Thanks Jayb,

Killarney's assertion that:

"As for your dystopian scenario of a world in which we would be speaking German, Japanese or Arabic, I could think of worse fates - like living in a world controlled entirely by banksters and corporate monopolies (ugh ....!)."

needs some clarification: I thought that, in the eyes of some of the pseudo-Left, (and extreme Right like Arjay) that banksters (especially Jews like Rockefeller) already ruled the world, and that, ever since Lenin's "Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism" came out in 1916, so did monopoly/corporate capitalism.

So, Killarney, we are already living in a world controlled entirely by etc. etc. ? The entire world ? China ? Russia ? Check your instructions, comrade :)

So, today, we, all of us here in Australia, are living in the worst dystopia possible ? Luckily, I'm not at my favourite restaurant, otherwise I would have choked on my kale. I would have had to get in my BMW and go home for a good lie-down, perhaps after a couple of glasses of a nice chardonnay, maybe a Middleton 1994.

Hyperbole is one thing, idiotic statements are another. Leave the 'hyperbowl' to the kids chucking a tanty over a new I-Pod, Killarney :)

Joe

Jayb and Loudmouth

Thank you for spectacularly and ever so sanctimoniously failing to get my point. My posts on this thread have been about historical NARRATIVES, not facts and certainly not our own victorious horrors that-might-have-been judgements.

The point I was making is that, had the other side won WWII, we would be subject to the same kind of victors' propaganda that whitewashes their genocides, massacres, bombings, concentration camps, war rapes, occupations etc. And quite possibly, we might even be speaking their language.

Having known nothing else, those who grow up with such victors propaganda will just believe it. Those who don't will be isolated and persecuted as dissidents and terrorists. (As the West are the current post-WWII victors, how much of what we are told about our actions during and since that war are simply victors' propaganda and how much of it is truth? How many of the West's genocides, massacres etc have been covered up or reduced to footnotes in our history books?)

Your combined pavlovian outrage simply proves my point. Our brainwashing regarding the sanctity of 'our' wars - and the rightness/wrongness of the victors/vanquished - digs far too deeply to challenge it with mere reason or, gasp!, humour.

And, Loudmouth. No matter how morally outraged you feel, NOTHING justifies spewing out crap like 'You're an idiot, Killarney' in two successive postings. Try shutting your mouth and opening your mind for once. You might actually learn something.

Unless the two of you can come up with some halfway respectful rhetoric, that does not spew hatred, ridicule and humiliation, then this exchange is over.

No, Killarney, we got your point before you finished your first sentence: the world is full of mugs, who so easily swallow whatever is dished out.

No, I don't believe so. People are not such puppets, and - I hate to break the news to you and your Utopia - never will be.

I might have believed that sort of rhetoric when I was young and foolish, but, through all the twists and turns of life, I hope those days are long gone.

You really are an idiot, Killarney. Keep learning, that's your only hope.

Cheers,

Joe

Loudmouth

'No, Killarney, we got your point before you finished your first sentence: the world is full of mugs, who so easily swallow whatever is dished out.'

Oh ... really? Well good for you and jayb. What a pity that this was NOT my point AT ALL. In fact, it doesn't even REMOTELY resemble anything I either said or was even trying to say.

But that's OK. You can always cover up your own bigoted ignorance by calling others 'idiots'. Works every time. I'm done with this thread.

Hi Killarney,

Sorry, can you please explain in little words what you were trying to say ? In my bigoted ignorance, you might have lost me :)

Fifty-odd years ago, in my Maoist days, I had some notion of the all-powerful, monolithic effects of monopoly capitalism (I'd just got onto Lenin's article, mentioned above) and similar articles by Mao himself. Later, in the seventies and eighties, I tried to plough through some of the Structural Marxist stuff, Althusser, Poulantzas, Apple, Giroux, etc., but, being not all that bright, it took me some time to get beyond their interpretation of the real world and its possibilities.

Forgive me for misunderstanding your suggestion that we are all, now, living under the most appalling restrictions, more brutal than anything the Nazis could have dreamt of, that life for every ordinary Australian (not the 1 % of course) is not only horrific but that oppression so cleverly tarted up that nobody but yourself can see it. Have I still misunderstood it ?

If you have found the 'truth', please share it: surely it can't do any harm to the rest of us to know the 'truth' ?

Cheers,

Joe

Joe , do you find it strange that all these peacenix seem to gravitate towards appeasing Tyrants. I wonder why that is?