I have written about this sort of thing before, most notably in the context of the ludicrous ‘Keith Murdoch Oration’ given by the chief executive of News Corp, Robert Thomson1 some time ago, in which the lies were queued up like beads on a necklace2.
I got into an online argument with a person who basically said that because he did not know what the Voice to Parliament entailed, he was going to vote ‘no’ in the referendum. I effectively told him that he was either gullible, illiterate, or a racist. I was wrong. I should have included ‘thick’ among those epithets because he was apparently incapable of finding out what the Voice to Parliament actually comprised. I sent him numerous sources where you could find out what was in it.
Political parties need to run election campaigns and they need to pay for all the advertising they throw at us. All those flyers you get in your letterbox, the ads on television, radio and online, and those in newspapers, cost huge amounts of money to print, format and produce. So, to raise the money for this, political parties always tout for donations from the wealthy, or from businesses or other organisations.
The epithet ‘useful idiot’ has often been attributed to Lenin, leader of the Bolshevik revolution of 19171, but there is no indication that any of Lenin’s works contain the epithet. Indeed, the Russian equivalent is translated as ‘useful fool’. The latter was in common use during the early part of the Second World War and usually refers to a naïve person that can be cynically manipulated towards an end of which they are either unaware or only partly aware2.