Loose Ends

I am going to keep this as blunt as possible. rather than flood you with academic babble I will try as much as possible to avoid using words that the common man is not normally exposed to. And by common man I mean the literal sense of your every day man or woman who is not usually exposed to the rhetoric of academia. I am also the common man, so this is also easier for me. Where possible I will explain what the words actually mean without you having to resort to a dictionary every 5 minutes. So what is my experience on this topic. I have read dozens and dozens of books, watched thousands of hours of documentary over a 40 year period. Todays topic is the holocaust. The holocaust is the Nazi industrialised slaughter of 6 million Jews, of course this number is not exact, it may be slightly over, it may be slightly under. But the majority of Historians agree that 6 million is probably about the right number. the general timeline is that of 1941-1945, of course, the murdering and slaughter ...

The first casualty, when war comes, is truth Hiram Johnson I find propaganda fascinating, being a student of 20th century history, a period which gave us some of the most evil propagandists of all time I'm well versed in spotting propaganda when I see it, but sometimes its not so easy to spot and it happens a lot more often than we think. The best propaganda is when you don't even notice you've been exposed to it. Joseph Goebbels was a master of it, while a lot of his work involved obviously cynical overt propaganda he was also a master at covert propaganda, twisting narratives and re-imagining history in a manner that was eagerly lapped up by the masses who might not have believed everything he was telling them, they simply wanted to believe it. Of course, Goebbels wasn't the only propagandist during the second world war, neither is it something only one side participated in. The allies were no strangers to propaganda themselves. In most cases, it takes an awful lot of...

Its all very tiring. Every time Owen Jones is invited to write an op-ed he then proceeds to claim he knows "exactly" what huge swathes of people are thinking, its a hallmark of his style, there's no real substance here, just far left hyperbole, mixed with a smidgeon of outright lies, this is then all stirred up to create what you could called a  classic "Guardian op-ed" Pretty much all Guardian op-eds are far left leaning, and in OJ they have just the person to drag them even further to the left, it appeals to their readership that's for sure. Its also the reason why circulation of The Guardian is always among the lowest of all daily newspapers, because barely anyone wants to read it. So here it is  in all its shoddy detail. So lets concentrate on OJ's hit points and see what we can come up with. Ugly divisive rhetoric has been part of British politics for years now, quite why Jones appears to think its just the right wing I'm not too sure. I really ...