"The Biden administration plan for the “day after” in Gaza is rooted in American hubris and ignorance, and therefore doomed to failure."
"The United States has a long history of misunderstanding the Mideast, but this level of ignorance and willful blindness far surpass anything we’ve seen before."
"It appears that the New York Times manipulated a working-class Mizrahi family in the service of Israeli hasbara in order to score a journalistic achievement, which in reality is nothing more than a repetition of fake news and government propaganda."
"New doubts are emerging about the New York Times’s coverage of sexual violence in the October 7 attack. The paper must explain why it broke its own rules by hiring a clearly biased writer who endorsed racist and violent rhetoric toward Palestinians."
Ben Norton wrote: 'Instead of investigating how it published a fake story on supposed Hamas "mass rapes", the NY Times is investigating... employees who leaked info about how its editors hired a racist Israeli propagandist to write the fake story to justify Israel's genocide.'
“Mass #propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in #cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”
― Hannah Arendt, "The Origins of Totalitarianism" #quotes#mediaStudies#commOdon#truth#agnotology#history
The masses' flight from reality is a condemnation of the world in which they are forced to live. […] The main disadvantage of reality is that it is not logical, coherent or organised.
~ Hannah Arendt, in "Totalitarianism"
"We must confess that our adversaries have a marked advantage over us in the discussion. In very few words they can announce a half-truth; and in order to demonstrate that it is incomplete, we are obliged to have recourse to long and dry dissertations."
— Frédéric Bastiat, Economic Sophisms, First Series (1845)