earth", and that's the problem.  In spite of all the disasters he personally saw that sort of "converted" him, he remained a socialist until he died.

Why?

For years I've been saying to be a leftist is to have a mental disorder.  What I find over and over again are those who were once solid leftists and then became "conservatives" always..... always...... fail to cut that cord entirely.  There are just some things they refuse to accept. 

That became clear to me when Diana West's book, American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation's Character, came out and was initially praised by Front Page editor and conservative writer David Horowitz.  Praised initially until his buddy and historian Ronald Radosh (both former Marxists) came out and criticized the book by ridiculing her and condemning her work publicly.  This caused a fire storm she not only weathered, but was vindicated by people who were in the know at the time, including a former Russian general.  This event exposed the both of them for still being contaminated with red measles. 

What was their bone of contention? 

It was clear from all the evidence she gathered you could only draw one conclusion about Franklin Delano Roosevelt - he was a traitor who surrounded himself with traitors and filled the federal government with traitors. And their intellectual and ideological progeny still infest government right now.  We call them the Deep State, but make no mistake about this.  They're leftists, and traitors.  

As for all these former Marxists, they're more than happy to say FDR's policies were wrong, but they just can't take the next obvious step and call him what he was. A Traitor!

To be a leftist is to be mentally disordered, and that disorder isn't easily cured. In some way in the back of their minds they keep thinking socialism has only failed because the wrong people were in charge. We have 225 years of history to show that kind of thinking is insane

As the author notes: "Orwell decided against democracy when he opted for socialism.  But there is no reason to believe that socialist programs are "undemocratic" if a majority votes for those who favor such programs."

When a nation has socialism imposed on them, or chooses to impose it on themselves via a democratic vote, as America has been doing for decades,  it leads to the socialism's invertible tyranny.  Socialism is antithetical to individual rights.  How can a political philosophy foundationally and intellectually opposed to individual rights be anything less than tyrannical?  How can anyone think otherwise unless they're insane?

Can you "Feel the Bern"?