1984: The masterpiece that killed George Orwell
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
> His book describes the struggle of a little group of sane people against a nightmare that nearly conquers the world. A company of mad scientists – or, perhaps, they are not mad, but have merely destroyed in themselves all human feeling, all notion of good and evil – are plotting to conquer Britain, then the whole planet, and then other planets, until they have brought the universe under their control.
>...
> There is nothing outrageously improbable in such a conspiracy. Indeed, at a moment when a single atomic bomb – of a type already pronounced “obsolete” – has just blown probably three hundred thousand people to fragments, it sounds all too topical.
Secondly, it's not targeted towards children. Even assuming a child would be paying attention after the first ten minutes' read: there's a sadistic lesbian police chief (a character of the sort whom Lewis is theorized to personally fancy), several open (if brief) discussions about sexuality and eroticism... to say nothing of the violent murders, suicides and tiger maulings.
It's not exactly what you'd consider child-safe, let alone targeted.
But I guess if you already know all there is to know about Lewis from the five-minute treatment in your local left-leaning literature class, or if you gleaned most of it secondhand from reading Neil Gaiman's The Problem of Susan, then you have no need to see anything that might interfere with your expectations. Go ahead and congratulate yourself on truly understanding the man.
Also be sure to avoid: his WWI poetry. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2003/2003-h/2003-h.htm
I think this is a reference to The Chronicles of Narnia
Most people seem to think C.S. Lewis wrote nothing except Narnia. This isn't the case; Lewis was a convert to Christianity and wrote forcefully and critically about it, even while he subscribed to it. A good example of this is Mere Christianity.
Narnia itself was a critique: yes, Aslan is Jesus, but Lewis' point wasn't "Jesus loves you!" It was "Jesus is a force of nature and he is REALLY FUCKING SCARY."
He's not the kind of man I like defending, but Lewis wasn't doing "propaganda" any more than Dante was doing "propaganda" when he wrote Inferno. He was trying to speak truth to power and using fiction to do it.
Some people say that Nineteen Eighty-Four wasn't written to be a warning, and maybe it wasn't - but I have a hard time seeing how anybody could read it and not discover something of a warning inside. And I think that's even more true given the various revelations over the past few years, vis-a-vis surveillance and diminishing civil liberties.
I encourage anybody who hasn't read Nineteen Eighty-Four to go read it immediately. If you aren't either angry has hell, or sad as hell, or both, at the end, you're a rare breed.
His land taxation regime is to say the least controversial, but it's still compelling and it's something. It's also considered responsible for much of the rapid progress out of medievalism in the Far East late in the 19th/early in the 20th Century. Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan all had periods of very rapid industrialization under land taxes.
No less than William F. Buckley referenced Henry George more than once.
Freedom and opportunity?
Opportunity might be true in some areas (particularly IT), but not in other areas. Just because you think you are king, you are not!
Freedom, no, not at all. Democracy has brought much freedom to the people and after the 2nd WW freedom lived up to it's maximum, it seems to me. But in the last decades it declined rapidly.
Do you mean, freedom in Iraq? Or in Afghanistan or other Arabian countries? Think twice! There might be some countries, yes, but they are far away from being real free.
Freedom in western countries? Europe?? The US???
Think again! Just think!
For instance, consider the Chinese version of NSA, it is an ideal tool for a free economy (i.e. a working economy) with control of the population. The country has already got a capitalist economy married to a dictatorship. We expect China to open up and democratize, now that it is getting better and the average education is increasing. But what if the communist party instead starts to integrate with the military, increases automatic surveillance and goes the other way? "The future as a foot that stamps in a face" (iirc from 1984) might seem lika a nice scenario for quite a few guys in boots.
Will it happen? Afaik, the risk is small. But it certainly exists.
Not really.
What do you have in mind? I was thinking about it, but could not get anything fixed to 1984 that could make it a relevant date.
It was about "The year is 1984, and history has led us to this point."
It's also worth asking ourselves each time we re-read 1984, are we farther away or closer to the life depicted in the book, than last time we read it?
No?
Then think again. Doubleplus think.
