Title: "Uncle Sam 2.0" Oil on canvas (24" X 30")
Based on the iconic Uncle Sam poster "I Want You for U.S. Army," which was designed by James Montgomery Flagg and was created during World War I to encourage military enlistment.
"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.
Real power is achieved when the ruling class controls the material essentials of life, granting and withholding them from the masses as if they were privileges. Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give the appearance of solidity to pure wind.
Truth – It’s the New Hate Speech: During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act. The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those that speak it.
Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except the endless present in which the party is always right."
George Orwell (English novelist, essayist, journalist and critic)
"The older dictators fell because they could never supply their subjects with enough bread, enough circuses, enough miracles, and enough mysteries. Under a scientific dictatorship, education will really work, with the result that most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution. There seems to be no good reason why a thoroughly scientific dictatorship should ever be overthrown.
There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it.
People will come to love their oppression and adore the technologies that undo their capacity to think.
The victim of mind-manipulation does not know that he is a victim. To him, the walls of his prison are invisible, and he believes himself to be free.
Medical science has made such tremendous progress that there is hardly a healthy human left.
The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior "righteous indignation" — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.
Reality cannot be ignored except at a price, and the longer ignorance is persisted in, the higher and more terrible the price that must be paid.
... the greater part of the population is not very intelligent, dreads responsibility, and desires nothing better than to be told what to do. Provided the rulers do not interfere with its material comforts and its cherished beliefs, it is perfectly happy to let itself be ruled.
The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be the most normal. Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does. They are normal, not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society.
Hitler’s vast propaganda successes were accomplished with little more than the radio and loudspeaker, and without TV, tape, or video recording. Today, the art of mind control is in the process of becoming a science.
Dictators can always consolidate their tyranny with an appeal to patriotism."
Aldous Huxley (English writer and philosopher)
"The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it’s profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, pull back the curtains, move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater."
Frank Zappa (American musician, singer, composer, songwriter and bandleader)