Comments by "Ash Roskell" (@ashroskell) on "Big Brother distorted by Elon Musk" video.

  1. I am a devotee of Orwell’s essays and I have always argued that if you juxtapose his complete essay collection with Winston Churchill’s glossy history books, therein lies the truest picture of British history you can find, so long as you understand the concept of historiography and close reading. As to how people like Musk are hijacking Orwell, that simply reflects the Russification of far right tactics that we have seen increasingly, since Putin spread his tendrils into our media discourse at every level. The tried and tested Stalin technique of accusing your opponents of the things you are guilty of, or accusing them of doing things that you yourself are about to do, began in earnest in the west with Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, at a time when trump’s ties with the Kremlin were far less opaque and almost his entire campaign team were found guilty of crimes relating to either domestic campaign laws, or to their spying and infiltration efforts on behalf of Putin. Remember Paul Manafort, anyone? If your goal is to muddy the waters so badly that everyone gives up trying to discern the truth, a good way to approach that is by taking the figures people who tried to warn the world about people like yourself and grafting them onto the faces of your own monsters. Have your, “creations,” utter the very phrases that people should be applying to you, and preempt that, by applying them to those who would stop you. It barely matters that the quotes you used were out of context, misunderstood, inappropriate or just plain wrong. In some senses that helps, as you get to accuse people correcting you of looking down their noses at you and being, “liberal elites,” blah, blah, blah. All that matters to the far right is that the comments are incendiary and get attention. Whether deliberately, by osmosis or just because of a general ongoing degradation of the quality of public discourse, Stalin’s tactics for making collective conclusions about the truth unattainable have been on the increase over the past 20 or so years, gathering momentum in the last decade, so far as I have observed them. Anyone who has read Simon Seabag Montefiore’s books on Russia, particularly his biographies of Stalin, will see what I mean, I hope?
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