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ceetee9
6th June 2018, 20:16
Illiteracy Leads to Censorship (https://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/2018/06/06/as-illiteracy-leads-to-censorship/). Isn't this precisely what the powers-that-be want?


By Jon Rappoport

"...intellectual freedom is a deep-rooted tradition without which our characteristic western culture could only doubtfully exist. From that tradition many of our intellectuals are visibly turning away. They have accepted the principle that a book should be published or suppressed, praised or damned, not on its merits but according to political expediency. And others who do not actually hold this view assent to it from sheer cowardice." (George Orwell, 1953)

When those who control public discourse, in a nation, see that they are losing to upstarts, that their flimsy ideas are being supplanted by much stronger ideas from these newcomers (who are actually traditionalists), the shocked controllers turn to the more direct strategy of censorship.

In terms of substance, and even popularity, the ministers of truth are losing; so they abandon reasoned discourse altogether. They desert this fertile, competitive, and NECESSARY territory. They no longer debate. They ban.

Among their supporters are crowds of illiterates.

There are many people who, because their education was a vaporous thing, have no interest in the written or spoken word.

The reason is obvious: they can't read.

Their natural impulse is to make excuses. "Who needs books?" "People who write books are showing their privilege."

For these excuse-makers, book burning would mean NOTHING. All that matters is: what slogans should I shout?

For the illiterate, a book is a mystery. How could anyone put all the words together and write one? Somehow, the author must have a secret method of downloading the book from an elite source, a cloud, a machine, a trick in their DNA.

A book, a report, an article, a study, an essay---millions of people in "advanced societies" don't have a clue. When censorship tightens, who cares? It's just words.

IT'S JUST WORDS.

Long ago, when I taught school, I had an experience I wish many people could share. Twenty children in a 10th-grade classroom. No student was reading up to that grade level. Each student was reading at a DIFFERENT (sub-standard) level. Time to teach reading. How could it be done? It couldn't.

Elite societal players welcome illiteracy. They love it. It's one of their cherished goals. Ignorance is good. More than that, illiterate people are easy to convince that repressive censorship isn't a problem. It's just something that "happens."

If you don't have "the right ideas," you should be censored.

IT'S JUST WORDS.

Words are useless "things" like tacks and marbles and crayons and paper clips. Who cares?

"Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed, will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten." (George Orwell, "1984")

At its root, illiteracy becomes a form of reductionism. What can be comprehended, discussed, debated, or reasoned shrinks.

IT'S JUST WORDS.

Illiteracy is more effective than political correctness. Untold numbers of people can't understand the sentences that are floating and flying by them every day. They register this by building up anger. Unfocused anger. They are perfect fodder for know-nothing social and political movements that requite violence and repression. After all, they were repressed, weren't they? Weren't they left hanging out in the wind by their education, their schooling? Now is the time for revenge.

Along the way, censorship becomes a very good thing. They were limited in what they learned; therefore, limit everyone else. Why not?

IT'S JUST WORDS.

There is a sub-text percolating in many, many schools: "All right, you students, this is your education. We're going to keep you from learning the language. We're going to hold it back from you. At the same time, we're going to praise you and push you ahead from grade to grade. You'll know something is wrong. But you'll accept what we do to you. It's easier. You'll take a ride through school, and then we'll dump you out into the world. We're making rebels wholesale. Ignorant rebels. Rebels without the tools for THINKING. You'll have find a place where thinking isn't important. Good luck. Here's a suggestion. Find a group where all you have to do is yell and throw rocks. Learn what to yell. Demand your right to get EVERYTHING FOR NOTHING. That is all."

Do you want a piece of interesting news? I can offer it, based on my experience of the past 17 years writing online. The declining system of education creates a vacuum. And into that vacuum, writers who do value language step forward, and they do present actual ideas. This is a large vacuum, so it can accommodate many writers.

They are creating new realities.

And readers show up.

Miracle of miracles.

These writers and readers are the "replacement team." They are standing in for the colleges and universities and the sloganeers.

They are not censoring themselves or anyone else.

They are proliferating language, not reducing it.

Here is the secret: the history of humans reveals that language does, in fact, expand. It doesn't lie down and die. It doesn't wait for know-nothings to catch up. It doesn't wait for anyone. Poets and novelists and playwrights and essayists find and invent new branches of word and thought.

Their present is the future. They are making the future every day.

And as far as pure ideas go, no matter how hard some people have tried, Jefferson and Madison and Tom Paine and John Adams are not dead yet. Their shaped principles embedded in sentences live on.

If at some point, the entire population of the planet were illiterate, except for four writers, those four would invent a new ocean that can't be contained---and somehow, readers would show up.

