This concluding part of my essay is more digressive and more speculative. It will act as a litmus test for just how far down the rabbit hole readers are able or willing to go. Five years ago, I would have considered its thesis to be bonkers. But this, I would argue, tells us more about the comprehensive nature of the deception than it does about the nature of objective truth.
That is, we have been so thoroughly well programmed - the ‘intelligentsia’ perhaps especially - to respond to particular buzz phrases or buzz names (like Pavlov’s dogs responding to a bell) that when we hear them being questioned our response is irritation and defensiveness rather than open-minded curiosity.
There were some good examples of this in the comments below the version of the essay that was kindly reprinted by The Conservative Woman. One reader baulked at the notion that Winston Churchill could be anything other than a wondrous human being and heroic examplar. Another cited Normie history to support his Ex Cathedra Normie statement that there was nothing nefarious about the intentions or backgrounds of the early Hollywood producers - and that they were purely in it to make money from entertainment, not to push a propaganda message.
We’re all well accustomed to the power of slogans. We’ve read our Orwell: “War is peace; freedom is slavery; ignorance is strength”. We’re familiar with Goebbels and Edward Bernays. We’ve laughed at lots of episodes of The Fast Show and Little Britain. So I don’t think I need waste any paragraphs explaining how easily we are manipulated - whether towards laughter, towards making purchases, towards political positions, towards much else besides - by the pithy, punchy phrases we have come to know as ‘sound bites’.
And I believe our overlords - the Powers That Be, the Predator Class - have been aware of this much longer than we have. Catch phrases (there’s a clue in the name) can be used to bind us, like spells. Even when they’re not true, or not very, they can acquire through endless repetition the not necessarily deserved status of immutable truth, thus subtly shifting the way we think as individuals, and, by extension, forming the accepted positions held by the broader culture. It’s so incremental it’s barely noticeable. But that’s how They roll: They’ve got the patience and They think in terms of decades, if not centuries when advancing Their agenda.
By way of example, allow me to mention one of my least favourite lines from Oscar Wilde, the oft-quoted one from his play A Woman of No Importance on the subject of fox-hunting: “the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable.” I concede that my irritation may be coloured by the fact that I am - or would like to be - a fox-hunting man. But really my objection is more aesthetic than it is political. Like a lot of Wilde’s bons mots, it’s just too strained. Wit has to seem effortless, yet this is painfully overworked. You can almost hear the awkward clunk as Wilde is forced to shoehorn in the word “uneatable” rather than the more natural choice “inedible.” Also, as I once read elsewhere, foxes are not strictly speaking inedible - you just have to marinade them for a long time. Yet, somehow this piece of hackwork has become known as the go-to aphorism on the subject of foxhunting. For those who need lazily and cod-literately to slander the people who hunt foxes, at any rate.
But Wilde’s influence is small beer when set against the biggest, most influential and possibly the most dangerous of all the phrasemakers, Shakespeare. Or rather ‘Shakespeare.’ It helps if you realise that Shakespeare’s works* were the creation of a scriptorium (ie a writers’ room) funded by Queen Elizabeth and overseen by one of her leading courtiers, Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford. But even if you don’t want to go that far down the rabbit hole, you only have to read the texts to realise that Shakespeare’s works were at least as much a political project as they were a literary or dramatic one.
Just as the Powers That Be have done in our own era via Hollywood, TV and the internet, so their late 16th and early 17th century forebears did through the medium of drama: they exploited the popularity and ubiquity of entertainment to shape public consciousness.
Obviously there isn’t space here to cover this at any length but let’s briefly alight on one of those quotes you’re encouraged to learn when you’re studying King Lear at school. “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods. They kill us for their sport.” Well, as you’d expect, it’s a memorable line, pungently expressed, and it might even be an accurate summation of the nature of existence. But it’s pretty damn blackpilled - not a line that leaves much room for hope, or the possibility of redemption. And suppose you were in charge of propaganda for a ruthless, narrow, oligarchy, isn’t that just the kind of message you’d want to ram home into the imaginations of all the little people you needed to control: “Life is awful. There are vastly more powerful forces than you which shape your ends. And that’s just the way it is, you useless eaters.”?
Or let’s take the most famous speech in all of Shakespeare: Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy. Weird, isn’t it, that of all the memorable lines that de Vere and his scriptorium cobbled together, the ones we focus on - or, perhaps, have been encouraged to focus on - are those in which a moody, petulant young man internally debates the pros and cons of committing suicide.
