Sometimes, reading a nonfiction sci-fi is more entertaining than reading a fiction sci-fi (I know. I know sci-fi means science fiction). This book is one good example.  There are many reviews and revisits about his dystopian-themed novel, Brave New World (1932), that you can find on the internet, but this "review" is different. It is a revisit by the same author - published about 2 decades after the novel. At a time when the global population was about 2 billion (only) in 1930s, Huxley had already worried and warned about the dangers of overpopulation - as evidenced in the first chapter of the book.  Long before the word "propaganda" became fashionable and being associated with the Nazis and their infamous Propaganda Minister, Joseph Goebbels, Huxley had warned us all about the use and abuse of propaganda in both democracies and dictatorships. He also wrote that "for what is now merely science fiction will have become everyday political fact" .  I ca...

Here's another ancient unpublished article. "There are probably hundreds of books and journals on Nazi propaganda, but at least one that is brief and worth mentioning is the one by David Welch, "Nazi Propaganda and the Volksgemeinschaft: Constructing a People’s Community", published in the Journal of Contemporary History, 2004. The purpose of this paper is to study how did the Nazi attempted to influence public opinion by means of propaganda, to analyse the key themes of propaganda and to observe whether or not there is a gap between the image of society in Nazi propaganda and social reality. All this were done by analysing the responses from two major sections of the community – the industrial workers and German youth. One of the key themes of Nazi propaganda was to influence the public opinion through propaganda. According to David Welch, he wrote that the concept of national or people’s community (Volksgemeinschaft) was a key element in the ‘revolutionary’ a...

Julia Klein's article, " The Myths of the Third Reich " (Third Reich refers to the era of the Nazi Germany) in the online version of The Wall Street Journal left me pondering over the question of freedom of speech and hate speech - 1. Where is the boundary between the two? 2. Where does one draw the limit? Interestingly, the article ends with the following sentence: "In Germany today, advocating Nazi ideology is illegal. But in the U.S. and elsewhere, balancing free speech with the desire to silence partisans of hate crimes and genocide remains a vital and troubling concern. The exhibition ends, appropriately, with this dilemma clarified but not entirely resolved. " - Julia Klein. Western nations, by and large have their own standard for freedom of speech - no freedom of speech for holocaust denial or anti-Zionist activism - to the extent that one could risk being persecuted simply by expressing doubts about the holocaust or risk being labelled as an anti-Semit...