“The most striking difference between ancient and modern sophists is that the ancients were satisfied with a passing victory of the argument at the expense of truth, whereas the moderns want a more lasting victory at the expense of reality.” Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) (p9) Our lives have been hijacked by insane […]
PARIJAH DIARIES 5 That gruesome quiet got inside me too, eventually. I have to shake it off. I had a friend who worked in theatre, and between jobs he used to drive trucks, and sometimes he had to drive a truck-load of cattle to the abbatoir. Most of the journey was on the motorway, but […]
“The force possessed by totalitarian propaganda — before the movements have the power to drop iron curtains to prevent anyone’s disturbing, by the slightest reality, the gruesome quiet of an entirely imaginary world — lies in its ability to shut the masses from the real world. The only signs which the real world still offers […]
“When I came upon the myth of objectivity in certain modern thinkers, it made me angry. So there was only one world for these people, the same for everyone. And all the other worlds were to be counted as illusions left over from the past. Or why not call them by their name — hallucinations?” […]
‘Normal men don’t know that everything is possible.’ David Rousset, The Other Kingdom, 1947 Whenever I get into a deep conversation with someone, where we’re exploring what is and what isn’t in this world, as we go deeper into the subject, sooner or later we hit bedrock — the point where rational argument takes you […]
“The Okhrana, the secret police of the GPU, is reported to have invented a filing system in which every suspect was noted on a large card in the center of which his name was surrounded by a red circle; his political friends were designated by smaller red circles and his nonpolitical acquaintances by green ones; […]
Eichmann is everywhere; not Everyman but Nowhere Man, someone we have all come across in our daily lives. For Arendt it was his bland normality that made him so terrifying.
SAM WHITE VS THE APPARATCHIKS When I read the UK Coronavirus Act last year I was picking up a very unpleasant smell; as if a rat had died under the floorboards, or it was 1933 and I was reading through Hitler’s Reichstag Decree. It wasn’t just that elections were suspended — the fundamental principles of […]
1 THE REALITY PRINCIPLE Ever since the onset of the Great Pseudo-Pandemic, George Orwell has been much on our minds, with quotations and memes proliferating all over the web and even the streets as the relevance of his greatest work to our own times grows ever clearer. Within days of the first lockdowns, sceptics had […]
On 14th October 2020 an email was sent to a publication called The Canadian Report from an anonymous source purporting to be a member of the Strategic Planning Committee of the Liberal Party of Canada (under the Prime Minister’s Office), tasked with creating a plan to achieve 100{7afbbc0afb0c7a66aa968a61965a5f55aa54e1a53c5ce8d1dec42cbaeedea50c} compliance with the plan outlined in the […]