Tuesday 25 May 2010

Quote of last century?

Via a Mr P. Hitchens, George Orwell said:

‘Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban... At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question... Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals ... If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.’


This is why an iron control of the media is not necessary -- all you need to do is make sure that your view of the world is the current orthodoxy.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Mr Orwell was, of course, quite correct. Messrs Herman and Chomsky were also correct in their attempts to explain how such a state of play is maintained. It's a shame that many of our persuasion have never given their insights consideration, merely because they are creatures of the left <roll eyes>