FlyingFish

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This is a personal website containing a few articles and links, focused around the issues of the mass media, information, power, democracy and quality of life.

It is dedicated to the resistance against news and image management, against the systematic distortion and trivialisation of reality that mainstream culture spews forth.

To the extent that we know and understand what's going on around us, we are empowered to make informed and wise decisions about how we live and act. Most of us know or understand next to nothing about the world around us; therefore, our 'freedom of choice' and our votes are next to worthless.

It is against the interests of big business corporations, and of most politicians, that we be empowered. The less informed and aware we are, the more they are able to sell us their images, news, ideas and products. None of these necessarily improve the quality of our lives; indeed, they impoverish our lives, since a quality life is an empowered life, and this is precisely what the corporate political establishment strives to reserve for itself.


'15 Reasons Why Mass Media Employees Act Like Propagandists'




 
"Public opinion itself is manufactured like other commodities; the proprietors of five or six great newspapers control it with the same certainty as the pointsman sends a train to the north or to the west. Ignorance has the grievous result of making the mass of the people and the middle classes a docile force in the hands of a few informed men. In the heart of our seeming democracies it has permitted the formation of an oligarchy of those who know.
"
Francis Delaisi, Oil: Its Influence on Politics (1922), p.5; translated by C. Leonard Leese from the French, Le Pétrole (1920)

"When conflicts occur, soldiers like other people, have to have faith in the moral rectitude of their government to some extent, because it is not usually possible to know enough of the facts to make an absolute judgement as to the rights and wrongs of the case."
Brigadier Frank Kitson, Low Intensity Operations: Subversion, Insurgency and Peace-keeping (1971), p.9




Remembering Tomas Young (1979-2014): Iraq War Veteran Turned Antiwar Activist

Never again: anti-war veterans to carry white-poppy wreath on Remembrance Day






Lessons in how to lie about Iraq
'The problem is not propaganda but
the relentless control of
the kind of things we think about '

Gas mask soldiers, Kuwait

 

 

The White House
Manifest Destiny!


The true purpose of torture
'Guantánamo is there to terrorise - both inmates and the wider world'

 



Blair, Butler report whitewash






Gustave Gilbert, a German-speaking intelligence officer and psychologist, in conversation with Hermann Goering in his cell on the evening of 18 April 1946:
We got around to the subject of war again and I said that, contrary to his attitude, I did not think that the common people are very thankful for leaders who bring them war and destruction.
"Why, of course, the people don't want war," Goering shrugged. "Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. 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."
"There is one difference," I pointed out. "In a democracy the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars."
"Oh, that is all well and good, but, 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 pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country."
  Gustave M. Gilbert, Nuremberg Diary, New York: Farrar, Straus and Co, 1947, pp. 278-9.



Greasing up to power
'A US comedian brings us closer to the truth than the BBC. Most of our journalists fail us'




stop asking questions
more gas your suv uses, more foreigners i kill
tired, individuality trying to reassert itself
Posters from The Propaganda Remix Project
     What Kurt Vonnegut says about the posters:
These anti-war posters by Micah Ian Wright are reminiscent in spirit of works by artists such as Käthe Kollwitz and George Grosz during the 1920s, when it was becoming ever more evident that the infant German democracy was about to be murdered by psycho-pathic personalities, hereinafter 'PPs', a medical term for smart, personable people who have no conscience. PPs are fully aware of how much suffering their actions will inflict on others, but they do not care. They cannot care.
The classic medical text about such attractive leaders turning into unspeakable calamities is The Mask of Sanity, by Dr Hervey Cleckley. An American PP at the head of a corporation, for example, could enrich himself by ruining his employees and investors, and still feel as pure as the driven snow. A PP, should he somehow attain a post near the top of our federal government, might feel that taking the country into an endless war, with casualties in the millions, was simply something decisive to do today. And so to bed.
With a PP, decisiveness is all.
Or, to put it another way: we now have our own Reichstag fire to do something about. What will it be?

  Trading on Fear, The Guardian, Weekend magazine, 12 July 2003, p.33.




 

US 'planned nuclear first strike on Russia'

 

Orange

The War Was Won Before Hiroshima - And the Generals Who Dropped the Bomb Knew It

Was Hiroshima Necessary? Why the Atomic Bombings Could Have Been Avoided





 








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