The Ukraine Crisis

Reading about World War I and World War II, it's frightening how easily the great powers ended up at war. In the cartoon version of things, or (to be more charitable) without the benefit of hindsight, the path to war is an obvious thing, and we sitting in the present day are supposed to shout out "You fools! Are you  blind to the forces you're unleashing?" But in reality, things were murky. Crises didn't seem like world-historical events then as they do to us now. "Evil" wasn't as clear cut as it's made out to be in the history books of the victors. And when "evil" was real enough (such as Hitler's racism) it needs to be remembered that Hitler wasn't this single proponent of anti-Semitism, or eugenics. An interesting exercise would be to insert the word "Jew" for the word "Muslim" in the diatribes of your typical Tea-Party member, or "Jew" for "Gypsy" in ezra levant's hateful rant.

Will the blundering and stupidity and hypocrisy that is the Ukraine crisis produce another global conflict? I don't think so. Our leaders are still connected enough to reality to know that even a weakened Russia possesses a terrifying arsenal of nuclear weapons. So far as conventional weapons go, the USA tends to prefer enemies like Iraq (which they didn't actually invade until it had been weakened by decades of war, sanctions and air-strikes against its anti-aircraft defences), Panama, and Grenada. (pop. 109,011). Not even Obama would send US-American soldiers into a slaughter such as a war with Russia in the Ukraine would be.

I rather think that Obama will use the crisis in the Ukraine to force Putin to acquiesce to Israeli airstrikes against Assad in Syria, and thereby avoid the humiliation he suffered when he had to climb-down from his hypocritical posturing about the mysterious chemical weapons attack that had been a "red line" for him previously.

If Putin accedes to this it will, obviously, be only grudgingly, and there will be retaliation elsewhere against the USA's interests. As well, China is also a player in the Middle East and places a high priority on energy sources outside of the USA's control. China would work either with Putin or without him, to make the USA pay for its heavy-handed bullying. What form this will take and what the consequences will be, I cannot say.

"Men's Rights" Guys Cross the Line (Again)

People have pointed out that the so-called "Men's Rights" organizations don't really do anything positive for themselves. For instance; they claim that men are victims because more men have been killed as soldiers in wars than women have been killed as soldiers in wars. Aside from the fact that it is mostly men who start wars and who support them as voters nowadays, I've yet to hear about a Men's Rights protest for peace. I don't tend to see Men's Rights groups in peace coalitions.

Really, it seems that all these guys want to do is blame women and especially, feminists, for all their problems. And the way these guys talk about women and feminists is the way that Nazis or the KKK talk about their enemies. It's creepy and frightening.

And they crossed the line from hate-speech to physical violence recently. A feminist at Queen's University was called by name by an assailant who proceeded to punch her several times in the face, causing her to lose half a tooth. This was after she had received several threats of violence from local "Men's Rights" "activists."

Of course, the leaders of this so-called movement have responded with anger, paranoid fantasies and further violent rhetoric.

What's genuinely scary about these guys is the violent circularity of their thinking. Read their shit and it just goes round and round; men have no power, feminists took it away, it's all the fault of the feminists, we should put them in their place, we should fight them physically, we should put them in their place with violence, they distort what we say because they're cunning and evil, we should rape and kill them to teach them a lesson, because we're not the violent angry ones, they are, because they keep us down ..... it never stops.

Barack Obama and Dalton McGuinty

It was a big day for both of those assholes yesterday.

Barack Obama, trying to square the circle of his total hypocrisy on the Ukraine Crisis, said that the invasion of Iraq was different because the USA didn't conquer and they left the Iraqis a free people.

Well, sorry. Sadly no. You went in there to privatize Iraq's oil. And you turned the country into a complete hell-hole. You took an authoritarian dictatorship with torture chambers and rape-rooms and fear, and you turned it into an inferno of rape, torture, dictatorship, sectarian conflict, civil war and one-million dead millions more wounded and even more MILLIONS refugees.

I wonder about the partisan blinkers that make so many otherwise intelligent US-Americans see this psychopath as a legitimate political figure rather than the inhuman imperialist and Wall Street shill that he is.

