ALAN writes:

In the years 1966-’70, I made the remarkable discovery (remarkable to one 16 years old) that some doctors were liars, as were some pharmacologists, some hospitals, and some departments of government. In some of those years I was in high school. But I did not learn those things in high school. I learned them in spite of high school.

I also discovered that whereas “nice” people did not themselves originate such lies, they agreed nonetheless to accept them and repeat them and almost never bothered to challenge them or oppose them.

There it was, in plain sight:  Professional mendacity in the former; widespread credulity or mindlessness or evasion in the latter. The first was bad enough, I thought. But the second was even worse.

Over the intervening fifty years, the lies have increased, along with a population who are delighted to be entertained and deceived by such lies. (more…)

AT the 23rd meeting of the New Right in London on September 26, 2009, Jonathan Bowden gave a speech on George Orwell's novel 1984. He makes many interesting observations, but his most important one is that Orwell's book depicts totalitarian rule by intellectuals. An excerpt: Another interesting insight is the relationship that people have with their children. Orwell prefigures the world of bourgeois chaos where parents are frightened to discipline their own children, and which we increasingly see in liberal humanist societies. The parents are preyed upon by the young. One of the first, and great, scenes is with the Parsons family who live just up the corridor in the block, cause the Parsons boy is a terror. He accuses everyone of being, “You’re a thought criminal!” he says, “You’re a nasty little vanguard against the Proletariat elite!” He screams that at everyone he meets. And he’s got a pop-gun, he says “You’re gonna burn, you’re gonna burn, you’re going to the camps! You’re going down [unintelligible]” And his mother’s terrified of him because to discipline him is to engage in the possibility of a counter-revolutionary act. So he knows that he’s got his parents where he wants them by this endless sort of Young Pioneers brigading sort of behavior. And it’s a way of corralling the older generation into conformity. Orwell’s instinct for particularly Left totalitarian forms of power is very acute here considering that, except for a small period…

"DEVOTION to the souls in Purgatory detaches us from the vain and passing things of the earth. It establishes a contact between us and our dear ones, which does not allow their memory to sleep with their dust. Not knowing whether they may not need our prayers to release them from their prison of sorrow, we multiply for them our prayers, our sacrifices, our good works. And, of all that, nothing is lost, for if they for whom we supplicate are happily in no need of such attention, God will mercifully apply to other souls the satisfactions we offer. There are multitudes of forgotten souls whose names are never uttered in prayer to God." -- Martin Jugie, Purgatory and the Means to Avoid It   

SHAUNA LINK, the mother of 28-year-old Haley Link Brinkmeyer who died in January two days after receiving the Moderna injection, recently testified in Indiana. "I can't describe the nagging pain I have with the lknowledge that her death, I feel, was in vain. I wake up every day with the same gut pain I had when we were told Haley passed, and the cycle starts all over again. And I'm only one person; there are so many similar stories."  

FROM Simon Shack at September Clues: [I]t should now be obvious to everyone that the invisible virus saga and the invisible global warming saga are, so to speak, intimately intertwined - as well as being the two current MASTER HOAXES used by the Nutwork (i.e. the "Powers-that-should-not-be") in order to fool, hypnotize and control this world's population.  

"CRITICAL RACE THEORY" is an offshoot of "critical theory" developed by the Frankfurt School of Jewish intellectuals such as Herbert Marcuse and Erich Fromm, to name two of many, who set about the task of deconstructing piece-by-piece Western society in the 20th century from their headquarters in California and New York City. Please avoid the term "critical race theory." It should be called, critical white race theory or simply anti-white theory. It is critical of only one race. This intellectual fad with its mind-bending jargon would be hilariously funny if people didn't actually believe in it and if it weren't actually being taught in schools and spread by major corporations in mandatory brain-washing sessions for employees. As it is, it's not funny at all. There's no question that it is laying the foundation for violence.  

CHARLOTTE ISERBYT expresses regrets for endorsing the new GOP governor of Virginia:

Who is the REAL Glenn Youngkin?

