Hacker News Reader

Comment by sorokod | Hacker News Reader

Well, Orwell was one of those "leftist" and did write "Animal Farm".

BTW the photos in your second link are fantastic!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Orwell#Spanish_Civil_Wa...

Isaac Asimov wrote a great critique on 1984 which includes a few thoughts on Animal Farm: http://www.newworker.org/ncptrory/1984.htm

It seems evident, to me at least, that Asimov views "arms-length extremism" as a core part of the identity of upper case Leftism, at least in the West (and predominantly America). The way Asimov approaches 1984 appears to be the bog-standard "Well, if you're not a Nazi then you can't possibly be as evil as the Nazis". It betrays a view of looking at politics from a standpoint of a slope, rather than a hill that descends into immorality on both sides, and I'm sure Asimov derives that view (as does much of the modern world) from the reasons behind and outcomes of WWII. IMO, we still haven't gotten past this - even entertaining such a discussion can't be had without acknowledging the 'progressive Sword of Damocles' hanging overhead, and almost always descends into whatabout-whataboutism.

I really do hope that we eventually grow out of this phase and acknowledge that even the 'good guys' can be evil, we shouldn't need to wait and see a Communist Reich to know that the Leftist version of brownshirts are a bad thing, or wait until actual genocide is happening (or accept/ignore it as a possibility, even) or wait until it has a 1-to-1 mapping with Nazi atrocity to hold those kinds of behavior accountable just because they're not Nazis and they're not actually killing people.

> I really do hope that we eventually grow out of this phase and acknowledge that even the 'good guys' can be evil, we shouldn't need to wait and see a Communist Reich to know that the Leftist version of brownshirts are a bad thing, or wait until actual genocide is happening (or accept/ignore it as a possibility, even) or wait until it has a 1-to-1 mapping with Nazi atrocity to hold those kinds of behavior accountable just because they're not Nazis and they're not actually killing people.

Having looked at 2020, the threat of the United States going in this direction is not coming from some unholy trinity of the ghosts of Stalin, Pol Pot, and Trotsky. As a political idea in the public zeitgheist, it's dead as a parrot. It has no legs.

It's coming from the mainstream right. But since our friendly neighbourhood MAGA rallies aren't actually sieging and heiling, we're all in the 'wait and see how bad it can get the next time they take power' stage.

I agree, I vividly remember how bad some conversations used to get, to the point of ignoring or justifying certain atrocities, and I have seen that the acts of groups such as the-one-that-shall-not-be-named confined largely to certain counties in certain states. I don't know how much of the fervor dying down is attributable to 2020 having come and gone, but I'm at least a little glad that most discussions have remained firmly centrist and any leftover fires are the dying gasps of populist mainstream media wars.

I don't really like this critique, mostly because, in my opinion, it fails to understand that 1984 is a fictional book. There are some parallelisms with Stalinism and other tyrannical societies, yes, however they are only there as part of history in that world. I would say it failed to recognize that 1984 is more of an essay about human nature, more specifically into the desire for power above everything else. I really don't think Orwell had planned to make a "reflecting" story, something like "Woah! This was about Stalinist Russia all along!".

The critique failed to understand that, I think.

> There is no ability to make minor changes, even.

Good grief, how to totally miss the entire point. He’s trying to critique a political deconstruction as though it was entertainment fiction. Didn’t he realise the close parallels are kind of the point, because Orwell was writing a commentary on and illustration of those events and personalities? Introducing random variations would have completely obscured the things he was trying to say. Things Asimov didn’t even notice.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com