I feel some compassion for principled Tories who have had nothing to do with masterminding the election campaign presently being fought by the Tory élite and their paid Rottweiler, Lynton Crosby.
It is surely under his instruction that May and other highly-placed Tories have agreed to lie and slander in order to sneak their empty promises past a damning array of facts, to try and snatch this election from the man who is, at the moment, winning without deceit and with a generosity of spirit his opponents could do worse than try to emulate.
We have all learned through social media how the Tory campaign from the outset took its methodology from the architect of ‘strong and stable’ power, Adolf Hitler, who ended his second volume of ‘Mein Kampf’, written in 1926, on that confident assertion. He it was who laid bare his philosophy on the correct use of propaganda:
‘The PSYCHE of the broad masses is accessible only to what is strong and uncompromising. Like a woman whose inner sensibilities are not so much under the sway of abstract reasoning but are always subject to the influence of a vague emotional longing for the strength that completes her being, and who would rather bow to the strong man than dominate the weakling–in like manner the masses of the people prefer the ruler to the suppliant and are filled with a stronger sense of mental security by a teaching that brooks no rival than by a teaching which offers them a liberal choice.’
Hitler, Adolf. Mein Kampf (p. 34). . Kindle Edition.
Does that seem familiar?
How about this?
‘The interests of the working class were not allowed for a moment to cross the path of this purpose; for in politics the application of economic pressure is always possible if the one side be sufficiently unscrupulous and the other sufficiently inert and docile. In this case both conditions were fulfilled.
Because, at the very heart of the Tories’ campaign, is an icy disdain for ordinary people:
…for everybody who properly estimates the political intelligence of the masses can easily see that this is not sufficiently developed to enable them to form general political judgments on their own account, or to select the men who might be competent to carry out their ideas in practice.
Hitler, Adolf. Mein Kampf (p. 57). . Kindle Edition.
So, with the Tory PR machine grinding into gear, the next step, according to Hitler, would be to get the Press lined up and obedient:
‘It took the Press only a few days to transform some ridiculously trivial matter into an issue of national importance, while vital problems were completely ignored or filched and hidden away from public attention. The Press succeeded in the magical art of producing names from nowhere within the course of a few weeks. They made it appear that the great hopes of the masses were bound up with those names. And so they made those names more popular than any man of real ability could ever hope to be in a long lifetime.
Hard to believe that was written in 1926.
Here’s how the Tory propaganda machine planned to ensure their tired old dogmas would take on a sprightly freshness:
The art of leadership, as displayed by really great popular leaders in all ages, consists in consolidating the attention of the people against a single adversary and taking care that nothing will split up that attention into sections. The more the militant energies of the people are directed towards one objective the more will new recruits join the movement, attracted by the magnetism of its unified action, and thus the striking power will be all the more enhanced
Because, at bottom, Tories despise you. They think any old guff will do, if it’s sold to you hard enough. And any old leader will do, as long as she can put up a decent show. Oh, and they make sure to use a limited vocabulary repeated until we fully comprehend it, because we, collectively, are not considered very bright.
‘Here the art of propaganda consists in putting a matter so clearly and forcibly before the minds of the people as to create a general conviction regarding the reality of a certain fact, the necessity of certain things and the just character of something that is essential.
But as this art is not an end in itself and because its purpose must be exactly that of the advertisement poster, to attract the attention of the masses and not by any means to dispense individual instructions to those who already have an educated opinion on things or who wish to form such an opinion on grounds of objective study-because that is not the purpose of propaganda, it must appeal to the feelings of the public rather than to their reasoning powers.
Did I say already that politicians using this type of propaganda have only contempt for the intellects of millions of us?
All propaganda must be presented in a popular form and must fix its intellectual level so as not to be above the heads of the least intellectual of those to whom it is directed. Thus its purely intellectual level will have to be that of the lowest mental common denominator among the public it is desired to reach.’
So last night we saw Theresa May, that shy, retiring flower who has so successfully avoided meeting real people in her tightly-controlled campaign, answering questions from the public.
What for us voters was a deadly serious Q & A, she saw as another opportunity to slander and lie about Labour politicians. She twice said, during the Question Time programme, that Diane Abbott wants to destroy police DNA files of criminals, when that was not at all what Abbott said. Abbott has pledged to remove innocent people’s DNA once a crime has been solved. She quotes the case of a fourteen year old girl having to submit her DNA to the police for a crime in which she was not even a suspect. Would anyone want to start their adult lives with a police record they have done nothing to deserve?