Glenn Youngkin, Virginia’s new Governor, is a globalist (internationalist), not at all who Youngkin himself, the parents who are supporting him, and the controlled media have lead Virginians and Americans to believe. (more…)

A FAN begged the performer to stop the concert. From the audio, it sounds as if rap star Travis Scott paused for a moment, asked who wanted him to stop and then continued to perform. (Language warning.) According to another witness, the rapper paused several times, asked concertgoers to help the injured — and then continued to perform.

At least eight people were crushed to death at a Houston concert by Scott last night. The crowd there to enjoy the star’s obscene “music” totaled about 50,000 and when it surged forward toward the stage “scores” were injured. (more…)

[The first two parts of this essay on George Orwell’s 1984 are here and here.]

THOUGHT police, groupthink, thoughtcrime, unperson, memory hole, doublethink and Newspeak — these are words from the book 1984 that have become part of our vocabulary. The novel chillingly depicts psychological warfare through mass propaganda:

And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed— if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’ And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. ‘Reality control’, they called it: in Newspeak, ‘doublethink’.

Here is the work of a masterful artist, transporting us into a vivid alternate reality, an unforgettably bleak vision of hell on earth.

Orwell, who was born Eric Blair, was a socialist. He was aware of what had happened in Russia. He told the author and producer Sidney Sheldon that the book was about life in Bolshevik regimes:

[Nineteen Eighty-Four] was based chiefly on communism, because that is the dominant form of totalitarianism, but I was trying chiefly to imagine what communism would be like if it were firmly rooted in the English speaking countries, and was no longer a mere extension of the Russian Foreign Office.

For good reason, Orwell despised the uniformity, ugliness and inhumanity of industrial capitalism too and many passages in 1984 are reminiscent of his writings on the working poor in England and France.

The main character Winston Smith is 39. He has grown up in London during a devastating war. He survives but his father, mother and sister were all taken away, never to be seen again. He painfully recalls his family:

The thing that now suddenly struck Winston was that his mother’s death, nearly thirty years ago, had been tragic and sorrowful in a way that was no longer possible. Tragedy, he perceived, belonged to the ancient time, to a time when there was still privacy, love, and friendship, and when the members of a family stood by one another without needing to know the reason. His mother’s memory tore at his heart because she had died loving him, when he was too young and selfish to love her in return, and because somehow, he did not remember how, she had sacrificed herself to a conception of loyalty that was private and unalterable. Such things, he saw, could not happen today. Today there were fear, hatred, and pain, but no dignity of emotion, no deep or complex sorrows. All this he seemed to see in the large eyes of his mother and his sister, looking up at him through the green water, hundreds of fathoms down and still sinking.

Privacy, love, and friendship — these are the casualties of collectivism and ideological fanaticism.

(more…)

 THE MONTH of November is dedicated to the holy souls in Purgatory. Prayers and daily reflections can be found here and here. "The first source or cause of a desire to be delivered from any state in life is, when that state is connected with great embarrassment and afflictions. Hence it is that the sick long so eagerly for the presence of the physician and for the medicine that will cure them; in like manner the starving long for bread and nourishment; the thirsty, for water; the poor, for the sentence of the judge, that will declare them heirs to riches, and save them from destitution. So also does the wayfarer upon the billows of the stormy ocean sigh for the port, yearn to reach the place where a happy future awaits him; and so does the prisoner in his dreary cell anxiously expect the hour of his delivery. How great, therefore, must not be the desire of the poor souls to be ransomed from Purgatory." --- Fr. Francis Xavier Weninger, 1876  

"THE Church today has the same desire as the Apostle thus expressed to the first Christians. The truth concerning the dead not only proves admirably the union between God’s justice and his goodness; it also inspires a charitable pity which the hardest heart cannot resist, and at the same time offers to the mourners the sweetest consolation. If faith teaches us the existence of a purgatory, where our loved ones may be detained by unexpiated sin, it is also of faith that we are able to assist them; and theology assures us that their more or less speedy deliverance lies in our power." --- Dom Prosper Gueranger, The Liturgical Year