> Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper, but in Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed. I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot fired hailed as the heroes of imaginary victories, and I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that had never happened. I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various ‘party lines’.
What we saw or were taught are not referenced because they’re in books or not linkable. So the only truths are what is on the internet.
Basically, people want to believe facts that align with their ideology and reject facts that do not. This keeps people focused and less distracted by doubts.
In 1984 this gets exploited in a regular manner.
I think this frankly is hard to understand until you're somewhere past 30.
It's hard to understand, when you're young, that basically everyone in the press is lying to you in little ways, even though they're 'mostly telling the truth' - that there is a huge game behind it.
I'm reminded of when E. Germany had to be re-integrated into the West, the problem was that the vocabulary relating to politics and democracy had been erased in the East. Several generations of people grew up without even thinking about various aspects of politics. There literally was no language for the W. Germans to use to re-introduce E. Germans to political dialogue.
You can erase democracy by suppressing language, and therefore by suppressing thought. It doesn't exist if nobody is thinking about it.
The idea is to enforce the rules through the daily rituals, language, constructs that people use - there's no need for facts or ideology then.
The beginning of this I think happens more or less out in the open with certain subjects now in 2020, when we see language and culture shifting - but it shifts slow enough that it's not noticed.
Go ahead and look at episodes of '30 Rock' - a brilliant, first rate, amazing production from literally just 10 years ago --> it's couldn't be made today, or rather, it would have to be 'heavily censored' today because so many of those jokes are just a little to un PC (jokes about women's pay, harassment in the workplace). But today, it wouldn't be 'network censorship' - it would be a kind of 'thought and behaviour censorship' right from the writers room and producers edict. When I look at '30 Rock' from a 2020 communications perspective I'm actually very, very concerned - the level of suppression that has slowly been sinking in is alarming.
1984 is very difficult to map directly on to US politics because liberal/neoliberal capture of the universities and mainstream journalism are kindof total the way that American conservatives allege, but also George Blair hoped that figures like Trotsky of the Red Army and Perez of the POUM would win out in the end
Orwell would not have been friends with the pepper Christian homeschooler, the glad-handing inside dealing Mar a Lago member, the little local lord like the area car dealership owner, the conspiracy theorist YouTuber, the Rad Trad anti Vatican II syncretist, those supremely Trumpist figures.
You kindof have to visit with George the man, his actions, and his times to understand his story. But that tends to muck up any chance to put him to use purely for your side.
(He was a socialist though, til the day he died, so he'd be voting Biden were he here in Wisconsin right now : P)
Not sure if that was sarcasm referring to labeling of Biden as socialist by Trump and co?
Because I doubt any real socialist would consider Biden a socialist.
On the other hand, despite the fact that my tongue was firmly planted in my cheek when I wrote it, such Debbie Wasserman Schultz haters as Nathan J Robinson and Noam Chomsky have adopted the 'Vote for Biden and keep protesting' angle so who's to say how the real socialists are voting this year?
And I think you can infer Orwell's position enough from this essay itself - he is concerned about "the liberal tradition" being the last bulwark against worldwide fascism just one sentence before criticising England's liberal tradition for not being willing to actively stand up to evil because that tradition believes good will win out because good is good. Liberalism is hardly sufficient, but it's necessary.
(Another way of putting this: Orwell is not an accelerationist. You can see from this essay that he's quite concerned with the material conditions of the working class in a realistic way, and the idea that they should get worse so that the people will revolt is neither convincing nor appealing to him.)
I doubt Biden would last as President until Inauguration Day.
Thankfully, all signs are pointing to a DJT victory tomorrow! ;-)
The tell-tale sign of political "thinking" is that you come across a lot of people who think all the evidence points one way. I always think twice when someone presents every decision as an obvious, here-are-10-reasons-and-no-rebuttals case. Such cases are actually a lot more fragile than here-are-some-pros-and-some-cons cases, where the author falls to one side or the other based on some valuation.
With Trump and the virus, this has gotten out of hand. It won't take you long to find badly supported opinions either way on those topics.
It was only after moving to USA I realized some things which I took for granted were basically propaganda and there are "other sides" which I need to consider. I could not have come to that conclusion without youtube and the diversity of thoughts in American society.
I really wonder how Orwell could see through things like this without the Youtube and Internet. Really a fine mind.
> I really wonder how Orwell could see through things
While he certainly had a fine mind and intellectual curiosity, it also seems he required exposure to different cultures, places, and events such as the Spanish civil war. Your own experiences provide similar anecdote, and my own travels certainly reinforce they idea.
I hate Orwell so much. He points out obvious behaviors in the most pretentious way possible.
Orwell seems to me perhaps the least pretentious of writers. I'm not sure what in that quote could be put any simpler or more clearly.