“If you don’t want a man unhappy politically, don’t give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none. Let him forget there is such a thing as war. If the government is inefficient, top-heavy, and tax-mad, better it be all those than that people worry over it. Peace, Montag. Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year. Cram them full of noncombustible data, chock them so damned full of ‘facts’ they feel stuffed, but absolutely ‘brilliant’ with information. Then they’ll feel they’re thinking, they’ll get a sense of motion without moving. And they’ll be happy, because facts of that sort don’t change.”
Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
“Today’s European politicians . . . are ‘test-tube politicians,’ who haven’t emerged from a process of significant political battles with worthy political oppnents, but have instead risen to power through the manipulations conjured by the strong players of the financial capital system, with the objective to control the political elite of the European continent. They are more employees than they are politicians. Moreover, their programme is not for public disclosure. Should they discuss in public what they really want to achieve, or rather what the bankers who appointed them want to achieve, even the stones will cry out in Europe in protest against them!
“Today’s European politicians are the product of a very particular historical period which started with the collapse of the European left and its integration into the established status quo and especially with the collapse of the USSR. They are also the product of decades of successful ‘filtering’ of European politics and of a very successful strategy of ‘entryism’ into the political elites, using in particular generalized corruption and the possibility to blackmail anybody, by the financial capital and by the most extremist representatives of the deep American state, organised around a ‘neoliberal’ and ‘neoconservative’ core respectively.”
Athens, 3 July 2015
Konstantakopoulos.blogspot.com
My brother gave me that book to read when I was in the 8th grade (1972) and I just read it at that time without an ounce of understanding.
Amazing the foresight some of these authors had.