Gaslighting & Firehosing
Given how central the “unelected Eurocrat” nonsense was so central to the Brexit campaign Johnson and Cummings themselves lead and now the government are humiliating themselves in order to keep him, even with open remarks regarding how very crucial he is to the operation and how, in the words of Andrew Bridgen MP on Newsnight last night that, Cummings is “deciding government policy”, given all this, the government argue that this is not hypocrisy? One would think their reckon we somehow don’t remember this?
It would seem that the government think we are but goldfish! At least, that would seem to be the case
Telling us things that are entirely contrary to what we know to be true has been a hallmark of the governments coronavirus response.
Almost every aspect of it is marred with some falsehood, misrepresentation or fudging of figures.
Their deception has been shameless. The government haven’t been straight with the people at any point.
That would be an understatement.
I do not believe they think they are convincing us with their lies at all, in fact, I’d argue they have decided to employ a particular tactic whenever questioned. A tactic that requires the most brazen and bald lies yet
Eg. Patting themselves on the back as we kept moving up the table for the worst death toll.
This is gaslighting,
it’s the flipside of the grooming of their supporters that the lying achieves, they don’t intend to convince us they want to drive us mad with how blatant and infuriatingly obvious their lies are.
In short, they know we know they are lying.
This is a technique also known as Firehosing, used pervasively and disturbingly successfully, by Valimir Lenin in Soviet Russia.
“Calculated, not to convince, but to break up the ranks of the opponent, not to correct the mistake of the opponent, but to destroy him, to wipe his organization off the face of the earth.”
It is all about bombarding people with things that are contradictory, sometimes painfully obvious, sometimes more sly and insidious, making it harder to know the truth and engendering a cognitive dissonance, that gulf between what we know to be true and what the government and their right wing media apparatus is telling you.
It is exhausting in the effort to sort fact from fiction and when they get more brazen still it is painful.
That pain and anger is overwhelming and can result in people giving up on even trying to distinguish truth from lies.
This is how to kill opposition.
It absolutely works, is historically documented and been analysed by many experts in behaviour and psychology, the effects are truly disturbing in the loss of personhood and personal relationship with truth.
As an individual with a particular interest in the manipulation of populations - he is, after all, a professional propagandist - there is no possible way that Dominic Cummings is not aware of the technique.
The way they have chosen to respond to the Cummings scandal is with more of this tactic, the same way they have responded to the terrible death toll is to talk, with an inexplicably straight face, about our “apparent success”.
These things are so untrue, so very far from each other.
what I want to tell those who oppose this government, I want to warn them, that it’s not just their supporters that can become groomed, we are not immune.
The rift in perception and interpretation is dangerously wide and the mental health of those who oppose this regime is like an elastic band being pulled from those ends and if we are not aware that we are not invulnerable time their lies just because we don’t believe them, we are all the more vulnerable to snapping.
I want the government to be asked to explain their contradictory statements and justify them in the seeing of the liaison Committee.
I want the government to be asked why it appears they are employing techniques such as Firehosing.
And I want them to know that we see them and what they are doing.