hypocrisy is a common weapon of power

"a successful claim to [imperial]power also rested on behind-the-scenes manoeuvers, on the support of key interest groups, on being groomed for the part, and on the careful manipulation of opinion." from "spqr: a history of ancient rome_____________"what the bolsheviks were up to words cannot describe. one time someone brought a newspaper from town. inside a photo. grain growing high in the fields. and the...text said that the cities were going hungry, that there were lines for bread night and day because the peasants were lazy, they didn't want to harvest the crops, and everything was rotting in the field. the hatred toward the peasants was great, and yet it was after all the peasants themselves who were dying of hunger." branislawa kamieloska on the ukrainian famine of the 1930s from "imperium"______“I turn on the T.V., open the newspapers and I see stories of chaos. Chaos! Yet it is the exact opposite. This administration is running like a fine-tuned machine.” don trump_________"in our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics'. all issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia." george orwell_____________"post-truth", "alternative facts", "fake news"...the "special vocabulary" of the current era continues to expand and distort...it is different but, in the end, it is still the "mass of lies" and no less the "evasions" of orwell's day...from the not so crypto-fascist right to the censorious, politically correct liberals everyone is indulging in distortions and outright untruths to enhance and expand their views...the media? from the new york times and wall street journal to breitbart and fox they all have an editorial policy that pander to their advertisers and the world view of their core readers who want nothing more than reinforcement of bias...no one is "objective" ( and, frankly, i am uncertain if that exists anywhere except, perhaps, in terms of the force of gravity... a ten story fall will injure or kill rightist, leftist, or centerist without regard to opinion or status )and everyone has an agenda..so..who to believe? no one...if it is going to be cast as an orwellian age then let us be orwellian in the terms of his writing and intellect...he was good at exposing hypocrisy and just because he wrote about a dystopian future doesn't mean he wanted to live it..his writing ( and i mean that beyond animal farm and 1984...he was a prolific writer and a good journalist ) looked to go beyond the distortions and the special vocabularies and dig into what was actually going on...he was widely read and intellectually skeptical...and he wrote in the most straightforward and clear language he could muster to make it plain what he thought...we could do with a bit more straightforwardness in this behavioral sink we have tumbled into...coming clean will take some serious linguistic analysis...no one in power likes clear thought...it raises too many questions...we need george now...but no the dystopian george...that person has been hugely misrepresented...what we need is the clear headed and unflinching semantic analyst that george was...even when it came to his own language use.