Or (to name a more current example) just say at the NY airport that the security measures are bullshit! ... just as doublethought-enhancer.
Only because you don't have 24/7 surveillance on you. Yet.
"A federal appeals panel has upheld the 20 year sentence of a lolicon found to have received illustrations of underage sex by email, saying that “it is not a required that the minor depicted actually exists”, and so ruling art not to be universally protected free speech."
I think that using a particularly narrow example of restricted permissible expression isn't proof that society is getting closer to the totalitarian nightmare of 1984.
Or, frankly, when a punishment for a crime is increased by its intent (e.g. race related or anti-homosexual) -- it's not only the crime that is punished but the thought behind it as well.
As far as hate-crime goes, the notion behind increased punishment there is that the victims include an entire terrorized community, not just the direct victim. If I throw some trash on some guy's lawn, there's one victim (the guy). If I burn a cross on some guy's lawn, there are multiple victims (the other black families in the neighborhood). It's an important distinction.
For hate crime: yes, you've explained the justification for the designation. But it is thoughtcrime. You've merely said that it's legitimate.
Do you not realize it?
I postulate that artful, metaphorical, or misleading uses of language is both neither misuse nor bending it, and I would like a clearer explanation of what a corrupted language looks like, aside from "being corrupt".
That is corrupting the language.
And I even see it in Germany. Because the basic rights (like free speech) are defined in our constitution and "security" is not among them, our former secretary of the interior said this would be a "super basic right" -- thus also putting security above all basic rights ... and giving our rights in the hands of the NSA.
By this way, they corrupt our language and our thinking. Defining everything that way, how they pleasure and how they can betray us!
It's a clear distortion of language to hide the truth; it has everything to do with language and the use of it, as it deliberately twists meaning in order to limit the thoughts of people who accept this term to describe certain actions. As Wittgenstein put it:
The limits of my language mean the limits of my world
> A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as "keeping out of politics." All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia.
Enemy combatants, Collateral damage, Leader of the free world, National security, War for peace, Premptive strikes, Enhanced interrogation
Some Orwellian concepts: War on abstract nouns (e.g on terror), Pervasive surveillance, Pervasive propaganda, Casual use of torture, Widespread hysteria and hatred over minor threats, Former hated enemies now allies and vice versa, Stark divides between the haves and have nots, A distant and poorly understood enemy necessitates perpetual conflict and sacrifice
It's a really interesting book and I disagree that we are any farther on in these respects than we were in orwell's time. His book is of course a fantasy intended to illustrate our failings by exaggerating them, not a strict prediction of the future, but it still has a lot to teach us.
War has become normalised and part of everyday life, with the implication that as we are at war special rules apply and the enemy, as designated by the government, deserves no mercy because we are engaged in an existential struggle.
Doubleplus ungood, actually.
I live in Poland, a post-communist country. Just yesterday I heard an interview on (public) radio with some (state-sponsored) university professor arguing that life was better under the previous system. No one cares.
There is proper thoughtcrime, like racism, or denying holocaust that can get you in trouble, fired, even arrested. But that is still really mild compared to 1984 or 1984.
It is just a small step from there to be arrested, as we saw before.
Even today, if you have the wrong name you can be disallowed from flying in the "land of the free". Because the government put your name on the list.
Some woman fought against this list, but the government even played tricks, that the trial could not go on. Where is there democracy or freedom?
Might be, that there are more exact descriptions of our future around. But one thing I think is dominant and alarming: The "free" world does not converge to a system of even rights and freedom for all, but into a new system of control and inequality, that might in turn even top the system of the middle ages.
Orwell fought against Fascism ( both of the Lft and of the Right) , and mercantilism/empire. Not capitalism. Something can be one of those, but not both. These things are quite precise terms that have very specific meanings.
The point of 1984 is not that some sinister cadre has seized power ( that's more like Alan Moore in "V for Vendetta" ) but rather that people stopped wanting to think at all, and the resulting regime met their preferences better as they simply stopped thinking at all.
George Orwell averred that Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932) must be partly derived from We.
Orwell began Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) some eight months after he read We in a French translation and wrote a review of it. Orwell is reported as "saying that he was taking it as the model for his next novel."