Chuds might as well quote Tekashi 6ix9ine whenever someone they like is banned from creating bad content on the internet

    • BrokenPolecat [any]
      ·
      4 years ago

      Best response to right wingers citing Animal Farm is to ask them who the farmers are supposed to represent

      • darkcalling [comrade/them, she/her]
        ·
        edit-2
        4 years ago

        But it's defeatist. The message is, yes the capitalists were bad, BUT trying to do anything about it with a central system like ML's propose (the people who have brought you the overwhelming majority of successful revolutions and all powerful states ruled by a communist party so far) just results in the same kind of exploitation by those people becoming the very thing they replaced. It fits perfectly in the liberal idea of "yeah capitalism isn't perfect, but it is eternal and any attempts to replace it will just result in the same kind of exploitation but by different people". Orwell was not a fucking anarchist so don't give me shit about that. Real Anarchists (tm) don't have colonial worldviews and snitch on people.

        • BrokenPolecat [any]
          ·
          4 years ago

          I mean I'm not saying Orwell was cool and good, I'm just saying that it's an effective refutation of "but wut about animal farm!!!"

  • Pezevenk [he/him]
    ·
    edit-2
    4 years ago

    I used to think 1984 was kinda bad politically but a good book in general, then I read Isaac Asimov's critique and now I think it's just trash lol. Never before has a critique made me go "wow, I thought it was good while I was reading it but... Holy shit it really IS bad, I didn't think of all this stuff" to such an extent.

    • BadWithNames [he/him]
      ·
      4 years ago

      Critique Linked Here (I believe this is it, anyway): http://www.newworker.org/ncptrory/1984.htm

    • RedArmor [he/him]
      ·
      4 years ago

      Yessss. Same here. Loved it growing up but reading Asimov just shit on it made me laugh out loud

  • darkcalling [comrade/them, she/her]
    ·
    edit-2
    4 years ago

    What's so bad about George Orwell?

    He attempted to commit a rape.

    Originally posted by reddit user parentis_shotgun.

    • Coca_Cola_but_Commie [he/him]
      ·
      4 years ago

      There’s a reason they teach George Orwell in schools and not Franz Fanon, Che, Huey P Newton, Malcolm X, Lenin, CLR James

      In fairness I don't believe any of these other people ever wrote books that could be read and comprehended by middle schoolers.

      I admit I haven't actually read any of the works of any of these people. Yet. I will, I promise

      • darkcalling [comrade/them, she/her]
        ·
        4 years ago

        The point stands. There are child accessible novels that look positively on communism, anarchist systems, etc. I can't think of any off the top of my head. Steinbeck is the closest I can come but his works weren't really explicitly pro-communist so much as sympathetic to the plight of working people and critical of the system's flaws.

        And there is a reason why certain books are so widely read. Yes an individual teacher or school with "progressive" administrations can set curriculum that involves books that challenge the American consensus but widely and broadly these books (Orwell) are popular, are recommended, are demanded or strongly encouraged by school board policy, are bulk bought, are included in study guides and teacher materials. Same thing with the Ayn Rand trash, purchasing of which is often funded by large donations by libertarian "think" tanks and private businesses. Books are a racket. School books especially so and many schools still use overly worn, quite old books because they simply cannot afford to replace them. A teacher who wants to assign reading typically must have enough copies of that book for everyone in the class plus themselves. That's often 25-30 or more books.

    • hogposting [he/him,comrade/them]
      ·
      4 years ago

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_%26_Us

      Eric & Us is a 1974 memoir by Jacintha Buddicom recalling her childhood friendship with Eric Blair, the real name of author George Orwell. Buddicom first met Blair when he was eleven and he became very close to her family. Their friendship lasted until Blair became a policeman in Burma and the two lost touch. Blair and Buddicom never saw one another again and did not resume contact until 1949, shortly before Orwell's death from tuberculosis...

      Buddicom's cousin, Dione Venables, added a postscript to the memoir in 2006, suggesting that the real reason for the ending of Blair and Buddicom's friendship was the possibility that Blair, in an attempt to further their relationship, may have tried to rape Buddicom. Dione Venables responded by revealing that Buddicom never interpreted Blair's adolescent fumbling as rape, but that the incident was merely a moment when his immature desires got the better of him.

      This is all the information I know. If this is the extent of the story, it can be read in multiple ways, one of which is "he tried to rape a childhood friend, that ended their relationship, and when the story came out decades later someone threw in the type of excuse polite society often uses to excuse rapists." It could be read more generously in Orwell's favor, too, but it really doesn't matter one way or the other.

      I think the far more compelling rebuttal to people who default to "this is 1984" is "maybe you shouldn't base your political opinions on young adult literature."

        • hogposting [he/him,comrade/them]
          ·
          4 years ago

          That's much more damning, and it leaves less room for doubt, but hey, that's why I started with "this is all the information I know and more information might change what I think."

  • RedArmor [he/him]
    ·
    4 years ago

    Stupid libs on the r*edit SRA pages kept trying to white wash him and be like “I’m actually sweetie he only wrote down the name of socialists for something else and no one was hurt”