Caesar: And in Rome, Marc Antony is to speak for Caesar. His authority is not to be questioned.
Canidius: His word will be yours. As always, Caesar’s word is law.
Caesar: Of course. But remind him to keep his legions intact. They make the law legal.
– Wanger. W. (Producer), Mankiewicz. J.L. (Director). (1963). Cleopatra [Motion Picture]. United States: 20th Century-Fox
“Imagine waking up one day and realizing you were born on a completely different planet; and everything you learned was a lie, and your country’s history was so fabricated, and everyone around you was so brainwashed, and the heroes of your worship were actually monsters, villains.
This is like the plot to a science fiction novel, but it’s the insane reality for North Koreans, like me. From the moment I was born I was indoctrinated towards the first dictator Kim Il-sung and I always used to bow to his pictures, which hangs in every North Korean home.
To us he was a Santa Claus and God who is delivering presents on holidays and performing numerous miracles. When he was fighting our enemy he made bombs from pine cones and turned sent into rice and crossed a river on tree leaves, and he even walked across the rainbow. So that’s why, when I was young, I used to believe that I could also work across the rainbow.”
– Hyeonseo Lee
Nelson: ‘I fear you’? This is what Valentine’s Day means to you?
Bart: This is what it means to everyone. How can you be forced to say ‘I love you’? People only give Valentines because they’re scared of what would happen if they didn’t.
– The Simpsons (2013) Season 25, Episode 11; “Specs and the City” [No. 541]
Established in 1938, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) was a committee of the U.S. House of Representatives that conducted investigations through the 1940s and 1950s into alleged communist activities.
Its actions resulted in several contempt-of-Congress convictions and the blacklisting of many who refused to answer its questions. Highly controversial for its tactics, it was criticized for violating First Amendment rights.
The following transcript of an excerpt from the interrogation of screenwriter John Howard Lawson by HUAC chairman J. Parnell Thomas gives an example of an alternative wording of the question and a sense of the tenor of some of the exchanges: Continue reading
Perhaps ironically, the most effective approach to extract information from someone may be kindness. In 2014, Swedish researchers compared a common, direct interrogation—where the questions are direct and specific—to the Scharff Technique, named after the highly successful German interrogator Hanns Scharff.[1]
Scharff was not a typical Nazi interrogator. Unlike the infamous Klaus Barbie, he did not believe in using physical violence. Instead, Scharff got prisoners to spill their secrets through kindness and cunning.
“Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers.” ― Voltaire
According to Pacific Standard magazine, he even used to share his wife’s baked goods with allied fighter pilots. Once, while strolling with a captured allied fighter pilot through the woords, Scharff claimed that American tracer bullets left a white instead of red smoke due to a chemical shortage, the pilot jumped in to correct him, saying the white smoke was a signal to pilots that they were low on ammo. Thus Scharff was armed with the information he sought. Contemporary researchers are now beginning to put his techniques to the test.
In the Swedish study, participants were given a story with 35 details and interrogated by phone, Scharff’s approach not only resulted in more (and more precise) information, but those being interrogated thought they gave up less information than they actually had, while those being interrogated directly felt they gave up more than they actually had. Kindness is not the only key ingredient to the Scharff Technique; having a “know-it-all” attitude compels information-disclosing corrections, as in the case of the pilot correcting his “friend.”
“The object of terrorism is terrorism. The object of oppression is oppression. The object of torture is torture. The object of murder is murder. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?” ― George Orwell, 1984
[1] Oleszkiewicz. S., Granhag. P.A., Montecinos. S.C. (2014) The Scharff-technique: eliciting intelligence from human sources.
Plantagenet: You’re very young. I don’t think you’ve thought about this very much.
Silverbridge: But I have sir, I have developed my own ideas. We’ve got to protect ourselves against those radicals and communists.
Plantagenet: Do your politics begin and end with your own self-interests? You’re advocating self-protection.
Silverbridge: Not only our own protection, sir, but that of our class. The people will look after themselves, but we are so few and they are so many that we will have quite enough to do.
Plantagenet: You would desert a family allegiance of centuries for such childish thinking as that?
Silverbridge: I know I’m a fool sir. Perhaps that’s why I’m a Tory. Well, the radicals are always saying that it must be a fool, so perhaps a fool ought to be a Conservative. I am very sorry if this upsets you father.
Plantagenet: I will not be upset sir, but I thought you had studied the conservative philosophy with some serious thought and consideration, but as it is…
– Lisemore, M. (Producer), David, H. and Wilson, R. (Directors). (1974). The Pallisers [Television Series]. United Kingdom: BBC
“Privilege is toxic.”
– Jerry Seinfeld
In both a plutocracy and an oligarchy a relatively very small group of people wields all the power; majority rule, if it exists, occurs only in token form. Furthermore, both governmental systems do not require a parliament nor a constitution, although these are not obstacles either. There are, however, a few nuanced differences between the two governmental systems:
Oligarchy is the system in which a nation is governed by a few powerful people. The basis of this power is unspecified but sticky; it can be passed on by means of elections as well as inheritance.
“A ruling group is a ruling group so long as it can nominate its successors.” ― George Orwell
Plutocracy is the government of the wealthy, who are powerful because of their wealth. As opposed to oligarchies, plutocracies usually enjoy elective successions – in one way or another.
‘Reagan’s story of freedom superficially alludes to the Founding Fathers, but its substance comes from the Gilded Age, devised by apologists for the robber barons. It is posed abstractly as the freedom of the individual from government control — a Jeffersonian ideal at the roots of our Bill of Rights, to be sure. But what it meant in politics a century later, and still means today, is the freedom to accumulate wealth without social or democratic responsibilities and license to buy the political system right out from everyone else.’ ― Bill Moyers, in his “For America’s Sake” speech (12 December 2006), as quoted in Moyers on Democracy (2008), p. 17
Knowledge Guild 