Communsim bad b/c I made up a story where it's bad.
I am intelligent
You know which book I'm mad I had to read in high school? Lord of the Flies. It's barely a novel, it's just a treatise on how the human condition is inherently selfish and violent, and that the only thing that holds us back from mayhem and slaughter is our wonderful systems of laws and the authority figures that enforce them.
And also the number of times the Stanford Prison Experiment has been explained to me as some kind of gospel truth. If this is really how liberals see humanity, some of their behavior starts to make a bit more sense.
one time a bunch of kids got abandoned on an island and they practiced communism, including doing all the work for their friend who broke their leg
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/09/the-real-lord-of-the-flies-what-happened-when-six-boys-were-shipwrecked-for-15-months
Noooooooo if you leave a bunch of kids on an island they'll literally become kid Hitler! Human nature basic economics vuvuzela
I've heard there were a lot of fundamental errors with how the SPE was run and it's dumb to rely on it as a source of anything since it can't be ethically reproduced anyway.
Correct, couldn't really have put it better myself. The only reasonable conclusion you can draw from the SPE is that Philip Zimbardo is a monster.
From my understanding, it has been reproduced in more ethical ways and with better attempts at variable control... and lo and behold, they almost always show that people aren't inherently chuds or victims as the original "experiment" implies. It's not exactly rigorous (or leftist) but here's an interesting Vsauce episode where the original is discussed and then they go on to do a similar experiment.
The SPE is literally the example for what NOT to do in research ethics classes. Zimbardo was chasing fame.
It sucks because Lord of the Flies isn't about how the human condition, it exists to shit on "The Coral Island" and other shitty colonialist boys novels of that era, but rarely is that aspect ever explored in school and instead teachers just focus on how this book about british brats being stuck on an island is actually a representation of all of humanity.
I remember my English teacher told me that if the kids where grills then they wouldn't have killed each other and worshiped a pig.
Damn it's almost like Orwell was a Trot leaning Socialist or something.
didn't he like turn in a list of communists to the goverment.
It is dumb, but right wingers will corrupt anything. They are politicizing a disease right now. Like what an argument.
Yeah, I mean
"but when one came straight from England the aspect of Barcelona was something startling and overwhelming. It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle. Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red flags or with the red and black flag of the Anarchists; every wall was scrawled with the hammer and sickle and with the initials of the revolutionary parties; almost every church had been gutted and its images burnt. Churches here and there were being systematically demolished by gangs of workmen. Every shop and cafe had an inscription saying that it had been collectivized; even the bootblacks had been collectivized and their boxes painted red and black. Waiters and shop-walkers looked you in the face and treated you as an equal. Servile and even ceremonial forms of speech had temporarily disappeared. Nobody said ‘Señor’ or ‘Don’ or even ‘Usted’; everyone called everyone else ‘Comrade’ and ‘Thou’, and said ‘Salud!’ instead of ‘Buenos dias’. Tipping was forbidden by law; almost my first experience was receiving a lecture from a hotel manager for trying to tip a lift-boy. There were no private motor-cars, they had all been commandeered, and all the trams and taxis and much of the other transport were painted red and black. The revolutionary posters were everywhere, flaming from the walls in clean reds and blues that made the few remaining advertisements look like daubs of mud. Down the Ramblas, the wide central artery of the town where crowds of people streamed constantly to and fro, the loudspeakers were bellowing revolutionary songs all day and far into the night. And it was the aspect of the crowds that was the queerest thing of all. In outward appearance it was a town in which the wealthy classes had practically ceased to exist. Except for a small number of women and foreigners there were no ‘well-dressed’ people at all. Practically everyone wore rough working-class clothes, or blue overalls, or some variant of the militia uniform. All this was queer and moving. There was much in it that I did not understand, in some ways I did not even like it, but I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for. Also I believed that things were as they appeared, that this was really a workers’ State and that the entire bourgeoisie had either fled, been killed, or voluntarily come over to the workers’ side; I did not realize that great numbers of well-to-do bourgeois were simply lying low and disguising themselves as proletarians for the time being."
Then realize how Stalin killed that.
