#harold pinter truth to power cafe

[thequeereview]

Theatre Review: Truth To Power Café (Lincoln Center, New York) ★★★★★

Who has power of you and what do you want to say to them? That’s the bold and tantalizing question at the heart of Jeremy Goldstein’s Truth to Power Café directed by Jen Heyes, which made its United States premiere this month as part of Lincoln Center’s second annual Festival of Firsts. For Goldstein, a British-Australian veteran theatre maker and HIV+ activist, the answer is his late father. As…

[garudabluffs]

2/6/2020 The United States of America's Doll House: A Vast Tapestry of Lies and Illusions

"It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn't happening. It didn't matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It's a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis." - Harold Pinter's Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech, 2005

This is an updated and revised version of the full cover-story that appeared in the important publication, garrison: The Journal of History and Deep Politics, Issue 003.  Issue 004 is due out this week and I urge readers to purchase it.  You will read articles there that you will find no place else, brilliant, eye-opening analyses of issues that the MSM will never touch.”

“...that as a result of the CIA's murderous coup d'e'tat on behalf of the military-industrial-financial-media-intelligence complex that rules the country to this day”

“Drip by drip, here and there, in the pattern of the best propaganda, as the French sociologist Jacques Ellul says - "for propaganda is not the touch of the magic wand. It is based on slow, constant impregnation. It creates conviction and compliance through imperceptible influences that are effective only by continuous repetition"[ii] - articles, books, media reports have reiterated that people are "determined" by biological, genetic, social, and psychological forces over which they have no control. To assert that people are free in the Sartrean sense (en soir, condemned to freedom, or free will) has come to be seen as the belief of a delusional fool living in the past , a bad philosopher, an anti-scientist, a poorly informed religionist, one nostalgic for existential cafes, Gauloises, and black berets.  One who doesn't grasp the truth since he doesn't read the New York Times or watch CBS television. One who believes in nutty conspiracy theories.”

Such bad faith allows people to fabricate a second act of bad faith: that they are not responsible for their ignorance of the truths behind the government's and corporate media's lies and propaganda, even as the shades of the prison house ominously close around us and the world edges toward global death that could arrive in an instant with nuclear war or limp along for years of increasing suffering.:”

“...what Jean Paul Sartre called bad faith (mauvaise foi):  In Existential Psychoanalysis he put it thus:

In bad faith it is from myself that I am hiding the truth. But with this 'lie' to myself, the one to whom the lie is told and the one who lies are one and the same person, which means that I must know in my capacity as deceiver the truth which is hidden from me in my capacity as the one deceived.”

Lisa Pease is so right: "The way the CIA took over America in the 1960s is the  story of our time, and too few recognize this.  We can't fix a problem we can't even acknowledge exists."

The conventional propaganda - I almost said wisdom - created through decades-long media and academic repetition, is that we are not free.

Let me repeat: we are not free.  We are not free.

“Let me repeat: we are not free.  We are not free.”

7 comments

  Western Massachusetts retired horticultural technician “Thank You Ed. Reality is so disheartening it is nearly impossible to get people to confront it. You get accused of being too negative. The only way to change our trajectory however is to embrace the negative reality for what it is and start from there.” Submitted on Thursday, Feb 6, 2020