Wikileaks vs. the Empire: the Revolutionary Act of Telling the Truth (John Pilger) [View all]

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[font size="1"]Crazy Horses Riding Through the Lower East Side to a WikiLeaks Soundtrack, 2013 graffiti or mural by Banksy[/font size]



Wikileaks vs. the Empire: the Revolutionary Act of Telling the Truth

by JOHN PILGER
CounterPunch, Oct. 2, 2015

EXCERPT...

These are dark times, in which the propaganda of deceit touches all our lives. It is as if political reality has been privatised and illusion legitimised. The information age is a media age. We have politics by media; censorship by media; war by media; retribution by media; diversion by media – a surreal assembly line of clichés and false assumptions.

SNIP...

Edward Bernays, who invented the term, “public relations” as a euphemism for “propaganda”, predicted this more than 80 years ago. He called it, “the invisible government”.

He wrote, “Those who manipulate this unseen element of (modern democracy) constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country …We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of …”

The aim of this invisible government is the conquest of us: of our political consciousness, our sense of the world, our ability to think independently, to separate truth from lies.

This is a form of fascism, a word we are rightly cautious about using, preferring to leave it in the flickering past. But an insidious modern fascism is now an accelerating danger. As in the 1930s, big lies are delivered with the regularity of a metronome. Muslims are bad. Saudi bigots are good. ISIS bigots are bad. Russia is always bad. China is getting wikileaksfilesbad. Bombing Syria is good. Corrupt banks are good. Corrupt debt is good. Poverty is good. War is normal.

CONTINUED...

http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/10/02/wikileaks-vs-the-empire-the-revolutionary-act-of-telling-the-truth/