Friday, July 14, 2017

Gore Vidal: The Corporate Grip On Opinion and Other Normalized and Often Disguised Realities


The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western world. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity - much less dissent.

Persuading the people to vote against their own best interests has been the awesome genius of the American political elite from the beginning.

There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party … and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat.

It makes no difference who you vote for - the two parties are really one party representing four percent of the people. 

You know, I've been around the ruling class all my life, and I've been quite aware of their total contempt for the people of the country.

As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests.

The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the people from ever questioning the inequity of a system where most people drudge along, paying heavy taxes for which they get nothing in return.

Politically, of course, it's to the Right, but then the whole country is to the Right. 

The unfed mind devours itself.  

Terrorism is a direct response to the crimes our government has committed against foreigners (besides which, the actual terrorists are within our own government).

We were to be forever at war with somebody. We were going to fight communism everywhere on earth even if it didn't threaten us. It was a holy war, just as we've made one on terrorism and Islam, equally stupid and equally irrelevant.

We should stop going around babbling about how we're the greatest democracy on earth, when we're not even a democracy. We are a sort of militarised republic.

The word 'radical' derives from the Latin word for root. Therefore, if you want to get to the root of anything you must be radical. It is no accident that the word has now been totally demonized.

True wisdom is to know the extent of what you don't know quite as well as you know what you do know. 

- Gore Vidal
 

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