Then I think about the otherwise intelligent Canadian Liberals who deny to themselves what an utter anti-democratic scuzzball Dalton McGuinty is. Some are so blinded by their loyalties that they even deny that the gas-plants scandal was a scandal. If, however, it had been Tim Hudak who had wasted ONE BILLION DOLLARS to cancel two contracts, merely to save some OPC seats during an election, and who refused to respect the demands of the majority of the people's representatives in the legislature for an accounting of this waste, and who had even tried to destroy the PUBLIC documents that describe this criminal waste, ... those Liberals would have gone ape-shit. But, since McGuinty is a Liberal, well, it's all good.

Our cities are crumbling, homeless people are freezing in the streets, working people are stuck waiting for crowded buses in the winter rain, and young people graduate with crushing debt-loads, but McGuinty had no problem paying hundreds of millions of dollars in fines to cancel something that the ONDP told him not to build in the first place.

(Oh. And don't think I'm not disgusted with Andrea Horwath's trampling of party democracy to make piece-of-shit SUN News defender Adam Giambrone their [failed] candidate in Scarborough. I think the whole circus at Queen's Park is a disgusting, sordid mess.)

Anyhow, one ray of good news is that McGuinty's chief-of-staff is probably going to be up on criminal charges for trying to delete those records and it's about time. It would be fucking awesome if at least one of these pricks served time for their CRIMES against democracy.

EC's John Kingsley - Master Thespian?

See, a sane person, or anyone who isn't a drooling imbecile, would naturally react with suspicion when the corrupt Conservatives, (the Contempt of Parliament Party that practices election fraud) proposed to reform the electoral process. Especially when the person they put in charge of the exercise is shameless hack Pierre Poilievre. So you had to have wondered when former Chief Electoral Officer, Jean-Pierre Kingsley said right off the bat that he gave Poilievre's "Fair Elections Act" a grade of A-. I remembered the way the news reports conveyed the highlights of the legislation the way Poilievre described them and I remembered thinking that this was the government's spin job. The bill was hundreds of pages long and I was sure and I (like other sane people) was right. The devil was in the details. And hellish details they were. The bill is now almost universally attacked as a shameless assault on Canadian democracy.

No matter; the harpercons are going to town. Numerous nitwit Tory vermin are lying their stupid faces off about all the election fraud they'd seen in past elections but never reported because maybe being candidates in elections they weren't all that invested in the integrity of the process or something.

[!]

And harpercon trolls took Kingsley's thoughtless and stupid "A-" comment and ran with it.

It makes you think that Kingsley is either stupid (and I doubt he's that stupid) or corrupt. This is the Kingsley who helped make a deliberate mess of Haiti's 2005 elections, where the party of the majority (Lavalas) was banned and where ballots from poorer neighbourhoods were found to have been tossed in the trash rather than counted. People can draw their own conclusions as to why a guy like that would embarrass himself by blurting out a premature passing grade to legislation he hadn't yet read.

One can speculate about the performance of Elections Canada throughout this whole sordid period of harpercon election fraud. Why didn't they offer legal immunity to the workers at Deltro Electric, for their testimony against their employers' brother, Dean Del Mastro, but they chose to to give legal immunity to harpercon stooge Andrew Prescott. Why did Elections Canada appear to take the side of the sleazy Ted Opitz against Borys Wrzesnewskyj?

What's up with Elections Canada in general?

Perhaps the whole agency, like Jean-Pierre Kingsley, is just acting. They're just pretending to (on occasion) stand up to the harpercons' shitting upon our democracy. In reality, for whatever reason, the fix is in. Our elites have decided that this shameful bullshit is a-okay for Canada, and we progressives, through defeatism, regional grievances, apathy and our lack of ideas, have decided this is acceptable too.

ETA: Saskboy is, if anything, even more disgusted with Elections Canada than I am.

Missing Planes & Mud-Slides

I don't watch television news. But I was out and about yesterday and CNN was on the television. They spent about ten minutes (at least) on speculation about the missing Malaysian aircraft. Then they spent three minutes talking about the mud-slide in, I forget, ... Washington State?

These are important stories, but if I was in charge of a news channel, I would give the each about one-minute, maybe two-minutes, tops. Because their impact on people's lives is not widespread. But this is CNN we're talking about. Pro-corporate, US-American propaganda. Were they to move on to more relevant stories in international relations, the economy, the environment, technology and society, or whatever, ... they'd make a hash of it.

As I said; I don't watch television news. They do a bad job of doing a bad job.

harper consorting with Anti-Semites?

