Hell, over the last 18 hours....
Winston was taking part in a demonstration in one of the central London squares at the moment when it happened. It was night, and the white faces and the scarlet banners were luridly floodlit. The square was packed with several thousand people, including a block of about a thousand schoolchildren in the uniform of the Spies.
On a scarlet-draped platform an orator of the Inner Party, a small lean man with disproportionately long arms and a large bald skull over which a few lank locks straggled, was haranguing the crowd. A little Rumpelstiltskin figure, contorted with hatred, he gripped the neck of the microphone with one hand while the other, enormous at the end of a bony arm, clawed the air menacingly above his head.
His voice, made metallic by the amplifiers, boomed forth an endless catalogue of atrocities, massacres, deportations, lootings, rapings, torture of prisoners, bombing of civilians, lying propaganda, unjust aggressions, broken treaties. It was almost impossible to listen to him without being first convinced and then maddened. At every few moments the fury of the crowd boiled over and the voice of the speaker was drowned by a wild beast-like roaring that rose uncontrollably from thousands of throats. The most savage yells of all came from the schoolchildren.
The speech had been proceeding for perhaps twenty minutes when a messenger hurried on to the platform and a scrap of paper was slipped into the speaker’s hand. He unrolled and read it without pausing in his speech. Nothing altered in his voice or manner, or in the content of what he was saying, but suddenly the names were different. Without words said, a wave of understanding rippled through the crowd. Oceania was at war with Eastasia!
I suppose the closest analogy I can think of is Dr. Fauci's protean public pronouncements. Another would be the mass of public health specialists who signed a petition last June telling us that mass public gatherings were fine as long as they were congruent with the political views of said public health specialists.
ReplyDeleteAnother analogy might be Woody Allen's Sleeper, where the only thing left of Our Leader is his refrigerated nose.
ReplyDeletelol Art you can go find the twitter accounts "_ posting their Ls" and find so many examples. "Journalists posting their Ls," NeverTrumpers, NeoCons, and I think either Dems or BidenVoters might be 2 more.
ReplyDeleteThose accounts love to post before and after tweets when the change shifts. So many examples.
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/tyler-o-neil/2021/03/23/black-lives-matter-traps-shoppers-in-rochester-grocery-store-n1434455
ReplyDeleteMeanwhile, back in my old neighborhood at the grocery store at which my mother shopped for 32 years....
And what did the store have to do with this? Nothing.
Deletehttps://www.democratandchronicle.com/story/news/2021/03/23/why-did-activist-target-wegmans-during-daniel-prude-protest-rochester-ny/6970095002/
Sounds like a well-thought out strategy there.
It illustrates your point that I'm tempted to ask "which narrative flip are you alluding to?"
ReplyDeleteBoulder is the most recent one, but yes: plenty of other examples out there.
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