Patrice

“From the first, the act of conquest, which reduces persons to the status of things, is necrophilia”
― Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

“Gingrich’s goal was to tar the Democrats as the party of corruption. In 1984, one of his advisers wrote a strategy memo saying that Gingrich and his allies should view themselves as the Viet Cong fighting the South Vietnamese government (the Democrats) while accepting support from the North Vietnamese (the Republican establishment). Both, he stated, were the “enemies.” The Democrats, he noted, “we must destroy” and the Republicans “we must take advantage of, lie to, sidetrack, confound, and possess by recruitment and propaganda.” The goal was to cast Democrats as “the oppressor,” a tyrannical enemy warranting the utmost despisal. This memo, as Gingrich’s biographer Julian Zelizer later said, was his “road map.” When”
― David Corn, American Psychosis: A Historical Investigation of How the Republican Party Went Crazy

“In a situation of manipulation, the Left is almost always tempted by a “quick return to power,” forgets the necessity of joining with the oppressed to forge an organization, and strays into an impossible “dialogue” with the dominant elites. It ends by being manipulated by these elites, and not infrequently itself falls in an elitist game, which it calls “realism.”

Manipulation, like the conquest whose objectives it serves, attempts to anesthetize the people so they will not think. For if the people join to their presence in the historical process critical thinking about that process, the threat of their emergence materializes in revolution…One of the methods of manipulation is to inoculate individuals with the bourgeois appetite for personal success. This manipulation is sometimes carried out directly by the elites and sometimes indirectly, through populist leaders.”
― Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

“But Jesus had to speak through a public-address system—the only one available—which distorted his words, so that they came forth as the bombastic claim to be the one and only appearance of the Christ, of the incarnation of God as man. This is not good news. The good news is that if Jesus could realize his identity with God, you can also—but this God does not have to be idolized as an imperious monarch with a royal court of angels and ministers. God, as “the love which moves the sun and other stars,” is something much more inward, intimate, and mysterious—in the sense of being too close to be seen as an object.”
― Alan Wilson Watts, Cloud-hidden, Whereabouts Unknown