Gerry Caplan makes a good point. While harper is cynically posturing as the fast friend of the US puppets in the Ukraine, he also appears to be playing footsie with anti-Semites.

Anti-Semitism, as we all know, has no more uncompromising a foe than Stephen Harper and his government. They even denounce it where it does not exist. So we can be sure they must be outraged by Svoboda, even though in public, strangely enough, they have been silent as the grave.

Given his newfound pre-occupation with Ukraine, Mr. Harper will surely know that only 16 months ago, the European Parliament expressed concern about Svoboda's growing support, emphasizing that "racist, anti-Semitic and xenophobic views go against the European Union's fundamental values and principles." The E.U. actually appealed to "pro-democratic parties [in Ukraine]...not to associate with, endorse or form coalitions with" Svoboda, an admonition Yatsenyuk's new government has totally ignored.

Of course, Caplan knows that harper doesn't give a shit about Jews, Ukrainians, or Canadians. He definitely hates democracy. No. This is all just an excuse for harper to robotically pander to the latest right-wing cause in the hopes of scoring some right-wing votes.*

It also gives the gutless shit-stain a reason to stay out of the country, and hide from all the scandals brought about by his own corruption and incompetence. harper has never been one to face the music.

In other news, LeadNow has probably finished delivering their petitions against the "Fair Elections Act" to the administrative assistants at harpercon MPs' constituency offices. And now, they're probably all on their way home. Can't you just feel the democracy?



*But now we can say that harper pals around with anti-Semites. And ezra levant and michael coren work at the separatist SUN News. "Separatists and anti-Semites." It sounds worse than "Separatists and Socialists" if you ask me.

A Vingette

Around 1993, when I was in my late-twenties, I lived in Toronto for a summer. Unemployed. One day, I'm walking on Bloor, somewhere west of Bathurst Street, when a woman approached me. She was a tiny thing. Kind of cute. Early-thirties I'd say. She mumbled something to me. I asked: "Excuse me?" She said a little louder: "Do you have a cigarette?" I don't smoke, so of course I said "No. Sorry." She mumbled something else. I said "Excuse me?" She said a little louder "Do you want a blow-job?"

It's testimony to what a kill-joy I am that in my mind's eye all I could see were cold sores erupting all around her mouth. That and the fact that I'm not too big about paying for sex, I said "Uh, no. Sorry."

Here's the thing that's haunted me all these years. She said "Please?" in such a way that it sounded like it'd really make her day if I let her suck my dick. It really did. And that's what made me laugh nervously when I repeated "No" to her. I knew at the time that it was all about her needing money. But I was flustered and just wanted to get out of there. My laughter was part of my being uncomfortable. I've thought about it since and I guess she was new to the whole thing and definitely not happy about whatever situation had brought her to offer oral sex to strangers for money. I've said on many occasions that I'm on the small side myself. Up until I was 40 there was always a certain subset of women (some beautiful) who found me attractive. She probably thought I looked unthreatening and, also, she could handle the idea of having my cock in her mouth, so she screwed-up her courage and approached me.

Yes. The whole thing sounds pretty sad. I know why I laughed. Her "Please?" sounded funny and I was already off-balance and uncomfortable. If I'd been thinking, I might have spoken to her and given her five-bucks (if I'd had it at the time, as I was unemployed) or something. But I was too disoriented to think of anything like that at the time. I guess she probably felt like shit, and thought that I was cruel and laughing at her predicament. I don't recall this story with any sort of merriment. I hope she got her life back on track.

stephen harper Stands Beside Ukranian Fascists

It's laughable. The disgusting puss-ball seems to think that 1) Canadians and 2) the people of the world, care about his cynical posturing on behalf of Ukraine's fascists.

Shut the fuck up you rancid tower of rotting fish. You've got scandals galore to account for back home you anti-democratic piece-of-shit. Your preening and strutting on the world stage is just more evidence of your innate cowardice.

Stupid Right-Wing Fucks

The other day I was on some social media platform and either the Globe or the CBC had a story up about the harpercon government's rejection that there is a social contract between the Canadian government and veterans. And, yeah, it's pretty shameless for a bunch of chicken-hawk militarists to bray for years about how they and only they "support the troops" to then turn around and deny they owe them anything as veterans.

