Submitted by Eric Zuesse, originally posted at Strategic-Culture.org
Today’s United States is a more realistic version of the type of society that George Orwell fictionally described in his allegorical novel 1984.
Like in 1984, the American public don’t know that they’re merely the tools of some unseen aristocracy who manipulate them by fear of ‘the other’, some ‘enemy’ group – manipulate the public via the media, which the aristocracy controls. But the big failing of Orwell’s model as a portrayal of the (when he wrote it) coming fascist-corporate dystopia was that he misunderstood how and why the public would falsely believe that they live in a democracy. His central character Winston Smith worked in an unrealistically portrayed propaganda-mill. But in some other fundamentals, Orwell had it right. The public don’t know that their real enemy is their own nation’s aristocracy who are mentally holding the public in bondage by lies systematically implanted into their beliefs, by means of ‘news’ media that are controlled by their own nation’s aristocracy, who own those media and/or control the government by bribery (sometimes subtle) of the politicians whom the aristocracy’s media are being paid to promote. In any case, the aristocracy control the public’s mind to accept the fundamental legitimacy of the regime the aristocrats are imposing. Aristocrats hire the ‘news’ media.
When two nations’ aristocracies are at war against each other, the public in each is deceived to think that, in the other, the rulers are evil and reign over their public by dictatorship, but that in one’s own nation, the rulers are truly representative of the public and therefore in some high sense are legitimate or even a democracy: rule by the public, instead of by any aristocracy at all. In some of these ‘democratic’ dictatorships, it’s called rule by ‘the people’ or ‘the Volk’ (such as in Hitler’s Germany), but in others, it’s called simply ‘democracy’.
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