But it is their latest effort which has reached an all-time low. They have produced a video which has been edited and altered to mean the exact opposite of what was said. I won’t give a link to it because it is so despicable.
Corbyn was being asked if he would condemn the IRA bombings. Corbyn’s sincere condemnation of all violence, loyalist and republican, has been trimmed in this video to make it seem as if he is refusing to condemn the IRA bombings. This is an out and out deceit. And it is the most watched video of the Tory campaign [clearly, the others are forgettable]. The fact is that, when he was asked by Mo Mowlam to help her start peace negotiations for the Good Friday Agreement, he met, talked and listened to Ian Paisley. After they met, they continued to have a civilised exchange of letters. As Corbyn says, in order to achieve peace, sometimes you have to talk to people whose views you dislike.
The Tories’ tactics smack of desperation. They cannot campaign on their record or their achievements – apart from the well-deserved success of same-sex marriage legislation – they have done nothing to be proud of in the past seven years of power. The vaunted economic recovery beloved of Osborne has made no difference whatsoever to the lives of millions. Calculations of strength or weakness of The Great British Pound are irrelevant when you haven’t got enough pounds in your pocket to put down a mortgage or even rent a house, or when, even though you are working full time, you are humiliatingly forced to accept the charity handout of food banks.
So, is this the gang of dishonest brokers we want to negotiate our Brexit arrangements? How can Barnier trust anything Boris Johnson or David Davis says, when they seem to be perfectly comfortable with a campaign based on lying? Is this the calibre of man we want representing the UK and our interests?
And why on earth is May talking about Brexit discussions as if we are already at war with the EU?
I leave the last word to Hitler. He was a vile human being, but he certainly knew how to build a dictatorship. He would have recognised with a smirk the Tories’ ‘coalition of chaos’ soundbite.
The leader of genius must have the ability to make different opponents appear as if they belonged to the one category; for weak and wavering natures among a leader’s following may easily begin to be dubious about the justice of their own cause if they have to face different enemies.
Happy voting on June 8th.
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franceskaywriter 
CORBYN’S ‘NO’ – HOW LOW THE TORIES HAVE SUNK TO SAVE THEIR SKINS.
Posted in Fairness, General Election 2017, Politics, Reality, tagged angry, comment, Corbyn, General Election 2017, ideas, May. Tories, Mein Kampf on June 3, 2017| Leave a Comment »
I feel some compassion for principled Tories who have had nothing to do with masterminding the election campaign presently being fought by the Tory élite and their paid Rottweiler, Lynton Crosby.
It is surely under his instruction that May and other highly-placed Tories have agreed to lie and slander in order to sneak their empty promises past a damning array of facts, to try and snatch this election from the man who is, at the moment, winning without deceit and with a generosity of spirit his opponents could do worse than try to emulate.
We have all learned through social media how the Tory campaign from the outset took its methodology from the architect of ‘strong and stable’ power, Adolf Hitler, who ended his second volume of ‘Mein Kampf’, written in 1926, on that confident assertion. He it was who laid bare his philosophy on the correct use of propaganda:
‘The PSYCHE of the broad masses is accessible only to what is strong and uncompromising. Like a woman whose inner sensibilities are not so much under the sway of abstract reasoning but are always subject to the influence of a vague emotional longing for the strength that completes her being, and who would rather bow to the strong man than dominate the weakling–in like manner the masses of the people prefer the ruler to the suppliant and are filled with a stronger sense of mental security by a teaching that brooks no rival than by a teaching which offers them a liberal choice.’
Hitler, Adolf. Mein Kampf (p. 34). . Kindle Edition.
Does that seem familiar?
How about this?
‘The interests of the working class were not allowed for a moment to cross the path of this purpose; for in politics the application of economic pressure is always possible if the one side be sufficiently unscrupulous and the other sufficiently inert and docile. In this case both conditions were fulfilled.
Because, at the very heart of the Tories’ campaign, is an icy disdain for ordinary people:
…for everybody who properly estimates the political intelligence of the masses can easily see that this is not sufficiently developed to enable them to form general political judgments on their own account, or to select the men who might be competent to carry out their ideas in practice.
Hitler, Adolf. Mein Kampf (p. 57). . Kindle Edition.