But see, here's the thing: While most people who commented were pretty uniformly disgusted with the harpercons, there was a true-believer who typed:

"That's funny. I thought it was the Liberals who put us in Afghanistan."

And there, my friends, you see shameless right-wing hypocrisy AND idiocy in all its horrible splendour. I quickly responded that the fellow was correct. The Liberals did put us in Afghanistan. And it's the harper government that is denying it has a social contract with veterans. I mentioned to the individual that he should try to keep up with the actual topics being discussed. The nitwit had no credible response to his team's callousness and hypocrisy. But being a partisan scumbag and an idiot, he thought that if the best he could do was an anti-Liberal non-sequitor, then so be it.

Don't get me wrong. Liberals, like Democrats in the USA, are slimy opportunists. And partisan sleaze and corruption and idiocy infects pretty much everyone. But right-wingers are generally the most moronic, the most shameless, the most scuzzy.

Look at this fucking election deformation proposal from Pierre Poilievre. It's attracting international condemnation.

Look at the shocking international disgrace and the local incompetence and stupidity and thuggery of Rob Ford.

In every case, it's right-wing filth.

An Actor's Range

I never realized what an amazing actor Ren Hoekk was until I saw this:

Vindication For Edward Herman

Just a little footnote in history. But yesterday I read a columnist (can't remember who) saying an former Iranian official has admitted that it was his country that blew up Lockerbie, Pan Am Flight 103, and not Libya. The Libyan guy convicted of the bombing was mysteriously given an early release on the grounds that he had three months to live before his cancer killed him, but he lived another three years. The deal to get him out of prison was dodgy to say the least.

Aha! It was Gwynne Dyer!

Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, a Libyan airline official who was convicted of placing the bomb aboard the plane and sentenced to 27 years in prison by a special international court in 2001, was freed from jail in 2009 and sent home, allegedly dying from cancer and with only three months to live. He eventually did die three years later, but it was a very peculiar thing for the Scottish government to do.
Megrahi was in a Scottish jail because Pan Am Flight 103, en route from London to Detroit, had blown up over the Scottish village of Lockerbie, killing all 259 people aboard and 11 in the village below. But he clearly wasn’t dying when he was freed, and he had served less than a third of his sentence.  
And there was something even more disturbing about the case. As a condition of his release, Megrahi was required to drop an appeal against his conviction that had been granted by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission in 2007.
The SCCRC listed no fewer than six grounds for serious concern about Megrahi’s conviction, including the fact that the U.S. Justice Department made an undisclosed payment of $3 million to two Maltese citizens whose evidence had linked Megrahi with the suitcase that contained the bomb. If the appeal had gone ahead, Megrahi’s conviction would probably have been quashed.

Edward Herman's been saying this for years.

The blowing up of the Iranian airbus passenger jet was, no doubt, an accident. But for the ship that fired the missile to get a heroes' welcome at home, and the whole crew to get medals, and for Bush Sr. to say "I will never apologize to the United States" was all a bit much. I'm sure if the roles had been reversed, Iran would be a radioactive ruin by now.

Anyhow, that's my post for today.

The Sick Farce of the Ukraine Crisis

So, Putin the Homophobe holds a post-Stalinist referendum and gets over 90% of the vote! The Obama the Betrayer and Kerry the Krustacean say that the referendum is illegal. These two idiots vow to stand by the legally-elected Ukrainian government cabal of kleptocrat and fascist usurpers until there is justice in the Ukraine.

Pro-coup/anti-Russian Ukrainians cry out that they who were so long under the heel of the murderous Soviet dictatorship will not submit to Russian tyranny. Very true. Stalin's terror-famine was an abomination on par with the Holocaust. But what's curious is that these US-stooges in the government are also out-and-out fascists and it's not as if the Ukraine had a good time under Nazi occupation either.

I think the whole thing is a sordid mess. Obviously though, the government of stephen harper doesn't see it that way. The way the Ukrainian usurpers stole power probably brings a little tear to his staring dead eye. And John Baird is just happy that he has something new to bray like a jack-ass about.

Capitalist domination of politics breeds contempt

We've lost sight of who we're supposed to be. The majority of us never really knew. We cling to comfortable, incoherent generalities. Who cares that Canada's government tortures? Who cares that we allow ourselves to be ruled by a government with contempt for Parliament and steals re-election via election fraud? A bunch of young men who were born here won a series of hockey games as a team representing us! (And some women did the same sort of thing.) We rock.

