Philip Roddis: Corporate totalitarianism: Aldous Huxley (and Goering) nail it

It's so easy for the elite to get people behind them in a war. It doesn't matter how evil the ruling elite are because all they need is some propaganda and once the war effort starts the people will quickly fall behind them.

When the Guardian found Julian Assange they felt it was the story of the decade, but when they felt that perhaps his released cables might endanger British troops lives they felt he had gone too far and so they turned against him trying to discredit him. Of course you don't want to endanger your own troops, nor do you want your country defeated in a war, and so the ruling elite can start any war they like and then the people will quickly fall behind them. And once the war has started the elite will just sit in their armchairs while others do the dying for them and they get the big gains.

There must be a way out of this? We have to make sure that these wars never start in the first place and for that we need a free press, but luckily we do have the internet. But I don't know how many people get the real news, hopefully it is millions?  I tell my friends to try reading this site.

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I never read Brave New World but when an American unknown to me agreed on FB with my view of Hillary Clinton, I looked her up to find this on her Timeline: by Philip Roddis

.... and by means of ever more effective methods of mind-manipulation, the democracies will change their nature; the quaint old forms—elections, parliaments, Supreme Courts and all the rest—will remain. The underlying substance will be a new kind of non-violent totalitarianism. All the traditional names, all the hallowed slogans will remain exactly what they were in the good old days. Democracy and freedom will be the theme of every broadcast and editorial—but Democracy and freedom in a strictly Pickwickian sense. Meanwhile the ruling oligarchy and its highly trained elite of soldiers, policemen, thought-manufacturers and mind-manipulators will quietly run the show as they see fit.

– Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited, published 1958

As the west sleepwalks into nuclear confrontation over Syria with a Russia our leaders have pushed into a corner – using all their corporate backed might to paint black white, up down and evil common sense – Huxley’s words could have been freshly coined just this morning.

​Also apposite are Herman Goering’s words at the Nuremberg trials:

Why of course the people don’t want war. That is understood…But after all it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.

https://off-guardian.org/2016/08/29/corporate-totalitarianism-aldous-huxley-and-goering-nail-it/