Published in The Philadelphia Inquirer

By Joseph P. Batory      September17, 2023

We are now living in an Orwellian era in which truth is fiction,  observed reality is fantasy, documented news reports are fake, and scientific evidence is to be ignored.

Thank heavens for Trudy Rubin’s columns in the Philadelphia Inquirer, especially the one on September 13 (2023).  In this latest piece,  she provided large doses of evidence refuting  the outrageous and absurd propaganda which has been desperately attempting to criminalize President Biden to distract the American people from the realities of President Trump’s multiple criminal behaviors.

This recent Rubin column also counters  the fantasy being perpetrated  by political operatives from right wing television and biased social media outlets utilizing  repetitive messages that Ukraine is totally corrupt. These pretenders have been working overtime to distract the American public from the reality of the daily humanitarian suffering of millions of Ukrainians  perpetrated by the ongoing Russian terrorist/criminal invasion of a sovereign nation.

 This Orwellian strategy is simple.  Just keep repeating the same  unsubstantiated messages  over and over and the populace will soon be turned into believing lemmings. In the latest occurrence, many lemmings attempted sedition at the risk of imprisonment while their leader hid in his house. How did people become so dumb, seduced by lies and the superficial repetition tactics used so well by totalitarians so many times in the past.

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****The effectiveness of this kind of propaganda demonstrates one of the chief characteristics of modern masses. They do not believe in anything visible, in the reality of their own experience; they do not trust their eyes and ears but only their imaginations, which may be caught by anything that is at once universal and consistent in itself. What convinces masses are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably part. Repetition, somewhat overrated in importance because of the common belief in the masses’ inferior capacity to grasp and remember, is important only because it convinces them of consistency in time.

page 351 Chapter 11 Totalitarian Movements, Part I Totalitarian Propaganda, – The Origins of Totalitarianism – Hannah Arendt