"Occupy bank" flash mob in Naples, protesters in underwear

From AGI.it:

Around 30 members of Naples' "Occupy" and "zero81" movements shocked a branch of Bnl bank with a "naked" flash mob. After hanging banners with their slogan "Occupy banks", the protesters began to undress before the incredulous bank employees and clients till both male and female protesters stood in their underwear, some wearing the Anonymous mask, then wrapped themselves in a banner which stated "the rich should be the ones who pay". . .

photo from Zero81

How Media Makes Reality Relative

Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_Cave
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69F7GhASOdM
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiral_of_silence
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJ7lAy7RCNg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit_451
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Orwell
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Bradbury
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noam_Chomsky
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Vonnegut

old film of george orwell found at bbc maida vale studios

See also:

George Orwell - A Life in Pictures (Full Documentary)

Amy J - 'Double Think'

Doublethink means, according to George Orwell's dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four:

... the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. ... To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies—all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth.


As Orwell explains in the book, the Party could not protect its iron grip on power without degrading its people and exposing them to constant propaganda. Yet knowledge of this brutality and deception, even within the Party itself could lead to disgusted collapse of the state from within, as the Soviet Union later fell in the late 20th century. For this reason, Orwell's idealized government used a complex system of "reality control". Though the novel is most famous for its pervasive surveillance of daily life, reality control meant that the population could be controlled and manipulated merely through the alteration of everyday language and thought. Newspeak was the method for controlling thought through language; Doublethink was the method of controlling thought directly.

Doublethink was a form of trained, willful blindness to contradictions in a system of beliefs. In the case of Winston Smith, Orwell's protagonist, it meant being able to work at the Ministry of Truth deleting uncomfortable facts from public records, and then believing in the new history which he himself had written.

Through doublethink, the Party was able to not only bomb its own people and tell its citizens that the bombs were sent by the enemy, but all Party members—even the ones that launched the rockets themselves—were able to believe that the bombs were launched from outside.

Additionally, Doublethink's self-deception allowed the Party to maintain both huge goals and realistic expectations: "If one is to rule, and to continue ruling, one must be able to dislocate the sense of reality. For the secret of rulership is to combine a belief in one's own infallibility with the power to learn from past mistakes". Thus, each party member could be a credulous pawn, but would never lack relevant information. The party is both fanatical and well-informed, and thus unlikely either to "ossify" or "grow soft" and collapse. "Killing the messenger" disturbed the command-and-control of the Nazi (and later the Iraqi) militaries, but would not present itself in such a system. Doublethink thus functioned as key tool of self-discipline of the Party, to complement the state-imposed discipline of propaganda and a police state. Together, these tools hid the government's evil not only from the people, but also from the government itself, but without the confusion and misinformation associated with more primitive totalitarian regimes.

Occupy DC revived

Occupy DC was one of the longest standing branches of the Occupy Wall Street movement in America until The National Park Service police bulldozed the headquarters back in early February. But now a resurgence of occupiers has begun. Tents are back in McPherson Square in the nation's capital. So is Occupy DC here to stay? RT's Abby Martin has more.