Just typing those words makes me cringe inside.

Did I Call It Or Did I Call It?

Pierre Poilievre's anti-democratic election deform legislation, 

OTTAWA - Pierre Poilievre won't stop citing a report to justify cracking down on potential voter fraud, even though author Harry Neufeld says the Harper government is misrepresenting his report and ignoring his recommendations.

"We are going to keep quoting Mr. Neufeld's report because it contains the facts that obviously support our position that people should have ID when they show up to vote," the minister for democratic reform told the House of Commons on Friday.

He accused opposition MPs of ignoring the "hard facts" contained in last year's report by Neufeld, a former chief electoral officer for British Columbia who was commissioned by Elections Canada to review the problem of non-compliance with the rules for casting ballots in the 2011 election.

However, Neufeld suggested it's Poilievre who's ignoring the facts.

What I said in response to the SCOC's abominable ruling on the Wrezenski-Opitz case:

Some progressives have been hailing the recent Supreme Court ruling allowing Ted "Homo-Hater" Opitz his theft of the Etobicoke-Centre election. Supposedly, the Supreme Court of Canada has decided that our rules, procedures and safeguards for conducting free and fair elections shouldn't interfere with Canadians' right to vote. At least, say progressives, that will be the end of right-wing caterwauling about Muslim women wearing veils being denied the vote, or Conservative Party goons disrupting polling stations talking about "illegal" polls. Right?

1. Such thinking underestimates harpercon shamelessness. They can, and they will, take advantage of this ruling while simultaneously pressing hot-button issues or hypocritically citing "procedural errors" to disrupt polls. (Something Ted Opitz's crew of goons did themselves in Etobicoke-Centre.) As long as disruption during elections prevents people from voting (in polls where their opponents tend to do well) these harpercon scum will disrupt. 

To whit; Now that they've got to keep Ted Opitz's stolen seat in Etobicoke-Centre through this bullshit precedent that makes it impossible to prove fraud after the fact, the harpercons will place tough barriers to honest voters due to non-existent "voter fraud."

This whole disgusting mess has been, as with all things with Canadian "conservatives," been imported from the USA, where shameless Repugnican scum shriek endlessly about "voter fraud" when the bulk of the (small) amount of such fraud is perpetrated by themselves.  This all about the very scuzzy attempt to discourage, or, worse, actually prevent people who tend not to vote for you from voting.  As I've said before, free and fair elections are as close as you can get to sacred in this world. For a party to dedicate itself to the evisceration of this process is atrocious. Such people are,  by definition, enemies of democracy. They should be labeled as such and treated as such.

What Pierre Karl Peladeau means to me

All I knew about Pierre K Peladeau was that he owned the SUN newspapers and the amateurish, 10th-rate FOX News North (just as stupid but with 1/10th the budget), SUN News network. And, I'm sorry, but while I'm sure that while everyone from stephen harper, to ezra levant, to Kory Tenyukyuk has some sort of "talent" or low cunning, or whatever the fuck it is they have, ... the bottom line is that these are all a bunch of shit-heads. So if PKP is the big guy in charge of ezra levant's wingnut welfare cheques, then he's got to be a shit-head too.

But apparently he's more than that. He's also a bigger asshole than he needs to be. He's one of the worstest, anti-union-ist employers in all of Quebec. And his joining the social-democrat Parti Quebecois would be like Conrad Black joining the NDP, except that PKP hasn't been convicted of anything yet.

So this rich, right-wing fuckface is being heralded as a "star" candidate 'eh? Well, good luck with that! Michael Ignatieff was a star candidate too and look how that turned out! The PQ taking on PKP as a candidate is a sign that the party's steering wheel has snapped off and they've no idea where they're going. It's also a sign that the "hyper-patriotism" of the SUN News mouth-breathers is bullshit. Just like Montreal Simon says, harper himself signed the "firewall" manifesto, revealing himself as just a mindless shill for the oil industry. PKP's SUN News just spews pro-corporate, pro-imperialist crapola to the right-wing rubes who imagine they're patriotic whilst going about loathing everything that Canada ostensibly stands for. They're all as clueless as their other hero, Rob Ford, who went on Jimmy Kimmel because he believes he's genuinely popular when he's actually a laughing stock.

