Recall photographs like the above?
Now SunTV brings us up to date:
1.
2.
Who’s that funny-looking guy third from the right where Theo Caldwell used to be?
Gotta hand it to the Soviets—they were working from silver halide emulsion film, and did a darned sight better than the PhotoShopper who digitally re-produced the SunTV image. (The latter does fit right on, of course, with the ludicrously poor production values of that money-losing effort.)
The Conservative government’s unofficial house organ, however, and various Conservative Ministers, have gone further: taking another leaf from the Stalinist playbook, they have begun to workers and various perceived enemies of the state as wreckers. Blogger Sixth Estate has the deets here and here.
All of this goes to show, of course, that totalitarian tactics have no specific politics. But they do move in the same direction: to a place where “truth” is what the government and its apparatchiks deem it to be, where news is indistinguishable from crude propaganda, and where anyone out of favour with the regime can be publicly reviled as an enemy of the state.
Deeply worrying—as it should be for allegedly anti-statist conservatives who, instead, are cheering and whistling from the sidelines.
[H/t Mark Bourrie]