Manipulation of Conflict
Current day comparison to Orwell's 1984 - Part 4
Part Three of my Curent day comparison to Orwell’s 1984 can be found here.
In Nineteen-Eighty Four Orwell’s primary nation-state Oceania maintains a perpetual state of war. To the citizens of Oceania the enemy is presented as unchanging, even though it has been known to shift between two different combatants; Eurasia and Eastasia. The battlefield is an elusive, distant and insignificant land that could even be described as undesirable, and the chief purpose of this unending conflict is not the land that might be won or lost or whether animus actually exists between the waring nations. Rather, the ongoing war is used to justify the continued psychological, physical and financial control over the population of Oceania. War fuels fear and keeps the people distracted and busy. The Party uses war propaganda to focus the people’s fear and hate towards the arbitrary enemy, which keeps it directed away from The Party and provides a convenient excuse for any perceived shortcomings or failings of Oceania’s government. Oceania’s entire economic output, industry and labour force are all dedicated to the war effort, and the people live wretched lives in poverty and near starvation with dwindling access to consumer goods and no hope of ever improving their pitiful standard of living.
While we are told that overwhelming force could be brought to bear to end the war, a key function of Orwell’s Ministry of Peace (Minipax) is to ensure that only the right amount of force is used; the aim is not to win the war, but to keep it in a constant state of equilibrium and, therefore, ongoing. Perpetual war redirects and consumes resources and keeps the people in constant hardship. This ensures they cannot learn and cannot become strong, and remain both unable to comprehend the true nature of their situation and society, and unable to overthrow the political structure.
There has not been a year since WW2 ended in 1945 when the United States government has not been involved in one or, more often, several concurrent wars, civil wars, insurgencies, coup d’états or other military actions1. Similarly, the United Kingdom government has involved their military forces in more than thirty military conflicts in the same period. The initiation of and our ongoing involvement in each conflict has been heavily propagandised. The American and UK governments, militaries and their private contractors through the mainstream media have unceasingly used propaganda against their own and foreign citizens in attempts to justify the lives lost and expense, to gain favour, or to counter opposing attitudes (Altheide & Grimes, 2005; Murphy & White, 2007; Seagren & Henderson, 2018). Documents made public by WikiLeaks and recent freedom of information releases have shown how President Bush and Prime Minister Blair used journalists to broadcast propaganda about Saddam Hussein possessing non-existent weapons of mass destruction to instil fear and justify an otherwise illegal invasion of Iraq (Oborne, 2023). Blair went on to establish his own consultancy, the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, which has been accused of continuing Blair’s legacy of peddling political propaganda on topics ranging from Digital ID and avoiding misinformation, to aspects of the Iranian and Ukraine wars (Norfolk, 2020; Tengely-Evans, 2022; Wilson, 2023).
Military actions since 2001 both in response to 9/11 and all other conflicts right up to present day have resulted in over US$8 trillion dollars2 of American public funds and resources being redirected. The American defence budget for 2023 is USD$1.8 trillion3, while the projected UK defence budget for the current year is £51.7 billion4. Neither of these amounts includes secret military and intelligence funds colloquially referred to as black budgets; which have been steadily increasing from US$85 billion in 2019 (Swab, 2019). Similarly, neither includes the often vast sums of money channelled to foreign governments to ostensibly support their own war machines. For example, more than €150billion5 has been taken from public funds in countries like America and the UK and given to the Ukrainian government for a protracted and, potentially deliberately, unwinnable war that some argue is pure propaganda and money laundering (Liebich, 2023; Meaker, 2022; Varga, 2023). For business owners, government-backed defence industry contracts are seen as cash cows that can both sustain a company through lean years and recessions, and deliver significant profits. Even though one-quarter to one-third of all military weapons contracts in recent years have gone to just five major companies6 (Hartung, 2021), they can be so lucrative that some businesses will spend big to hire former high-ranking military officers and politicians in order to increase their chances of being one of the favoured few. In some cases, government agencies will even commit or aid in the commission of criminal acts so that a small few can either profit from or fund their protracted wars7. However, what is clear is that very little of the money that funds the war effort, if anything, trickles down or is beneficial to the vast majority of the general population.
Leaving aside battles involving our armed forces, there are a whole range of expensive and propaganda-driven conflicts at home that are intended to keep us distracted, cash-strapped and in a constant state of disagreement. Are electric cars green or do they create more pollution but shift it to someone else’s backyard8? Are children being educated or harmed by the propaganda of woke ideologies9 being taught in schools like gender ideology10, critical race theory11 or being assigned masturbation as a homework task12? Were Covid responses including lockdowns13, covid vaccines14, censuring doctors for using repurposed known safe drugs15 and incorrectly propagandising them as animal paste16, and the costly abject failure that was track and trace17 all proportionate and necessary? Is carbon dioxide plant food or our environmental enemy18? Is meat a historic and necessary part of the human diet or the cause of significant climate change19? Are trans treatments such as the removal of testicles and breasts from healthy children a cure that saves a life or mutilation that permanently destroys that life? Each of these questions is being played out in some way every day in political and social discourse and across our mainstream media. These conflicts require us to choose sides and, in doing so, we trade meaning and truth for virtue-signalling morality-based superficial beliefs and ignorance. For most of these battles there are three potential groups of combatants: those for or against the matter at issue, and a smaller group who simply carry on with life, often by trying to ignore that the issue even exists. Given the repeatedly punitive and arbitrary way people are being treated today when they do express their views, some in this last group may simply be avoiding expressing a position for fear of being ostracised by one or more of their social peer groups.
