“Thought control” is decapitation without removal of the head. The head remains attached but is filled with political propaganda that obstructs the mind’s capacity for critical judgment. Reduced to unthinking “dead-heads,” the victims of the indoctrination do not trust the efficacy of their own minds and are dependent on an outside source for mental direction, that is, to tell them what to believe and what to do. As civilized as mankind claims to be, we are yet surrounded by laboratory governments that continue the practice of decapitating their subject-citizens with political propaganda in the production of “useful idiots.” Theirs is the world of “Transylvania” — in real life and real time.
Thought control has forever been the tyrant’s favorite approach in the maintenance of their mastery over the masses. Since “brainwashing” is administered by word of mouth—propaganda — it lends the propaganda the sound of persuasion. But when a dissident emerges from amongst the masses and dares to challenge that “persuasion,” the brute force of “all the king’s men” is summoned to re-establish obedience to authority. The dissident is charged with crimes of the tongue and sentenced to suffer the grotesque brutalities of cruel and unusual punishment—including the forfeiture of life.
Across the ages of man’s society-building history, America was the first society to recognize “freedom of speech” as the inalienable and unbridgeable right of mankind. So that there would be no doubt about it, our founding fathers ratified that right as the First Amendment to the U. S. Constitution. That is where America parted company with the past to “start the world anew.”
The First Amendment decriminalized the “libelous offense” of “speaking ill” of officialdom and, as represented in the famous expression: “I disagree with everything you say, but I will defend to my death your right to say it,” equalized the speech of every tongue. The rightness or wrongness of what one said was no longer the issue, but rather, one’s right to say it — right or wrong.
Today, however, the First Amendment is under siege by the Democratic Party and a mob of anti-free speech progressives. Once again, expressing a “politically incorrect” opinion is treated as a “libelous offense,” subject to the imposition of punishment by “all the king’s men”—the “PC Police.” An “offense” can cost you your business, or a speaking engagement at a university, or the cancellation of an interview with a mainstream media news outlet; it can get you fined, or fired, or sentenced to a “re-education camp” for “sensitivity training,” and so on.
The objective of the “PC Police” is identical to the objective of the tyrants of thought control: to control human behavior. In April of 2010, I spoke to that subject in my article, “Political Correctness: Tyranny By Any Other Name.” I presented the issue as follows:
Does political correctness exert real influence over social behavior, or is it just a silly indulgence in silly pretense? To answer that question, I submit to you the astounding “dereliction of duty” by the military authorities at Fort Hood. Americans used to assert, without a second thought, the adage that “You can judge a person’s character by the company they keep,” but not anymore. Political correctness has criminalized that truism as “racist stereotyping.” Reacting to that “adjudication,” the Fort Hood brass restricted themselves so severely that, even as they observed one of their soldiers jaunting about the planet fraternizing with his American-hating fellow terrorists, their response was to abide by the moral admonition of the three neutrality monkeys: Hear no evil, see no evil, and speak no ill of the evil you hear and see. Red flags aplenty were raised by the conspicuous and extremely questionable behavior of Major Nidal Malik Hasan. But in fear of offending the “PC Police,” the Fort Hood higher-ups ordered an intelligence “stand-down” against investigating him. You know the rest of the story.
Freedom of speech and the freedom of person are halves of an interdependent whole. Where one does not exist, you will not find the other. I submit that there is no person or political party intent on controlling freedom of speech that is not, at once, intent on controlling human behavior. As goes freedom of speech, so goes the freedom of person.
Orlis Trone is an LVN columnist.