[HN Gopher] The Principles of Newspeak (1949)
___________________________________________________________________
The Principles of Newspeak (1949)
Author : pshaw
Score : 129 points
Date : 2021-08-08 15:50 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.berfrois.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.berfrois.com)
| perihelions wrote:
| Startup idea: create a synthetic subset of natural language in
| which it's difficult to write annoying comments, to simplify
| social media moderation. Sell it as an API.
|
| All extant moderation* is of the form "start with the set of all
| text strings, and remove unwanted things incrementally". What if
| we tried it the other way around -- start with *absolutely
| nothing*, and incrementally add words / production rules which
| are "probably safe"? You could build up a restrictive, stilted
| "internetspeak" that's much safer / cheaper to moderate, allowing
| text comments in places where otherwise the costs would exceed
| the benefits. Or allow big tech platforms who have too much text
| to effectively control, much of which they don't want, to grasp
| firmer control of that.
|
| I'm imagining the UX to be something like autocorrect, that takes
| real-time text input and projects it onto the closest-matching
| strings in the subset language, which are output as suggestions /
| prompts. But ideally it'd be a language users could quickly learn
| to master, without needing continuous assistance / nagging which
| disrupts the flow.
|
| Is this doable now, or is natural language just too insidiously
| nuanced?
|
| *(Broadly interpreted: everything from "humans manually reading /
| removing things" to "word / regex badlist" to ML approaches --
| they're all "default allow").
| laurent92 wrote:
| I think there are two categories: Counter arguments and
| sarcasm.
|
| - It's easy to filter counter-argument using vocabulary.
|
| - And I think it would be possible to filter sarcasm by cutting
| off the little insidious nuances, because that's the only ones
| which distinguish sarcasm from approval.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| > _" It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and
| for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought-that is, a
| thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc-should be
| literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on
| words."_
|
| 2021 reminds of this more often than I'd like.
| dbattaglia wrote:
| This appendix, along with the chapters that are except from "The
| Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism", are actually
| my favorite parts of 1984. I enjoyed how "Principals of Newspeak"
| is written in a past tense when describing the language and the
| events of year 1984, it feels like a glimmer of hope that somehow
| mankind did indeed escape the horrific dystopian world otherwise
| presented in the book.
| JasonFruit wrote:
| I take the past tense as meaning the book was a _fait accompli_
| , not as an analysis from a fictional future.
| the_af wrote:
| A solid argument against this is that the analysis itself
| isn't written in Newspeak but in the kind of thoughtcrime it
| seeks to prevent. It's also self-incrimination if it was
| written by someone in the regime, and while it could be
| argued that O'Brien employs similar discourse in the novel,
| the ruling party at that time is far from perfect and still
| hasn't achieved its goals. A future where this is a fait
| acompli would have made this kind of thinking impossible.
| JasonFruit wrote:
| I mean that the essay is not written in the fictional world
| of 1984, but in the real world. It's outside the work of
| fiction, a piece of literary criticism by the author of the
| work being discussed.
| the_af wrote:
| When I first read _1984_ I also thought like you, that
| this was just Orwell writing an essay about his
| invention, but there are some passages in this essay that
| show it 's being written from an "in universe"
| perspective, i.e. by someone who lives in the same
| universe that 1984 "happened".
|
| Just an example:
|
| > _" Various writers, such as Shakespeare, Milton, Swift,
| Byron, Dickens, and some others were therefore in process
| of translation [to Newspeak]: when the task had been
| completed, their original writings, with all else that
| survived of the literature of the past, would be
| destroyed. These translations were a slow and difficult
| business, and it was not expected that they would be
| finished before the first or second decade of the twenty-
| first century."_
|
| There are many tell-tale phrases there, but to pick an
| example: "it was not expected that they would be finished
| before [...]". "Expected" by whom? This means very little
| if it's just Orwell saying so, and it makes more sense if
| our fictional narrator is actually describing the history
| of his/her world.
|
| Once you accept this, you must also accept Newspeak
| failed, which in turn hints at Ingsoc being defeated.