Many of the battles being fought are not as overt as World War II (WW2) and the Korean war, but our nations have been maintained in a constant state of Orwellian conflict during the last several decades. While the politicians who either created or promulgated these Hegelian dialectics on us flipflop between pushing the problem and selling the solution, they appear to delight all the more in watching us scramble to comprehend, take sides and then battle over the next thingtm. However, the net result for us is that we are agitated, stressed, financially drained and often willing to accept anything that looks like it even marginally goes in the direction we want. In truth, no one in the trenches ever gets what they want and the only people who walk away smug and satisfied are the politicians and globalists who fund them. The answer we are required to accept always creates a significant financial burden on everybody, no matter which side of the debate they were on. And lastly, in many cases these conflicts are continuously recycled as the public is told some outcome has been implemented, only to find it was not a solution and the battlelines are simply and deliberately being redrawn.
Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon and Northrop Grumman.
https://www.doctorkiltz.com/why-eating-meat-is-good-for-the-environment/
Liebich, A. (2023). The propaganda war over Ukraine: Unanimity on both sides? Global Challenges. Last accessed: November 4, 2023. Sourced from: https://globalchallenges.ch/issue/13/the-propaganda-war-over-ukraine-unanimity-on-both-sides/
Meaker, M. (2022). How Ukraine is winning the propaganda war. Wired. Last accessed: November 4, 2023. Sourced from: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/ukraine-propaganda-war
Varga, J. (2023). Zelensky told war with Russia ‘unwinnable’ and that land will have to be given to Putin. Express. Last accessed: November 4, 2023. Sourced from: https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1761732/zelensky-ukraine-war-russia-putin
Swab, A. J. (2019). Black budgets: The US government’s secret military and intelligence expenditures. Harvard Law School Briefing Papers on Federal Budget Policy, (72).
Hartung, W. (2021). Profits of War: Corporate beneficiaries of the post-9/11 Pentagon spending surge. Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. Last accessed: November 4, 2023. Sourced from: https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/papers/2021/Profits%20of%20War_Hartung_Costs%20of%20War_Sept%2013%2C%202021.pdf
Altheide, D. L., & Grimes, J. N. (2005). War programming: The propaganda project and the Iraq War. The Sociological Quarterly, 46(4), 617-643.
Murphy, D. M., & White, J. F. (2007). Propaganda: Can a word decide a war?. The US Army War College Quarterly: Parameters, 37(3), 23.
Oborne, P. (2023). When Journalists act as state propagandists. Declassified UK. Last accessed: November 4, 2023. Sourced from: https://www.declassifieduk.org/when-journalists-act-as-state-propagandists/
Norfolk, A. (2020). Scholar spreads Iranian propaganda in Britain. The Times. Last accessed: November 4, 2023. Sourced from: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/scholar-spreads-iranian-propaganda-in-britain-3q90fvzxd
Tengely-Evans, T. (2022). Tories use Tony Blair to peddle imperialist propaganda. Socialist Worker. Last accessed: November 4, 2023. Sourced from: https://socialistworker.co.uk/news/tories-use-tony-blair-to-peddle-imperialist-propaganda/
Wilson, R. (2023). Tony ‘war criminal’ Blair is spreading his digital ID propaganda around the world. Expose News. Last accessed: November 4, 2023. Sourced from: https://expose-news.com/2023/08/03/war-criminal-blair-is-spreading-propaganda/
Agree. 😞😩😡
As with all feckless conservatives and their websites, you've described the problem, over and over and over again, without submitting any proposed solution, or even an in-depth rational analysis of the phenomenon and the ideology behind it. Do you understand there's a difference in those approaches?
Conservatives are utterly useless because they've conserved absolutely nothing over the last 70 years, not even women's bathrooms. But they're always eager to relate the woke left's latest egregious outrage perpetrated against society, all the while parroting "hypocrisy". This is just more proof of conservative stupidity, and their complete inability to espouse or even develop a useful ideology not mired in Enlightenment/egalitarian terms, which amounts to nothing more than an innate reflection of woke leftism. This is precisely where the fake concept of "hate speech" and resultant censorship come from. The only solution is a viable ideology from the alt-right, the dissident right, and NO, IT DOES NOT HAVE ANYTHING TO DO WITH NAZIISM.
Nothing will get better until the masses of hypnotized ninnies in western society (and their self-appointed spokesmen) discard conservatism, disbelieve any attack by the media about the "far-right", and start embracing anti-egalitarianism, race realism, and rejecting racial equality. But it's all about the fake morality of equality, the Cult of Equality, about which the peons have been so heavily brainwashed that they will never get off their fake moral high horse to start thinking and using their minds instead of their feelings.
The racist-antiracist paradigm is killing western civilization, but absolutely everyone is so puffed up with fake morality that they refuse to understand the connection. Unless the masses of hypnotized ninnies wake up, their societies will continue to commit suicide, due to their buy-in of worshiping at the heretical Altar of Equality. Better to stand with the far right, than wallow with the lying lunatic left.