Two Minutes Hate - Democratic Underground

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Wed Feb-18-09 12:58 AM
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Two Minutes Hate

War is Peace. Ketchup is Vegetable. Traitor is Hero. Greed is Good. Freedom is Surveillance.

The biggest danger in the Big Lie perpetrated and perpetuated by the Reagan Myth was not illegal wars, shredding the social safety net, impeachable offenses, mercenary economic policies to rob the commonwealth or the snowballing of media consolidation and the surveillance state.... no, sisters and brothers, it was the wedge driven between us by all of the above.

The Biggest Lie of All was that Americans cared only for themselves and their conspicuous consumption, their unconscious consumption of brand names and bad TV.

And it went like that through the 80's..... and the 90's..... and the 00's....

And along came Obama.

And he said: We're not Blue States! We're not Red States! We're the United. States. Of America!

As Popeye usedta say, "Well, Blow Me Down."

The People cheered. The People smiled. The People clapped and sang. The People could. not. believe. their ears.

The Reagan Error was so toxic and divisive that in the space of a few decades, it had turned what once was a basic notion of American pride and principle into a RADICAL NEW CONCEPT THAT GOT THE FIRST BLACK MAN ELECTED TO THE WHITE HOUSE.

We're All In This Together.

No duh.

Now we have our new President, who will do as much as he can under the intentionally devastated circumstances of global market rule, in the absence of that pesky old social safety net.

The reason all this is the BIGGEST danger, is that when we need to pull together, will we? United we stand, divided we fall.

The genocide in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina was proof of that, good Americans watching brown bodies floating in the waters and eaten by dogs.

So. Listen. If you come to a place like this and you see things you don't agree with and you got something to say; and you claim you want to "disagree," and maybe you're sefl righteous and projecting and even a bit out of line; and maybe that gets you off somehow; just ask yourself this:

How hateful and vicious do you want to be.

How hateful do you want to be toward others, while you try to live up to the promise of this new era with a new President's assertion:

We're All In This Together. Yes we can.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_C992KPzKs

19. Emmanuel Goldstein Two-Minutes Hate
http://www.orwelltoday.com/twominutes.shtml

It was nearly eleven hundred, and in the RECORDS DEPARTMENT, they were dragging the chairs out of the cubicles and grouping them in the centre of the hall opposite the big telescreen, in preparation for the Two Minutes Hate....

The next moment a hideous, grinding speech, as of some monstrous machine running without oil, burst from the big telescreen at the end of the room. It was a noise that set one's teeth on edge and bristled the hair at the back of one's neck. The Hate had started.

<snip>

Before the Hate had proceeded for thirty seconds, uncontrollable exclamations of rage were breaking out from half the people in the room. The self-satisfied sheep-like face on the screen, and the terrifying power of the Eurasian army behind it, were too much to be borne: besides the sight or even the thought of Goldstein produced fear and anger automatically. He was an object of hatred more constant than either Eurasia or Eastasia, since when Oceania was at war with one of these Powers it was generally at peace with the other. But what was strange was that although Goldstein was hated and despised by everybody, although every day and a thousand times a day, on platforms, on the telescreen, in newspapers, in books, his theories were refuted, smashed, ridiculed, held up to the general gaze for the pitiful rubbish that they were - in spite of all this, his influence never seemed to grow less. Always there were fresh dupes waiting to be seduced by him. A day never passed when spies and saboteurs acting under his directions were not unmasked by the Thought Police. He was the commander of a vast shadowy army, an underground network of conspirators dedicated to the overthrow of the State....

In its second minute the Hate rose to a frenzy. People were leaping up and down in their places and shouting at the tops of their voices in an effort to drown the maddening bleating voice that came from the screen....In a lucid moment Winston found that he was shouting with the others and kicking his heel violently against the rung of his chair. The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid joining in. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge-hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one's will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic...

The Hate rose to its climax. The voice of Goldstein had become an actual sheep's bleat, and for an instant the face changed into that of a sheep. Then the sheep-face melted into the figure of a Eurasian soldier who seemed to be advancing, huge and terrible, his sub-machine gun roaring, and seeming to spring out of the surface of the screen. But in the same moment, drawing a deep sigh of relief from everybody, the hostile figure melted into the face of BIG BROTHER...