Even weirder, to my mind, is the rationale given. Life is so miserable, so fraught with troubles, Hamlet argues, that it’s a wonder we don’t just have done with it and top ourselves. But we shouldn’t, or at least we don’t, he decides, because what comes after death - ‘That undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns’ - might be even worse.
Because Hamlet is so well studied, even over-studied, at school and afterwards, it requires quite an effort of will to step back and consider it objectively. It has become such a known fact that this is the greatest speech ever written it feels almost a form of sacrilege to question its presence in the literary and dramatic pantheon. Which precisely, to my mind, is why we should most especially do so.
In my journeys down the rabbit hole, I’ve developed this theory - I call it Delingpole’s Second Law - that the more the Powers That Be want to draw something to your attention the more suspicious you should be of the underlying motives. Is it really coincidental that the six best known words in the entirety of Shakespeare - words which even people who have never read any of his plays can quote - are the prelude to a speech pondering the merits of suicide?
They were written at a time when suicide would have been universally recognised as a mortal sin; when - under Elizabeth I’s Act of Uniformity 1558, which wasn’t repealed till 1650 - church attendance was a legal obligation. Yet here is ‘Shakespeare’ blatantly, shamelessly, even vauntingly, rejecting the fundamental Christian argument against suicide - as the Catholic catechism expresses it “It is God who remains the sovereign master of life…We are stewards, not owners of the life God has entrusted to us. It is not ours to dispose of” - and replaces it with a cynical humanistic one, dependent on rational intellect and the crude calculation of least worst options.
So what’s going on here? Well if you wanted to put it simply, you could say that the Shakespeare project was just another waystation on our Luciferian overlords’ ongoing mission to abolish God. Which is more or less what we’re taught at school when we learn about the Renaissance, except it’s usually spun as a positive thing rather than a negative one: an intellectual, political, cultural and artistic rebirth, as the talents of the day threw off the shackles of Medieval Christianity, embraced humanism and rediscovered the (pagan) wisdom of the Ancient Greeks and Romans.
Obviously, there is much, much more to Shakespeare than Luciferian blackpilling, but of course there is, that’s the point. The very best form of propaganda is that which engages all levels of society, from the highest intellects to the lowliest groundlings; and perhaps no black arts collective in history ever achieved this more brilliantly or enduringly or - on a good day - more entertainingly than Edward De Vere, his psyop scriptorium and the Collected Works of WS.
One of the key details they got so right is quotability. Perhaps it would be pushing it to suggest that all those plays were really just elaborate delivery mechanisms for punchy one-liners. But I suspect those authors well understood - no less than did Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse, or Monty Python or the Goons four centuries later - that if you want to get inside your audience’s heads, nothing succeeds like a catch phrase.
Am I striving to argue that from ‘all the world’s a stage’ and ‘there’s nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so’ to ‘I saw you coming’ and ‘does my bum look big in this?’, every memorable phrase that has ever lodged itself in your head is the result of some organised, sinister psyop to control your mind? Well, no, obviously not. But of course, that would be very much the charge you’d want to lay if, as so many do, you wanted to tar anything that smacked of ‘conspiracy theory’ as the wild, tortured fantasy of hysterical loons.
No, I think it’s a bit more complicated and nuanced than that. In the case of some well-known quotations, I’ve no doubt, a cigar is just a cigar; that is, they approximate more or less, to something a real, well-known person actually once said and that there was no nefarious purpose involved - it was just an accidental (or even deliberate) burst of wit which ended up recorded for posterity.
But as James Delingpole said - just now, in fact - just because some things aren’t fake doesn’t mean that most things aren’t. My hunch is that the majority of our most oft-quoted phrases do serve an ulterior purpose. They haven’t entered the parlance merely because they are witty or clever or insightful but because they were placed there to serve a particular end.
Quite what these ends are will of course vary almost as widely as there are quotes to serve them. I’m not being slippery here: it’s not always easy to second guess the motives and aims of the people who run the world, not least because, by definition, they think and act very differently from people like you and me. Sometimes, though, you can make a pretty confident guess.
In the case, for example, of Neil Armstrong’s ‘That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,’ the purpose was to help cement in the public’s imagination the ‘moon landing’ as an event that definitely happened. Ditto the thing that J Robert Oppenheimer claims to have said - or rather thought - as he witnessed the detonation of the first nuclear bomb in July 1945.
“Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” Thanks to repeated citations of this alleged historical moment, we many of us know that this is a quotation from the Bhagavad-Gita (and that Oppenheimer, a Sanskrit scholar was familiar with it). But knowing what I suspect to be the truth now [*see this fascinating podcast by Jerm Warfare] this is a classic case of distraction through seemingly plausible detail.
As well as cementing events of dubious authenticity in the public imagination, ‘famous quotes’ are also often used, I believe, to bolster the credibility and reach of dubious public figures. Albert Einstein, for example.
We most of us have heard of at least one really good Albert Einstein quote because he came up with so many. Among the better known are “Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe” and “Everything must be made as simple as possible. But not simpler.” These are just the sort of things you’d hope a quirky, Nobel-prize winning genius would say. So much the sort of things you’d hope he’d say, indeed, that I smell a rat.
If you believe the numbers attributed to him, Einstein wasn’t just a brilliant physicist but a one-man quote machine with a fluency in English truly remarkable for a man who only came to the US from his native Germany in his 30s, and with a wit almost worthy of Mark Twain and SJ Perelman. And sometimes not. While one or two of his alleged witticisms are genuinely quotable, many more look as if they were designed to be superimposed on a picture of a misty landscape or a cloudy sky or a cute cat on one of those feel-good posters they sell in gift shops. “Once we accept our limits, we go beyond them”; “The only source of knowledge is experience”; “Only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile.”
Is any of this plausible? Well, I’m not saying it’s impossible. But isn’t it more likely, given the wide unevenness of these alleged aphorisms, that they are the work of many authors? And does that not then invite the question as to why this might be so? Why would ‘history’ - or rather, the forces that shape our perception of history - be so eager to persuade us that Albert Einstein wasn’t merely a great scientist but our scientist, the crazy, funny, lovable guy who was so much more than E = mc2?
My contention is that for reasons beyond the purview of this essay, The Powers That Be required that the theory of relativity became - as indeed it has subsequently become - the world’s most famous equation. Clearly they were never going to achieve this by appealing to the public’s intellectual appetite for the complexities of theoretical physics. Instead, they achieved this using the shortcut of appealing to something much more relatable: the seductive power of celebrity. Never mind all that complicated E = mc2 caper: that could be taken on trust. Why could it be taken on trust? Because - duh - there’s no way Albert Einstein could have become as famous as he has become if he were a charlatan. After all, all the scientific experts who decide these things would have seen through him.
This, unfortunately, is how the great deception prevails. So much of what we think we know about the world is based on trust. Because we ourselves lack what we consider the necessary expertise to decide on this or that scientific theorem, or economic paradigm, or geopolitical stratagem, we contract out our thinking on these matters to remote authority figures whom we assume have a better grasp of the situation than we do. And whence did these figures gain this authority? Why by dint of being household names!
Often, I find, when you try pointing this out to people still trapped in the traditional paradigm their response is one of indignant irritation. No one likes being told that everything they believe is based on second hand opinions which they’ve been too lazy or trusting to fact-check. Still less does anyone like to think of themselves as being so malleable and shallow that they can be entranced to a state of abject swinehood by a few apparently pithy and meaningful one-liners.
“A little learning is a dangerous thing” wrote Pope. Yup. And just why it’s so dangerous I was reminded the other day during a podcast I did with an historian who subscribed to the official narrative in every last detail, even to the point of insisting that the Vietnam War was a legitimate containment measure against Communism and that JFK was definitely assassinated by a lone gunman called Lee Harvey Oswald.
What I found particularly telling when I pushed him to justify his world view was that he began bombarding me with scattergun aphorisms: handy quotes from the usual designated authority figures whose self-evident truthiness apparently obviated any requirement to reconsider his position because there it all was, stated by acknowledged experts and bracketed by quotation marks.
I’ve been guilty of this myself, in my time. Heaven knows how many articles I’ve written as a journalist, deploying something someone famous said sometime in order to demonstrate that the entirety of my argument was just and right and sanctioned by time and celebrity prestige. In fact it’s so tempting and time-saving a cheat that I doubt I’ll stop using it, even after all I’ve said in this piece.
It ought to go without saying that not everything anyone famous has ever said in history is fabricated or worthless or designed to mislead. But I do think that whenever we hear these wise words we ought perhaps to be more mindful of something that someone Roman once said: Caveat Emptor.
Article by James Delingpole
James Delingpole is a writer, broadcaster and truth seeker. He hosts the Delingpod - the world’s most entertainingly shambolic ‘conspiracy’ podcast.
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