leave it a mystery if you are a left winger or a right winger or even a trot yourself.
Orwell was objectively trash read this where Issac Asimov destroys him
This would just lead to "Trotsky triggers the libs, so he's cool" and rightists would start memeing with Trotskyite shit, and a few of them would unironically start a newspaper
The trot to neocon pipeline except Ecological Freedom Fighters have seized the pumping station and reversed the flow.
Who do everybody in the media be tripping over themselves trying to prove how anti Soviet they are tho? It makes me think there are bees living in my head.
50 years down the line they go full circle and accidentally irony-poison themselves into becoming Norman Podhoritz 2
King shit
I would just complain that they don't bother with proper sex ed nor do they give content warnings before teaching 1984, so they always end up exposing teens to rape and misogyny out of nowhere. I need to spread the "Fahrenheit 451 is the superior dystopic book" agenda
Edit: oh, just a new comment by gay regarding the sex pest behaviour Orwell exhibited by writing 1984. Normal stuff folks, keep moving
F451 is good. I personally love Brave New World and it relates to modern society wayyyyyyy more that 1984. Huxley is the King of Dystopian SciFi and also on his deathbed he asked to wife to give him acid so he could die while tripping balls. Absolute legend.
his deathbed he asked to wife to give him acid so he could die while tripping balls
Friendship ended with Fahrenheit 451, now Brave New World is my best friend
I would say look up the content warnings (Winston, protagonist, bad) and read it. Reading a book you don't like is not gonna kill you, you're just gonna waste some of your time. You can easily find an ebook version for free online and the audiobook has been on YouTube for a few years now
The only good part about 1984 is Goldstein explaining how every war machine made is food out of the mouths of the poor. If people should get anything out of that book, it is becoming rabidly anti-war/military
As much as I hate 1984, I still believe the appendix is the only good part of the book. I guess "language is kind of an effective control tool" is a basic take, but when I read it in high school I was fascinated by how good those few pages were at building the 1984 world.
In my defense, I had never read something like that before ("oh, this is fiction pretending to be non-fiction... is that legal??!1!") because I was 15 (also I was so creeped out by Winston, the story is better without him)
I guess “language is kind of an effective control tool” is a basic take, but when I read it in high school I was fascinated by how good those few pages were at building the 1984 world.
George Carlin has a great bit about how words have changed Shell Shocked
I know what libs take from it. They recognize Goldstein stands for Trotsky so they become a "Trotsky was Lenin's true heir" type of person and then denounce the rest of the USSR's history as a stalinist famine gulag. They do not reflect on American imperialism, they already have their "woke" talking point.
Not wasting my breath defending any man. But Fahrenheit is still a book that is more appropriate to teach teenagers due to the lack of rape and abuse fantasy scenes and misogyny in the text. Also it's just better. Perhaps I'm just biased because I can read an anti-capitalist message on Fahrenheit more easily than 1984 and... no creep main character
the sex pest behaviour Orwell exhibited
Orwell attempted to rape his childhood friend Jacintha Buddicom (cw: rape apologia) when he was 18
Well that just makes everything worse. "Hello teens, you wanna read a rape fantasy written by an aspiring rapist? You're gonna love 1984. The misogyny included in the text has no relevance so we'll just ignore it and focus on Winston's blue balls"
"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."
:anarchists: lmfao
So was Asimov a comrade? I always kinda wondered, given some of the themes in his work
He was definitely politically literate, I'm not sure if he ever publicly claimed himself a commie though
Orwell not only foresaw the communist victory (he saw that victory everywhere, in fact) but also foresaw that Russia and China would not form a monolithic bloc but would be deadly enemies.
There, his own experience as a Leftist sectarian may have helped him. He had no Rightist superstitions concerning Leftists as unified and indistinguishable villains. He knew they would fight each other as fiercely over the most trifling points of doctrine as would the most pious of Christians.:side-eye-1:
The great Orwellian contribution to future technology is that the television set is two-way, and that the people who are forced to hear and see the television screen can themselves be heard and seen at all times and are under constant supervision even while sleeping or in the bathroom. Hence, the meaning of the phrase 'Big Brother is watching you'. This is an extraordinarily inefficient system of keeping everyone under control. To have a person being watched at all times means that some other person must be doing the watching at all times (at least in the Orwellian society) and must be doing so very narrowly, for there is a great development of the art of interpreting gesture and facial expression. One person cannot watch more than one person in full concentration, and can only do so for a comparatively short time before attention begins to wander. I should guess, in short, that there may have to be five watchers for every person watched. And then, of course, the watchers must themselves be watched since no one in the Orwellian world is suspicion-free. Consequently, the system of oppression by two-way television simply will not work.
Wish he was right tbh
It's 17 December 2020 and George Orwell is still a rapist
Venables is the Buddicoms’ first cousin, and was left the copyright to Eric & Us, as well as 57 crates of family letters. From these she made the shocking discovery that, in 1921, Eric had tried to rape Jacintha. Previously the young couple had kissed, but now, during a late summer walk, he had wanted more. At only five feet to his six feet and four inches, Jacintha had shouted, screamed and kicked before running home with a torn skirt and bruised hip. It was “this” rather than any gradual parting of the ways that explains why Jacintha broke off all contact with her childhood friend, never to learn that he had transformed himself into George Orwell.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2007/feb/17/georgeorwell.biography
Wow, Asimov destroys Orwell in that link. I can't believe I havent seen that before
There are some good points by Asimov in that review. He's right that 1984 has a bizarre fixation on 'Stalinism' while ignoring other forms of totalitarianism. It is also feels incredibly dated because of this fixation and because of the setting (WWII dreariness and dilapidation).
However, Asimov is too committed to the idea of sci-fi as prognostication, and that a work of sci-fi succeeds or fails based on the accuracy of its extrapolations. This is a simplistic conception of the genre and no scholar of sci-fi would take it very seriously.
Wikipedia states that Asimov was a liberal, but no liberal would ever criticize 1984. Some of this review misses the mark but a lot of it is pretty awesome, particularly the end, where he channels Red Rosa and says that ultimately we’re either going to have communism or extinction. Isn’t Asimov’s concept of psychohistory just another name for Marxism as well? But his Robot novels are basically about finding better ways to enslave workers. With the Three Laws, it’s almost impossible for robots (the original Czech means “workers”) to break free.
yeah when I read them in school I basically took a "real communism hasn't been tried" lib stance on the whole thing.
Also I should note since you brought him up that it is somewhat of a joke in Russia that the only Russian author Americans know about is Solzhenitsyn. He is basically a racist crank over there but since he serves our propaganda purposes the west loves him.
