Originally Posted by
midcan5
The parties have reversed haven't you heard. History shows that clearly, please pay attention.
"History is the queen of the humanities. It teaches wisdom and humility, and it tells us how things change through time." Gordon S. Wood
"Learning history is easy; learning its lessons is impossibly difficult." Nicolas Bentley
"If you can cut the people off from their history, then they can be easily persuaded." Karl Marx
"To think of humans as freedom-loving, you must be ready to view nearly all of history as a mistake." John Gray
"The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history." George Orwell
"The value of history is that it teaches us what man has done and thus what man is." R. G. Collingwood
"The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie—a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days—but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please." Hannah Arendt
"Historian Phillips-Fein traces the hidden history of the Reagan revolution to a coterie of business executives, including General Electric official and Reagan mentor Lemuel Boulware, who saw labor unions, government regulation, high taxes and welfare spending as dire threats to their profits and power. From the 1930s onward, the author argues, they provided the money, organization and fervor for a decades-long war against New Deal liberalism—funding campaigns, think tanks, magazines and lobbying groups, and indoctrinating employees in the virtues of unfettered capitalism." 'Invisible Hands'
"Not only does there seem to be widespread social fragmentation and disillusionment with democracy in the United States, but the possibility of reversing this sense of alienation appears to many of us to be already lost. Any democratic president who wants to institute the desperately needed reforms in health, welfare and the environment faces one of two options. He can stick by his reform program and suffer a loss of public confidence through orchestrated campaigns to publicly portray him as 'too liberal' and ineffectual (the Carter image) or too indecisive or sexually indiscreet (the Clinton image). Alternatively, a reforming democratic president can move further to the Right, forget his promises and become part of the propaganda campaign. Given the history of democratic propaganda in the United States, some of us doubt that another Roosevelt or New Deal is possible. The political system is now so attuned to business interests that this kind of reformer could no longer institute the substantial health, welfare, education, environmental and employment reforms the country needs." Andrew Lohrey, Introduction, Alex Carey "Taking the Risk Out of Democracy"