PKP's nauseating presence in the Parti Quebecois will alienate Quebec voters and cause a moral crisis in the party itself. It's an open question as to whether Pierre Karl Peladeau will mitigate the damage to Canadian unity caused by the "firewall"signatory stephen harper, ... the worst threat to Canadian unity since forever.

Adieu to the "Mound of Sound"

He of "The Disaffected Lib." He's packing it in, at least for a while. And I can't say as I blame him. I only hope and pray that the results of his meat-space activism add up to more than what traditional "activism" (re: petitions, one-off demonstrations and information seminars for the converted) tend to amount to.

But hey, MoS; don't do what Sixth Estate did, and close-up shop altogether. Leave that record of dissent and analysis up for posterity to enjoy.

Two-Tier Justice

"3 Mohawk protesters could be charged after Ontario rail blockade." Ignoring the racist shit-heads saying "If hundreds of women from my personal demographic group went missing or were found murdered and the police couldn't be bothered to investigate, I wouldn't block rail-lines or protest at all. I think the First Nations of Canada should just shut-up forever and take whatever abuses we fire at them because I'm a stupid, ignorant, useless, ugly piece of garbage" ... I'd just like to say that I'll be happy when there's one-tier justice in this country.

When murdering corporate scum like Edward Burkhardt, who demand, and get "de-regulation" of their industries, which any functioning sentient person would know will inevitably endanger the public get tossed in the goddamned slammer for their poisoning and burning of their fellow humans.

Or, murdering, anti-democratic political scum like Peter Mackay, or Pierre Poilievre or Vic Toews or stephen harper, get thrown behind bars for election fraud, torture, and other assorted crimes against democracy and humanity, ... and stay there for the rest of their unnatural lives.

Then we can talk about First Nations protesters you racist shits.

What are YOU doing to stop the Un-Fair Elections Act?

What have you THOUGHT about doing? What have you heard about what ANYBODY is doing?

Isn't it terrifyingly ridiculous how completely devoid of ideas and initiative we all are?

A government that everyone but the politically-insane recognizes was in contempt of Parliament, engages in widespread election fraud, stymies the investigations of said fraud, uses its criminally-obtained majority to ram through the most appalling omnibus legislation in this country's history, and then gets a thoroughly partisan weasel like Pierre Poliviere to craft a massive bill to neuter our already tame elections watch-dog and enable it to steal more elections with impunity in the future, ... and we, and the Canadian left-progressive brain-trusts do NOTHING.

NOTHING.

(And in my Canada, "nothing" includes fucking goddamned petitions. Blow me "Lead Now." Just fucking blow me.)

What Else Is There?

It is the power of capital that corrupts and debases our democracy. There are only a few alternatives to choose from when it comes to strategies to destroy this power:

The Liberal Party of Canada strategy of working hand-glove with capitalism in order to attempt to impose your idea of "reasonable" behaviour upon it. Well, we all know how that's worked out.

The NDP approach. Campaign from the centre-left for decades. Cave to "reality" when in power and become Liberals. (Rae, Romanow, Dexter, the Manitoba NDP) Whatever.

Vote Green and believe in eco-capitalism as well as in your ability to force involuntary green policies on corporations without addressing the reality of power. I'm not waiting to see how it works in practice.

Vote Marxist. I wonder who believes this in Canada in this day and age.

Throw rocks through windows with a dozen or so of your friends and then scamper off to allow peaceful protesters to face the state's wrath. (Why didn't I think of this??)

Petition psychopathic murderers who think you're an idiot. Peacefully assemble to show them how many (or how few) of you there are to the psychopathic murderers. Brilliant.

The Left & a Reality to Terrible to Think About

What else could those 20-30 anti-harper activists chanting in the freezing cold outside the Toronto Convention Centre a few weeks ago, have been thinking? "Our power is in the streets!" they shouted out as they agreed to reject working with the slimy politicians and vowed to defeat harper on their own. I might have thought that the three cops standing nearby were amused by this except that I'm pretty sure they weren't even listening.

It must be the case that such activist types are aware of their own lack of consequence and the inevitability of the horrible policies coming their way. They must see their own faces when they think of Orwell/O'Brien's vision of the future in "1984" of "a boot stomping on a human face forever."

It's too terrible to contemplate. So they push it out of their minds and instead say completely deluded things like "Our power is in the streets!"