The first sign of a deceiver is their use and abuse of long understood and accepted terms. They take terms that people have embraced and they distort and redefine them. It is the shortcut to acceptance. Then as you use the terms, people hear one thing while you mean another. Slowly you bring them around to the new definition. It is the art of liars. It is the art of this professor. That’s one.
Second, to lead people into error you do not really have to prove your theory. You only need to place such a heavy burden of doubt on their beliefs that they become ripe for the picking. Then you carry along some security for them by using their old terms, only in new ways and voila: You are a minister of satan the great deceiver.
All this deception became possible because someone laid ground work. They failed to study and understand the truth they professed, or at least to teach it and pass it along to the next generation. So here we are in 2015 with a generation or two of people who have heard all the language of freedom from tyranny but have not been trained in who, what, why and how. They are pigeons for the con men. The con men are many.
I have been bemoaning the lack of respect for the truth for over three decades...and it keeps getting worse. We live in interesting times.
I read “Atlas Shrugged” back in the early ‘70’s and thought it a worthwhile novel. I have read it 6 or 7 times since...it now reads like the nightly newscast.
Just read a children’s book about the cultural revolution in China. A huge part of the buildup was the doublespeak, politically correct inversion of language and words to break down old patterns of thought. It was quite disturbing to read the book and see how all that has ramped up in the past several years here in the U.S. (even though it’s been around for 20 or more years) - the “Central Committee” here - the media and Hollywood, professors have just ramped it up 100 fold.
A child’s nightmare unfolds in Jiang’s chronicle of the excesses of Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution in China in the late 1960s. She was a young teenager at the height of the fervor, when children rose up against their parents, students against teachers, and neighbor against neighbor in an orgy of doublespeak, name-calling, and worse. Intelligence was suspect, and everyone was exhorted to root out the ``Four Olds’’—old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits. She tells how it felt to burn family photographs and treasured heirlooms so they would not be used as evidence of their failure to repudiate a ``black’’—i.e., land-owning—past. In the name of the revolution, homes were searched and possessions taken or destroyed, her father imprisoned, and her mother’s health imperiled—until the next round of revolutionaries came in and reversed many of the dicta of the last. Jiang’s last chapter details her current life in this country, and the fates of people she mentions in her story. It’s a very painful, very personal- -therefore accessible—history. (Memoir. 11-15) — Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. —This text refers to the Hardcover edition.