With the the latest thread about Britain trying to punish people just for staring at women, it got me to wonder. Looking at the current state of Britain, if BBC in George Orwell era believed in free speech and freedom in general. They had George Orwell record his passage in the book that are all about censorship and whatnot, in the end was it just for the show and they just believed all that nonsense about good guys vs bad guys in WW2? I thought they actually believed in a sophisticated morality, not everything is evil, it's grey morality but I can't help but think were they were just as simple-minded as current era journos. Now I look back at history how much the truth has been distorted, makes me believe almost everything was a sham.
The fact that there was no internet, they had to rely on journos to inform people what was happening, they would have just swallowed the false narrative and probably not question it. Even worse, we came to understand more and more, most journos were presstitutes and a very few have integrity. Ever since I saw how the world was run, I found this revelation to be depressing. Even worse, George Orwell said something about this, too.
Words don't really mean what they mean in the end nowadays, they can throw around any words like fascist and dictatorship and it didn't mean much when the journos were throwing that term left and right a few years ago.
If you want revised history on WW2 Britain, you are looking for David Irving's Churchill's War.
If you want a general breakdown of how Our Democracy™ actually functions, you want Walter Lippmann's Public Opinion and Edward Bernay's Propaganda.
David Irving has a nasty habit of straight up lying in his work. Now, this doesn't mean that every mainstream historical accounting is accurate, but it does mean that you will unfortunately need to read multiple conflicting secondary sources to get a better idea of the truth. If you want to read Irving, you'll end up needing to read Evans. This doesn't mean that Evan's assertion of history is right, because although he isn't explicitly lying like Irving is, he's just accepting some premises that aren't true, because even he may not know some of the things he's read aren't true, or may be operating off of a Leftist meta-narrative.
A good example of the problem with historians bickering and trying to actually decipher what any of them are talking about is Tik's video on Hitler's Table Talk
I think the masses have always been easy to control with misinformation. Whether that's through newspapers, religious clergy, television, social media, whatever. Most people buy into it. Yet you also always had skeptics. I think the internet has just given more documented voice to skeptics whereas if you're searching for evidence of skeptics existing in history, you simply won't find documented evidence of them because the institutions that do the documenting of things were always controlled by the party that creates the false narrative to sell to the masses.
You have a great point. The masses in general are indeed frequently mislead and it's not just limited to west to be fair. I seriously became more convinced of that and get disappointed when the vaccine mandate was being rolled out and people just complied in getting the jab. Makes me seriously believe we are better off with independent journalists instead of relying on old media.
I once dated a journalist who worked for CNN. I thought she was going to be the most leftist idiot around but she actually wasn't at all. She told me a couple interesting things. It didn't matter how accurate she reported on a subject because before it got published it would get edited and it would be changed to suit what the organization wanted. She said it was frustrating and upsetting because oftentimes whatever ended up published wasn't anywhere close to what she originally wrote and the message was entirely skewed. Lastly, she told me you're better off watching YouTube videos made by independent journalists than CNN if you want accurate reporting. I thought it was interesting to hear a journalist who worked at CNN say that.
Journalists have always been scum, it's just that since the progressive era, the government has improved their reputation by using them as the first line of containment. Journalists never speak truth to power. They are allowed to be journalists because they don't.
That being said, reality still exists, and you can still find evidence for reality when you look through the primary sources.
Even in the 1968 already, the BBC clutched their pearls so hard when Enoch Powell dared point out massive immigration was displacing native Brits at an accelerating pace.
The only way Powell was wrong was how he massively under-estimated the pace of replacement comming as all the usual suspects were protesting loudly it was not happening, then minimising it, like they do all over the West.
It's not that the problems haven't existed, the internet just shines the light way better on the cockroaches. The problem is the bugs decided to play hardball and hurry things up for their agenda.