“The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate
their own understanding of their history.”

George Orwell

I have spent the first 30 years of my life under communist rule.
Under a communist yoke, actually.

I have witnessed Trump being elected President of the United States.
Thrown out by popular vote.
Then I watched Mike Pence being spirited away by the Secret Service. Some of those convinced by Trump’s Big Lie were chasing the Vice President inside the Capitol in an attempt to…

The US Supreme Court reversed Roe vs Wade.

Prigozhin, also known as Putin’s chef – and lately the mastermind behind PMC Wagner – had become so pissed that organized a field trip. Then turned his troops around and went to Belarus.

What’s going on here?!?

The world has become a battle-field.
A political battle-field where ‘right’ and ‘left’ fight for control.

Both sides oblivious to the fact that politics is, or more exactly ‘should be’, about solving people’s problems.

Given my experience – half a life spent under communist yoke – people expect me to root for the right side of the political spectrum. Which I do.
But I’m also fully aware that the left would have had no chance, absolutely no chance at all, if those on the right had been just a tad more considerate.

And here’s the catch.
There’s no such thing as a good left but there are a good right and a bad right.

The bad thing about the left – about the entire left – is the fact they ‘know better’. All of them. The left is choke full of solutions. Whenever somebody says ‘I noticed there’s a problem with… What are your thoughts about this subject?’ somebody from the left will surely grab the opportunity: ‘we’ve already told you that this and that had to be done a long time ago in order to solve this thing before it even happened’!
The bad thing about the right, the militant portion of the modern right, is that they’ve become just like their sworn enemies. They’ve somehow convinced themselves that ‘if you can’t beat them, join them’ and that’s what they did. They joined the left in battle. Using the very tools they have borrowed from the left and adopting the very same attitude.

The bad kind of right are also convinced that ‘they know better’. That you have to be a moron in order to be a ‘liberal’. Or, at least, a ‘greenhorn’. “If You Are Not a Liberal When You Are Young, You Have No Heart, and If You Are Not a Conservative When Old, You Have No Brain”.

In fact, it’s exactly this infatuation with their own ‘brains’ which is the worst thing about the left. And about the bad right.
I see no difference between Marx’s “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.” and Trump’s ‘truthful hyperbole’.

You see, Trump isn’t a self made man, as he pretends to be.
He would have never become what he is today if Tony Schwartz, a liberal, hadn’t ghostwritten the Art of the Deal.

When Schwartz began writing “The Art of the Deal,” he realized that he needed to put an acceptable face on Trump’s loose relationship with the truth. So he concocted an artful euphemism. Writing in Trump’s voice, he explained to the reader, “I play to people’s fantasies. . . . People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular. I call it truthful hyperbole. It’s an innocent form of exaggeration—and it’s a very effective form of promotion.” Schwartz now disavows the passage. “Deceit,” he told me, is never “innocent.” He added, “ ‘Truthful hyperbole’ is a contradiction in terms. It’s a way of saying, ‘It’s a lie, but who cares?’ ” Trump, he said, loved the phrase.

Furthermore, Trump would have never become the 45th President of the United States of America without the support of the ‘activist republicans’. The ones convinced that Roe vs Wade must be reversed. At all costs.
The ones convinced, just like the ‘liberals’ are, that they ‘know better’.

And, by the way, this is a fake.
Something that Orwell would have agreed upon but was never actually written by him.

The sentiment is one that Orwell, who knew plenty about the historical iconoclasm of the Soviet Union, might well have endorsed, but it seems he never wrote those words – certainly not in 1984 and, as far as anyone can discover, not in any other of his works.