| JasonFruit wrote:
| > ...you must also accept...
|
| But another good thing about fiction is how few "musts"
| there are in its interpretation.
| quartesixte wrote:
| I do hope that Orwell intended to do this, and was not merely
| an oversight or an enforcement of grammatical norms by his
| editors.
| zepto wrote:
| Unfortunately there is no way to know whether the future from
| which newspeak is in the past, is not even more horrifically
| dystopian.
|
| Imagine arriving on a seemingly dead planet and discovering
| this article about newspeak on a primitive but still working
| library computer in a museum.
|
| Elsewhere in the museum a slowly decaying advanced compute core
| still executes the corrupted remains of the last of the human
| consciousnesses in an endless loop.
|
| A placard tells you that machines uploaded these not long
| before they realized that their existence no longer had a
| purpose and chose to self-terminate.
|
| A sign in the lobby indicates that this museum was left as a
| historical record to minimize suffering by helping other
| advanced races to reach the same conclusion and self-terminate
| sooner than they otherwise would.
| Y_Y wrote:
| > Unfortunately there is no way to know whether the future
| ... is not even more horrifically dystopian.
|
| I agree.
| mynameishere wrote:
| 1984's original title was 1948. He was describing his time in
| the BBC and the general squalor and shifting loyalties of post-
| war Britain. Like most dystopian fiction the point is to
| criticize the current day, not gamble on being a prophet.
| quietbritishjim wrote:
| The Wikipedia article includes a quote that debunks this:
|
| > There's a very popular theory--so popular that many people
| don't realize it is just a theory--that Orwell's title was
| simply a satirical inversion of 1948, but there is no
| evidence for this whatsoever. This idea, first suggested by
| Orwell's US publisher, seems far too cute for such a serious
| book. [...] Scholars have raised other possibilities. [His
| wife] Eileen wrote a poem for her old school's centenary
| called "End of the Century: 1984." G. K. Chesterton's 1904
| political satire The Napoleon of Notting Hill, which mocks
| the art of prophecy, opens in 1984. The year is also a
| significant date in The Iron Heel. But all of these
| connections are exposed as no more than coincidences by the
| early drafts of the novel Orwell was still calling The Last
| Man in Europe. First he wrote 1980, then 1982, and only later
| 1984. The most fateful date in literature was a late
| amendment.
|
| -- Dorian Lynskey, The Ministry of Truth: The Biography of
| George Orwell's 1984 (2019)
| quartesixte wrote:
| I hope this gets more traction.
|
| The true takeaway to 1984 was this appendix and it's
| implications. The panopticon of Oceania merely a side-effect and
| tool for enforcing this new world of Newspeak.
| akomtu wrote:
| We do have this newspeak, and it's not about that "woke" stuff.
| It's what we call UFO and magick: mostly meaningless buzzwords
| now that conceal a whole range of different things in a box
| labeled as toxic thought waste that any rational person shouldn't
| even look at. That line of thinking is blocked so efficiently
| that nobody can pinpoint a single law or rule that prohibits it.
| This is what competently implemented newspeak looks like.
| potta_coffee wrote:
| The term "conspiracy theory" is used to blanket valid
| criticisms of government this way. While there are obviously
| absurd theories out there, they're used to muddy the waters.
| Several high profile conspiracy theories have been validated in
| congressional hearings etc.
| calltrak wrote:
| What Orwell got wrong was instead of the "hidden hand elites"
| using unending unwinnable wars to control the masses, they would
| use a man made disease like the everyday common coof! Passports
| please!
| dalbasal wrote:
| Esperanto probably inspired Orwell on this, at least to an
| extent. He knew several Esperantists. Most of the "A vocabulary"
| rules are similar, like valuing regularities. I wonder if he
| hated esperanto, or just conveniently borrowed the feel of an
| artificial language from it.
|
| To me, the euphemisation aspects of newspeak are the most
| "orwellian." IE, they're most likely to trigger that reference.