Of course he was bitter.
We are in the third great dystopia right now. No I will not dignify Fahrenheit 451 in this regard.
Most novels mentioned in this thread are just bitter miserable old men writing angrily about their personal vendettas in their thinly veiled polemics
Uhh not entirely the point but what mcdonalds have you been eating there?
Yeah you know what, I take it back that should do it
o7 and we'll pray for your bowels
How does someone read Animal Farm and come away with "Liberalism Good"?
The biggest insult Orwell lobs at communism is that when it totally degenerates in his story it becomes indistinguishable from capitalism. At no point in the book are the conditions of the animals worse than when the farmer controls the farm.
What was the lesson of the story anyways? Should the animals have kept the farmer in charge, waited to be slaughtered?
Should have tried voting in the good animals, im sure the farmer would appreciate that
lmao I think 1984 and Animal farm was written because of his personal vendetta against MLs
Stupid commie, good things are impossible. Get back to working for your master
the animals should have seen the pigs becoming more like the farmers and removed them from power.
Revolt against the pigs. Christ, do we have to spell it out for you? Pigs.
Animal farm is a good lesson to watch our for counter-revolutionaries and revisionists.
love some of the folks in the reactions section defending him with the biggest galaxy brained takes
Orwell is cringe and a snitch, but the thing anti-communists don't get about Animal Farm is that it isn't even an anti-communist book. The ending is about how the pigs became literally indistinguishable from humans (meaning capitalism), which is bad because humans (again, capitalism) are fucking garbage. It couldn't be any clearer that the message is "Stalin sucks exactly as much as capitalism sucked".
Anti-communists somehow miss this and think the book validates their view that capitalism is superior. This is probably because they lack reading comprehension skills due to never reading any books besides Animal Farm.
hate to break it you bud but Stalin isnt the be all end all of communism.
I know people love to hate on animal farm, but the way Snowball described it made me finally go: "Huh, this communism thing seems pretty good. Yeah we should automate shit, that would make life so much better!" After reading I finally started believing that there was something better than capitalism.
yeah that was what I got from the book. shame I had an edgy libertarian phase a few years later...
Communism doesn't work because I refuse to accept a single layer of additional complexity. This is your fault.
I am going to link yet again the beautiful and funny review of 1984 by Isaac Asimov : http://www.newworker.org/ncptrory/1984.htm
Some nice excerpts :
A bit of background
Blair was born in 1903 into the status of a British gentleman. His father was in the Indian civil service and Blair himself lived the life of a British Imperial official. He went to Eton, served in Burma, and so on.
However, he lacked the money to be an English gentleman to the full. Then, too, he didn't want to spend his time at dull desk jobs; he wanted to be a writer. Thirdly, he felt guilty about his status in the upper class.
So he did in the late 1920s what so many well-to-do American young people in the 1960s did. In short, he became what we would have called a 'hippie' at a later time. He lived under slum conditions in London and Paris, consorted with and identified with slum dwellers and vagrants, managed to ease his conscience and, at the same time, to gather material for his earliest books.
He also turned left wing and became a socialist, fighting with the loyalists in Spain in the 1930s. There he found himself caught up in the sectarian struggles between the various left-wing factions, and since he believed in a gentlemanly English form of socialism, he was inevitably on the losing side. Opposed to him were passionate Spanish anarchists, syndicalists, and communists, who bitterly resented the fact that the necessities of fighting the Franco fascists got in the way of their fighting each other.
The communists, who were the best organised, won out and Orwell had to leave Spain, for he was convinced that if he did not, he would be killed From then on, to the end of his life, he carried on a private literary war with the communists, determined to win in words the battle he had lost in action.
During World War II, in which he was rejected for military service, he was associated with the left wing of the British Labour party, but didn't much sympathise with their views, for even their reckless version of socialism seemed too well organised for him.
He wasn't much affected, apparently, by the Nazi brand of totalitarianism, for there was no room within him except for his private war with Stalinist communism. Consequently, when Great Britain was fighting for its life against Nazism, and the Soviet Union fought as an ally in the struggle and contributed rather more than its share in lives lost and in resolute courage, Orwell wrote Animal Farm which was a satire of the Russian Revolution and what followed, picturing it in terms of a revolt of barnyard animals against human masters.
