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Why bloggers love Orwell — 14 Comments

  1. What I find most interesting (and ironic) about 1984 is how the Left has hijacked an anti-communist novel and uses it to bash the Right over the head.
    The core central ideas of the novel (new-speak, thought-crime, mutability of reality) are all ignored so that the Left can use 1984 to complain about surveillance.
    If you never read the novel and just listened to how people commonly talk about it, you would think that 1984 was an anti-Right, anti-fascist novel about the dangers of ubiquitous surveillance.

  2. Ah, but here’s the rub: though his experiences in Spain did set him dead against Stlinist Communism as it was practiced in Russia, it convinced him more than ever that socialism was the best way to go. As he says:

    [W]hen 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… 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 ‘Senior’ 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… 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.

    Alas, the Soviet Union had decided that, if there was going to be a Communist revolution in Spain, they wanted to control it. So, they gave military aid to the Spanish Communist party (the P.S.U.C.) in return for suppressing the Anarchists and Socialists. With the Communists fighting their allies and the bourgeoisie collaborating with Franco, the internal strife was sufficient to give the Spanish Fascists and their Nazi backers the upper hand. Democracy didn’t return to Spain until 1975, after Franco’s death.

  3. Thanks for yet another fascinating, informative, thoughtfully written, and very relevant post! You and Tammy Bruce have together inspired me to read the Orwell I somehow never got around to in my school years. (Well, I’m underlining Animal Farm and 1984 in my ever-growing “To Read” list at least. It’s a start!)

    One thing I find remarkable about Orwell is that I’ve noticed him being quoted by people of widely varying political persuasions in recent years — from those of us in the classical-liberal / libertarian / [neo-] conservative camp, who invoke Orwell in criticism of “political correctness” and its associated language-control-as-a-means-of-thought-control obsession, or see the MSM and folks on the left as presenting a deliberately skewed picture of progress in Iraq and the meaning of the War on Terror, to still others on the progressive-left and farther-left, who’ve accused not only the current administration but also (to my continuing astonishment) the very same MSM of promoting the war(s) using Orwellian “newspeak”. There’s something inherently interesting about the rare author whose ideas have such broad appeal (and, clearly, widely varying reader interpretation). I look forward to reading his work and learning more about him.

  4. “Winston Smith’s travails seemed so terrifying and, in the end, so utterly devoid of hope, that it took me a while to come back again to my own world.”
    When an author is able to hijack a reader’s grasp on reality, even for a short spell, it is truly a remarkable achievement. In all my readings there have been a precious few that had this ability.
    Orwell’s writings were a womder.

  5. George Orwell was a well meaning economic illiterate. Socialism was presumably about sharing the wealth and everybody being nice to each other. He died at a relatively young age. It’s too bad that Orwell never got a chance to closely study the works of Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig Von Mises.

  6. Your posting reminded me that in my collection of “intend to read” books is Christphor Hitchens’ fairly recent “Why Orwell Matters”.
    Intend to get to it right away.

  7. Just a plain great writer, too. Try to read his description of the coal mine in “The Road to Wigan Pier” without feeling at least a bit claustrophobic.

  8. Wonderful Orwell homage. He was unique in being able to use his personal experiences, but to gain sufficient distance from them, so as to write unparalleled prescient and objective fact and fiction about the dangers of any form of totalitarianism.

  9. Orwell is a great source of quotes to illustrate, in the most succinct way possible, the evils of totalitarianism.
    This is a great post. I will use some of your words in my post on PC & Defects in Reality Testing.

  10. One of my great failings is that, in regard to my reading material, I am, most often, a skimmer. However, your posts inspire me to read every word and, often, I even reread so as to better absorb your point. You never disappoint. Probably not a day goes by that one can’t easily find examples of the manipulation of facts or the outright dissimination of misinformation in all areas of mainstream media. The new Naral backed commercial against Judge Roberts comes quickly to mind as an example from today. Regardless of how you feel about his suitability to be a Supreme Court justice, couldn’t the opposition just fight fair.Give it your best shot with honest facts and let truth will out. I feel so fortunate to live in the age of bloggers and, especially in these early years since I believe in the ones I read, there is a genuine commitment to truth telling. Yes, I understand the influence a bias might have but, as you pointed out, at least the bias is acknowledged and I can judge for myself how much it might effect the blogger’s content.

  11. Ouch!

    The black text on an orange background in the linked post is both unreadable and painful.

    Copied the text out into Word and I can read it.

    Will think about commenting after my eyes recover.

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