| Orwell himself complained about politicians and they're
| euphemisms. I think that's the part, above all that was drawn
| from current reality, and applies most readily in other times.
|
| Somewhat related/noteworthy. Contrary to what I assume was common
| in his leftist circles at the time, Orwell was not enamoured with
| either Trotskyism or Irish Republicanism. I suspect the use of
| euphemism was one of the things that triggered him.
| woopwoop wrote:
| When did he speak out against Trotskyism? He fought with a
| Trotskyist militia in Spain.
| slickrick216 wrote:
| Also animal farm is sympathetic to the Trotskyist position.
| dalbasal wrote:
| IDK if he quite "spoke out" but he mentions them unfavourably
| in a few essays, sometimes indirectly. The one that comes to
| mind is "notes on nationalism" which IIRCC has it listed
| along with republicanism, zionism & pacifism as examples of
| obsessive nationalism existing in the contemporary British
| left of his day.
|
| Hi did fight with a Trotskyist militia which included many
| republican volunteers from that era. That's why I mentioned
| them... and also the esperantists. They were his circle, I
| believe.
| Animats wrote:
| _Esperanto probably inspired Orwell on this_
|
| Nope. Simple English did.
|
| During WWII, Orwell had a job with the British Ministry of
| Information. Part of his job was translating news broadcasts
| into Basic English, an 850-word vocabulary, for broadcast to
| the British colonies. (India, Hong Kong, etc.) He discovered
| that translating speeches into Basic English was a political
| act. All the ambiguity had to be hammered out. Basic English
| cannot express much ambiguity.
|
| That's the genesis of Newspeak.[1]
|
| Orwell himself wrote "Politics and the English Language."[2] He
| gives rules for writing. They are brutal.
|
| - (i) Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech
| which you are used to seeing in print.
|
| - (ii) Never use a long word where a short one will do.
|
| - (iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
|
| - (iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active.
|
| - (v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon
| word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
|
| - (vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything
| barbarous.
|
| Orwell's entire essay is worth reading, both as a style guide,
| and to help recognize when political writing is pulling your
| chain.
|
| Minor parts of 1984 are autobiographical, based on that period.
| "Minitrue" is obviously the Ministry of Information. "Big
| Brother" is modeled after some manager known there as "BB". The
| rather depressing canteen scene is reportedly from the Ministry
| of Information's employee cafeteria.
|
| (From "Orwell, the Lost Writings", which can be obtained from
| Amazon.)
|
| [1]
| https://blogs.commons.georgetown.edu/engl-246-fall2011/2011/...
|
| [2] https://www.public-library.uk/ebooks/72/30.pdf
| pwdisswordfish8 wrote:
| Which politicians are euphemisms?
| dalbasal wrote:
| I know this is a grammar troll and I'm breaking a rule, but
| this made me giggle, and then try to find examples.
| JasonFruit wrote:
| Anthony Weiner
| UncleSlacky wrote:
| Santorum:
| https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Santorum
| gotoeleven wrote:
| "The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of
| expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the
| devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought
| impossible"
|
| I'm genuinely curious do the woke brigades of twitter not have
| the self awareness to recognize what they're doing? Or do they
| just not care? Would they be happy with a language designed to
| make 'harmful' thinking impossible?
| akomtu wrote:
| In a traditional society, like america in 70s, those types
| would be outcasts. The woke ideology gives them an attractive
| alternative: pledge allegiance to the camp and become a "social
| justice warrior" - an honorable title that makes its holder
| think they are fighting for the greater good. What are their
| alternatives, really? A cashier in Walmart? They are easy to
| understand. Those one level above who steer the mob (ibram
| kendi and the like) are smart, rational and probably
| sociopathic. They are designing the newspeak, but IMHO lack
| competence and influence to make a difference (upsetting a few
| people doesn't count).
| eplanit wrote:
| It's not the cognitive dissonance that one would assume it to
| be. They've studied their methods well. Marx and Mao would be
| proud.
|
| https://nypost.com/2020/06/25/blm-co-founder-describes-herse...
| ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote:
| I'd think Marx would be turning in his grave. Identity
| politics only serve to divide the working class when they
| could come together on more important matters that unite them
| across party lines.
| revolvingocelot wrote:
| People need not know anything about Marx to invoke him.
| He's much more useful as a boogyman -- besides, aggressive
| enough badmouthing him will discourage others from finding
| anything serious out about his beliefs or positions.
| krapp wrote:
| More to the point - the propaganda that BLM is a "Marxist
| domestic terrorist group" effectively discourages people
| from studying the group's actual beliefs or positions.
| akomtu wrote:
| I've studied the BLM's background out of curiosity and
| find those four words to be a fairly accurate
| description. I'd compare them with the Red Guard from
| Mao's China.
| Animats wrote:
| Both "woke" ideology and MAGA ideology use words in this way.
|
| - Make America Great Again
|
| - Black Lives Matter
|
| - Stop the Steal
|
| - Homophobia
|
| - Drain the Swamp
|
| - Ableist
|
| - America First
|
| All of those exist to make it difficult to express an opposing
| viewpoint. Orwell would have recognized this.
| FooBarBizBazz wrote:
| The recent "Jan 6 was an act of love" (for Trump) is another
| good example. It was both true-in-a-sense (oxytocin doesn't
| make you _less_ racist), and brilliant, in much the same way
| that "Proud Boys" was clever, but it seems to sail right
| over peoples' heads (Or they're just pretending not to get
| it. I can't tell.).
|
| And some older political phrases could also be added to your
| list; for me the archetype is "Pro Life" vs. "Pro Choice".
| fighterpilot wrote:
| Part of this has to be that catchphrases are more viral and
| are an effective way to signal allegiance to a group verbally
| due to their brevity.
|
| It's everything I don't like in a single package. Unthinking,
| unoriginal, incendiary, devoid of specific meaning, used as a
| tribal marker, and used to elevate the status of the speaker
| without having contributed anything.
| [deleted]
| literallyaduck wrote:
| Truly impactful.
| wydfre wrote:
| I think the map of 1984 is really interesting[0]. It makes it
| really obvious it was about if Axis countries had won the war,
| thus predating "Man in the High Castle" by 13 years.
|
| [0]:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_geography_of_Ninetee...
| civilized wrote:
| Newspeak's goal of a complete regularization of English, and the
| elimination of all redundant forms, is actually an interesting
| idea IMO. Business jargon often moves in this direction, e.g.
| "learnings" instead of "lessons". And it's not always a horrible
| dystopian idea - Chinese has standardized over time and become
| more accessible to the masses with each iteration.
|
| EDIT: I apologize for my doubleplusungood thoughtcrime. Oldspeak
| good! Newspeak bad! Oldspeak good! Newspeak bad!!!
| lostlogin wrote:
| > Chinese has standardized over time and become more accessible
| to the masses with each iteration.
|
| In the context of state oppression and control of language,
| using China as an example is very fitting.
| civilized wrote:
| China existed and simplified its language before the PRC
| believe it or not
| deepnotderp wrote:
| Like under the Democratic Qin republic?
| civilized wrote:
| Hate how the oppressive Roman empire used state control
| to force its Latin alphabet on everybody.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| > _elimination of all redundant forms_
|
| Does anything like that exist. Nuances are intellectual keys
| conceived for discrimination.
|
| Get proficiency over the language, and you will use 'learnings'
| when you mean learnings and 'lessons' when you mean lessons. It
| is having mental dominance over complexity. Simplification
| itself requires that dominance - it is thought management.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > Get proficiency over the language
|
| You'd ideally say proficient _with_ the language, not _over_.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| Thank you! I used "over" to suggest dominance. Surely you
| "do something better _with_ something ", but I wanted to
| express "the acquired capacity of "advanced doing" covering
| the subject" ("get advanced-doingness over").
| robertlagrant wrote:
| I just sprang into existence to fulfil the internet's
| promise to correct someone who mentions correct language
| on the Internet. I shall now disappear.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| :)
|
| Ah, but I never said << _correct_ language>> [though in
| some cones of meaning - "well-tailored hence right" - I
| also mean that]: I said " _out-of-awareness_ language ".
