Also, like Prohibition, the roots of the Samizdat movement began much earlier. Prohibition was essentially begun by the Methodists in the mid-19th Century, then driven later by the temperance movement.

I actually found a website when looking for some free eBooks online called Samizdat. LOL
The B&R Samizdat Express

Isn’t the Internet amazing?! Where was it when I was a Uni student! *sigh* LOL

One of the factors in the fall of the Soviet Union was samizdat [самиздат] the “self published” works of dissidents, educated in those schools. The ‘Net is a faster version of self-publishing with a much wider potential audience than the hand-typed carbon copies of Bulgakov, Pasternak, or Solzhenitsyn. The blogs can be traced back to the pamphleteers of 18th and 19th centuries. Outside of government control, and annoying the establishment has a long and occasionally proud history.

The primary difference the past century I think, is the emergence of mass media and communications, culminating in the Internet. 🙂 I think the Internet is the GOP’s undoing. They underestimated it and they had little control over it. Until the Internet, the people had no real means of truly global mass communication to fight back, as you do with your blog and so many others are doing also. 🙂

You may only have a ‘little home on the ‘Net’, but it’s an extremely important piece of the whole ‘rebellion’. 🙂 Because you have your audience, and your message is essentially the same as so many other sensible, intelligent, observant bloggers, and that audience reads other blogs with a similar message, and they become convinced to varying degrees. With your background, you are part of a small peer group of bloggers with a unique perspective than can fill in the very important missing pieces, such as about Kissinger etc. 🙂

Imagine where the USA and the World would be today without the Internet!! I for one find that thought horrifying. The Internet has essentially become the medium of the people. This is why the MSM and the MIC and the GOP are desperately trying to control it or destroy it. The MSM is loosing this battle, and perhaps they will loose the war! 😉 We can but hope! 😀

Just call me Kryten the Anarchist! LOL

BTW, I have almost all Azimov’s fictional books, and many non-fiction. He was an amazingly prolific writer! At an interview, he was asked “What would you do if you knew you only had 6 Months to live?” His reply was “Type faster!” LOL

Thanks again! And please keep doing what you do! I know how difficult it is day after day (I have been there), but you are a valuable voice amongst the noise.

Cheers m8! 😀

FDR was unique in that he would try anything, including a few things that were frankly dictatorial, but if it didn’t work, he would drop it and move on to something else. If you study his administration it wasn’t doctrinaire, it was utilitarian. If it worked, it was good. No other President has ever managed to pull that off. I believe that it was because of the dire straits the US was in when he took office that he was able to get away with it, and he was showman.

The Repubs had been working towards 2000 for decades, building their support network, subverting the media, fashioning the message. They then wasted all that work on a collection of corrupt incompetents and are seeing it collapse. They gather together groups that really didn’t have a lot in common other than to win elections, and now those groups are splintering over their differences.

If you know to look for them the signs have been obvious since Reagan took office. The power brokers assumed they could control the Shrubbery, and they were wrong with effects piling up daily.

Isaac Azimov’s Foundation series was built around the basic concepts of mass control, and sociology is no where as finite as it needs to be, but masses of people have always been easier to control than individuals, because humans are social animals by nature. Mobs do things that the individual members wouldn’t consider.

I can’t solve the problems from my little home on the ‘Net, but I have no intention of ignoring them.

I came to the conclusion early during G.W. Bush’s Presidency that he displayed the characteristics (along with Chaney and others) of an amoral personality.

Part of the work I was trained to do, was to build psychological profiles of *persons of interest*. I am not a psychologist, and have never claimed to be, but certain characteristics become very evident. Usually, once we had a rough profile of a person, we would worked with a specialist Psychologist to gauge our accuracy and adjust or fill in the gaps. We got quite good at it. 🙂

It amuses me now how almost everyone truly wants to believe they are so unique and different to everyone else. The reality is quite different. When one understand patterns and how to follow threads, they become easy to see. This is of course why the GOP have been so successful. They understand this. It’s always been about manipulation and started a long time ago. I think that Americans in particular don’t realise, generally, how easy they are to manipulate. The environment has been carefully manipulated over a long period of time. And it’s much easier to manipulate a very large population. Not all will succumb, but they become the minority. We know that a big lie is often wrapped around a small kernel of truth, and that if a lie is told often enough, it becomes truth. This is one reason torture, especially prolonged torture, it unreliable. It’s only used to get the result the torturers want, and to convince the tortured that a lie is the truth.

If my foresight was as good as my hindsight, I’d have spent a lot more time studying them. I am certain that Kissinger is still working in the shadows and has a lot to do with Iraq. It has his disastrous fingerprints all over it.

People really need to wake up and look behind the superficial facade of Politics and have a good look at *the way things are done*! I have said many times, Ignorance is NOT bliss!

Oh well… the more things change, the more they remain the same. Yup!

They have no historical perspective in Washington. They don’t learn history, so they certainly don’t learn from it.

I read a statistic somewhere that Aus has been involved in more Wars and Peacekeeping missions than the USA. Might make a list one day and see if that’s true. 🙂

And you are correct about Iraq (or any other sovereign state for that matter). Also about Afghanistan, and you can add a long list of other countries to that.

Saddam was a tyrannical SOB, who should have been removed – BUT, he should have been removed by Iraqis with minimum outside assistance as this would provide a uniting force. Having a totally external force remove him does nothing to empower the Iraqis, and, in fact, makes them believe they are weaker than they actually are.

The Soviets often used the Bulgarians to do things that they didn’t want to be caught doing. Everyone used surrogates during the Cold War. We created a surrogate army in Afghanistan to fight the Soviets and then abandoned them when they won. We lost their allegiance and are paying the price. It was predicted by the people in the field, but Washington ignored them. BLOW BACK.