So, with the Tory PR machine grinding into gear, the next step, according to Hitler, would be to get the Press lined up and obedient:
‘It took the Press only a few days to transform some ridiculously trivial matter into an issue of national importance, while vital problems were completely ignored or filched and hidden away from public attention. The Press succeeded in the magical art of producing names from nowhere within the course of a few weeks. They made it appear that the great hopes of the masses were bound up with those names. And so they made those names more popular than any man of real ability could ever hope to be in a long lifetime.
Hard to believe that was written in 1926.
Here’s how the Tory propaganda machine planned to ensure their tired old dogmas would take on a sprightly freshness:
The art of leadership, as displayed by really great popular leaders in all ages, consists in consolidating the attention of the people against a single adversary and taking care that nothing will split up that attention into sections. The more the militant energies of the people are directed towards one objective the more will new recruits join the movement, attracted by the magnetism of its unified action, and thus the striking power will be all the more enhanced
Because, at bottom, Tories despise you. They think any old guff will do, if it’s sold to you hard enough. And any old leader will do, as long as she can put up a decent show. Oh, and they make sure to use a limited vocabulary repeated until we fully comprehend it, because we, collectively, are not considered very bright.
‘Here the art of propaganda consists in putting a matter so clearly and forcibly before the minds of the people as to create a general conviction regarding the reality of a certain fact, the necessity of certain things and the just character of something that is essential.
But as this art is not an end in itself and because its purpose must be exactly that of the advertisement poster, to attract the attention of the masses and not by any means to dispense individual instructions to those who already have an educated opinion on things or who wish to form such an opinion on grounds of objective study-because that is not the purpose of propaganda, it must appeal to the feelings of the public rather than to their reasoning powers.
Did I say already that politicians using this type of propaganda have only contempt for the intellects of millions of us?
All propaganda must be presented in a popular form and must fix its intellectual level so as not to be above the heads of the least intellectual of those to whom it is directed. Thus its purely intellectual level will have to be that of the lowest mental common denominator among the public it is desired to reach.’
So last night we saw Theresa May, that shy, retiring flower who has so successfully avoided meeting real people in her tightly-controlled campaign, answering questions from the public.
What for us voters was a deadly serious Q & A, she saw as another opportunity to slander and lie about Labour politicians. She twice said, during the Question Time programme, that Diane Abbott wants to destroy police DNA files of criminals, when that was not at all what Abbott said. Abbott has pledged to remove innocent people’s DNA once a crime has been solved. She quotes the case of a fourteen year old girl having to submit her DNA to the police for a crime in which she was not even a suspect. Would anyone want to start their adult lives with a police record they have done nothing to deserve?
But it is their latest effort which has reached an all-time low. They have produced a video which has been edited and altered to mean the exact opposite of what was said. I won’t give a link to it because it is so despicable.
Corbyn was being asked if he would condemn the IRA bombings. Corbyn’s sincere condemnation of all violence, loyalist and republican, has been trimmed in this video to make it seem as if he is refusing to condemn the IRA bombings. This is an out and out deceit. And it is the most watched video of the Tory campaign [clearly, the others are forgettable]. The fact is that, when he was asked by Mo Mowlam to help her start peace negotiations for the Good Friday Agreement, he met, talked and listened to Ian Paisley. After they met, they continued to have a civilised exchange of letters. As Corbyn says, in order to achieve peace, sometimes you have to talk to people whose views you dislike.
The Tories’ tactics smack of desperation. They cannot campaign on their record or their achievements – apart from the well-deserved success of same-sex marriage legislation – they have done nothing to be proud of in the past seven years of power. The vaunted economic recovery beloved of Osborne has made no difference whatsoever to the lives of millions. Calculations of strength or weakness of The Great British Pound are irrelevant when you haven’t got enough pounds in your pocket to put down a mortgage or even rent a house, or when, even though you are working full time, you are humiliatingly forced to accept the charity handout of food banks.
So, is this the gang of dishonest brokers we want to negotiate our Brexit arrangements? How can Barnier trust anything Boris Johnson or David Davis says, when they seem to be perfectly comfortable with a campaign based on lying? Is this the calibre of man we want representing the UK and our interests?
And why on earth is May talking about Brexit discussions as if we are already at war with the EU?
I leave the last word to Hitler. He was a vile human being, but he certainly knew how to build a dictatorship. He would have recognised with a smirk the Tories’ ‘coalition of chaos’ soundbite.
The leader of genius must have the ability to make different opponents appear as if they belonged to the one category; for weak and wavering natures among a leader’s following may easily begin to be dubious about the justice of their own cause if they have to face different enemies.
Happy voting on June 8th.
Read Full Post »