He completed Animal Farm in 1944 and had trouble finding a publisher since it wasn't a particularly good time for upsetting the Soviets. As soon as the war came to an end, however, the Soviet Union was fair game and Animal Farm was published. It was greeted with much acclaim and Orwell became sufficiently prosperous to retire and devote himself to his masterpiece, 1984.
A bunch of lines that I like, I love isaac's snark
At the very start, there is a reference or two to Jews, almost as though they were going to prove the objects of persecution, but that vanishes almost at once, as though Orwell didn't want readers to mistake the villains for Nazis. The picture is of Stalinism, and Stalinism only.
By the time the book came out in 1949, the Cold War was at its height. The book therefore proved popular. It was almost a matter of patriotism in the West to buy it and talk about it, and perhaps even to read parts of it, although it is my opinion that more people bought it and talked about it than read it, for it is a dreadfully dull book - didactic, repetitious, and all but motionless.
Many people think of 1984 as a science fiction novel, but almost the only item about 1984 that would lead one to suppose this is the fact that it is purportedly laid in the future. Not so! Orwell had no feel for the future, and the displacement of the story is much more geographical than temporal.
Orwell imagines Great Britain to have gone through a revolution similar to the Russian Revolution and to have gone through all the stages that Soviet development did. He can think of almost no variations on the theme. The Soviets had a series of purges in the 1930s, so the Ingsoc (English Socialism) had a series of purges in the 1950s. The Soviets converted one of their revolutionaries, Leon Trotsky, into a villain, leaving his opponent, Joseph Stalin, as a hero. The Ingsoc, therefore, convert one of their revolutionaries, Emmanuel Goldstein, into a villain, leaving his opponent, with a moustache like Stalin, as a hero. There is no ability to make minor changes, even. Goldstein, like Trotsky, has 'a lean Jewish face, with a great fuzzy aureole of white hair and a small goatee beard'. Orwell apparently does not want to confuse the issue by giving Stalin a different name so he calls him merely 'Big Brother'.
[Talking about the stupidity of the TV-watching surveillance and how nonsensical and inefficient it is...] Orwell himself realised this by limiting its workings to the Party members. The 'proles' (proletariat), for whom Orwell cannot hide his British upper-class contempt, are left largely to themselves as subhuman. (At one point in the book, he says that any prole that shows ability is killed - a leaf taken out of the Spartan treatment of their helots twenty-five hundred years ago.)
Then, too, Orwell had the technophobic fixation that every technological advance is a slide downhill. Thus, when his hero writes, he 'fitted a nib into the penholder and sucked it to get the grease off. He does so 'because of a feeling that the beautiful creamy paper deserved to be written on with a real nib instead of being scratched with an ink-pencil'. Presumably, the 'ink-pencil' is the ball-point pen that was coming into use at the time that 1984 was being written. This means that Orwell describes something as being written' with a real nib but being 'scratched' with a ball-point. This is, however, precisely the reverse of the truth. If you are old enough to remember steel pens, you will remember that they scratched fearsomely, and you know ball-points don't.
This is not science fiction, but a distorted nostalgia for a past that never was. I am surprised that Orwell stopped with the steel pen and that he didn't have Winston writing with a neat goose quill.
To summarise, then: George Orwell in 1984 was, in my opinion, engaging in a private feud with Stalinism, rather that attempting to forecast the future. He did not have the science fictional knack of foreseeing a plausible future and, in actual fact, in almost all cases, the world of 1984 bears no relation to the real world of the 1980s.
Some positivity
The world may go communist, if not by 1984, then by some not very much later date; or it may see civilisation destroyed. If this happens, however, it will happen in a fashion quite different from that depicted in 1984 and if we try to prevent either eventuality by imagining that 1984 is accurate, then we will be defending ourselves against assaults from the wrong direction and we will lose.
Inshallah isaac.
i had animal farm and 1984 from years ago and recently threw it into a box of shit to donate but now im thinking i need to throw it in the trash