Perhaps you think I'm describing a kind of magic, and maybe I am, but I'm also giving you ironclad fact. It has always been so.

The Internet may have been invented with machine language, but the writers who have appeared on it are multiplying their own language.

They are outdistancing the machine.

They always will.

ceetee9
6th June 2018, 20:56
And here is another enlightening article from Jon Rappoport that goes hand-in-hand, IMHO, with what's behind that which is currently going on (i.e., Socialism Equals Triumph for Corporate Criminals (https://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/2018/05/31/socialism-equals-major-triumph-for-corporate-criminals/)).

By Jon Rappoport

In several recent articles, I've exposed the myth that socialism is a revolution of and for the people.

I've presented evidence that socialism is actually a movement owned, operated, and funded by ultra-wealthy elites.

Dupes, foot soldiers, blind idealists, indoctrinated students, and low-level thugs are recruited through cutouts to serve the agenda of Rockefeller Globalists, for example, who are determined to bring about worldwide socialism.

Socialism, in a nutshell, equals ultra-rich elites (represented by the Council on Foreign Relations, Trilateral Commission, Bilderberg, etc.) owning the free market, cutting out competition, and creating more powerful, overarching, central governments.

Hidden in the plan is the granting of greater dominion to mega-corporations. This is a key fact.

The US Constitution was a document that established extremely limited central government. Regardless of the motives of the authors and the state legislatures that ratified it, the ideas contained in the Constitution were, and are, extremely oppressive toward large centralized structures controlling the people.

But there was another factor present at the beginning of the American Republic.

At the dawn of the United States, corporations were chartered and thus allowed to operate by the individual states. If a corporation, in the eyes of a state legislature, violated a basic trust by harming the people, committing offenses against the citizenry, the legislature could summarily cancel their charter and literally exile them from the state.

This power followed, in part, from the fact that corporations were not and are not individuals. They do not have the rights and freedoms of individuals. Corporations were not granted the rights of citizens in the Constitution.

Richard Grossman, an activist and scholar of US corporate history, unearthed and made lucid these facts.

At the birth of the American Republic, therefore, there was a double limitation on power. Central government and corporations were both strapped and shackled.

Of course, just as the federal government has been allowed to expand like an unchecked fungus, so has corporate power.

Under socialism (aka Globalism), mega-corporate power is the prow of a ship that sails on and on and conquers the economies of the world.

Corporate crimes go unpunished.

Contrary to popular belief, the real agenda of socialism has nothing to do with prosecuting those crimes.

The idea, for example, that greater socialism in America would defeat Monsanto is ludicrous in the extreme.

Monsanto is one of the components of actual socialism---the real, not the fake, version.

Again, socialism is by, for, and of the ultra-wealthy elites. It is not a movement on behalf of the downtrodden.

As Gary Allen puts it in his 1971 classic, None Dare call It Conspiracy: "...pressure from above and pressure from below... The pressure from above comes from secret, ostensibly respectable Comrades in the government and [elite Globalist] Establishment, forming, with the radicalized mobs in the streets below, a giant pincer around middle-class society. The street rioters are pawns, shills, puppets, and dupes for an oligarchy of elitist conspirators working above to turn America's limited government into an unlimited government with total control over our lives and property."

"The American middle class is being squeezed to death by a vise. In the streets we have avowed revolutionary groups... Virtually all members of these groups sincerely believe that they are fighting the Establishment. In reality they are an indispensable ally of the Establishment in fastening Socialism on all of us. The naive radicals think that under Socialism the 'people' will run everything. Actually, it will be a clique of Insiders in total control, consolidating and controlling all wealth. That is why these schoolboy Lenins and teenage Trotskys are allowed to roam free and are practically never arrested or prosecuted. They are protected. If the Establishment wanted the revolutionaries stopped, how long do you think they would be tolerated?"

Gary Allen wrote that passage in 1971. Does it ring a familiar bell now?

As philosopher George Santayana famously wrote in 1905, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

Equally famous is the prescription for all advertising: repeat the same message over and over, so it sinks into the mind and forms a false impression of truth.

Thus it has been with the basic message of socialism. "This is a form of government that finally serves the people. It is the people rising up to take the reins of power."

Once that notion is rigidly fixed in consciousness, it is impossible to believe socialism is actually emanating from the elite of the elite.

Fortunately, more and more people are waking up to the basic con of fake news, which doesn't only broadcast distorted current events spooling out through screens, day by day.

Basic themes of fake news also span decades and even centuries.

What will happen when enough young people, who want to tear down the structures of the monopolists, realize those same men are bankrolling them in the streets?

What will happen when these young people realize their teachers and mentors and handlers and professors have been feeding them the precise reverse of the truth?

As long as independent media continue to proliferate, that day is coming.