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Comment by metabagel | Hacker News Reader

This is a rather scattershot article. The author doesn’t spend any time actually fleshing out an argument, just moves from one observation to the next.

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Also, I think to people outside the UK, it may be less obvious that this is a style of writing that happens constantly here:

A wealthy, probably privately educated journalist, lecturing the reader on how having formal education (that they possess) is unnecessary or bad. Or is being dispensed to the 'wrong' people. And instead, that there is some other invisible indicator that makes people worthy of being listened to - implied in this article to be 'judgement' but the actual idea being peddled (here and in every article of this type) is social class.

This is not wholly a UK phenomenon. People describing themselves as populists in the US media tend to come from a handful of schools, all quite distinguished.

It’s more than just populism though - our political and media classes are deeply intermeshed and overlapping. The previous prime minister was a newspaper columnist and returned to being one. His sister is also a journalist in a prominent paper. A previous chancellor was a newspaper editor.

There is a very big class/power thing in journalism in the UK, so when an article like this turns up gesturing at Orwell (educated at Eton) with a vaguely anti-intellectual slant, I don’t think it means what it appears to at face-value

I had never given a moment's thought about Orwell's education, or lack thereof, which is probably the case for most people. I'm unconvinced this is a significant reason for Orwell's enduring popularity. It seems to me that people who do actually look at/care about what education some author like Orwell had says more about those people than Orwell.

I agree. The entire article can be summarised as

"There are lots of rich, powerful idiots. Orwell's works still have appeal."

I also take issue with the statement that 1984 was not "prophetic". That's an unimaginative misreading of the book, or even the whole genre. Dystopian novels are rarely intended as an accurate prediction.

I wouldn't consider it prophetic, although it was a reasonable prediction of what could occur after a global war is fought where the main actors are totalitarian regimes and imperialists. It could have been applied within the context of WWII or the Cold War.

Back in 1949 when the book was published, it wasn't a far-fetched notion to assume that the world would essentially be divided between conflicting forces by the 1980s. However, in reality, the last African country under colonial rule gained its independence by 1980, and the Berlin Wall fell in 1989.

So, looking back, it wasn't prophetic but still stands as a hell of a cautionary tale. There is always the looming danger of going back to this clusterfudge of a state of affairs again (c.f. Fourth Political Theory or Duginism and how readily the so-called "Atlantist" opponents in the far-right embraced this terrible ideology).

What the author of this article seems to miss - and I'm not sure how - is that the whole purpose of this genre of fiction - speculative alternative future - is to prevent the future in the novel, not to be able to look back 70+ years after the novel is published and say, "Called it."

It wasn't prophetic, in that a lot of the book was already (at the time Orwell was writing it) a reality in Soviet Union .

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