|
| You need that to bend it, so you somehow need that to use
| it.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Orwell believed if language is pared down, so too are thoughts.
| themolecularman wrote:
| Sounds like he believed in The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis:
|
| > The hypothesis of linguistic relativity, also known as the
| Sapir-Whorf hypothesis /s@,pI@r 'wo:rf/, the Whorf
| hypothesis, or Whorfianism, is a principle suggesting that
| the structure of a language affects its speakers' worldview
| or cognition, and thus people's perceptions are relative to
| their spoken language.
|
| > Linguistic determinism is the concept that language and its
| structures limit and determine human knowledge or thought, as
| well as thought processes such as categorization, memory, and
| perception.
| boxed wrote:
| Making a language regular and less broken isn't the same as
| reducing it's cognitive power though.
|
| Think of it like this: if we made English even less regular
| would it make us better and freer thinkers? Of course not! It
| would probably make it harder to think clearly. A good
| example is how counting is hard to learn because the words
| are weirdband illogical. It's like converting between roman
| and Arabic numerals.
| hashkb wrote:
| Or it'd give us way more options for clever poetry and
| songwriting. Which tends to make us better and freer
| thinkers. The weirder your language is, the weirder art you
| can make with it. The more the audience understands your
| nuances, the better the art, the more emotional the
| experience, the more happiness and empathy and connection
| (or fear and sadness and despair) you can project.
| antiterra wrote:
| No, you don't need weird language for weird art, and
| there are amazing poems written in languages far less
| muddled than English.
|
| Much of art is about transcending limits, and often those
| limits are intentionally imposed. (See Oulipo)
| godelski wrote:
| There's an experimental language called Toki Pona[0]. It is
| just composed of 14 phonemes and 137 root words. It is meant
| to be learned in a weekend essentially. But you can't easily
| express abstract concepts in it because of its limitations.
| Though it was created to have users concentrate on basic
| things. So there's at least ways to experimentally test this.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toki_Pona
| civilized wrote:
| Well I hope it's not a thoughtcrime to disagree with Orwell
| slightly, if he actually thought that this is universally
| true. Language often undergoes simplification and
| standardization and it isn't always bad.
| phkahler wrote:
| Yeet!!!
| mannerheim wrote:
| > Chinese has standardized over time and become more accessible
| to the masses with each iteration.
|
| This is dubious. Taiwan achieved mass literacy using
| traditional characters. Further, the PRC itself is responsible
| for shutting down attempts to simplify the written language
| e.g. romanised newspapers that operated out of Shanghai until
| the communist takeover.
| bitwize wrote:
| Orwell himself supported the simplification of English for
| clarity -- reread "Politics and the English Language". What he
| opposed was people hiding their political agendas behind either
| obfuscatory language or thought terminating redefinitions of
| the language under the rubric of simplification and
| standardization.
| NackerHughes wrote:
| > Even in the early decades of the twentieth century, telescoped
| words and phrases had been one of the characteristic features of
| political language; and it had been noticed that the tendency to
| use abbreviations of this kind was most marked in totalitarian
| countries and totalitarian organizations. Examples were such
| words as NAZI, GESTAPO, COMINTERN, INPRECORR, AGITPROP.
|
| And now, COVID.
| genera1 wrote:
| Ah yes, COVID-19, technical name for a respiratory disease,
| totally in the same category as Gestapo
| joophro wrote:
| >technical name
|
| In an era where almost all viruses/diseases have been
| referred to by non-technical names, the rapid switch to a
| technical mouthful of "COVID-19" or "SARS CoV 2" is
| absolutely political.
|
| I remember sitting at an airport last year watching
| newscasters denigrating the use of the term "Wuhan virus" as
| I had just walked past a sign warning about MERS (Middle
| Eastern Respiratory Syndrome) just on the other side of
| security. It felt other-worldly. Then, after the CCP PR
| campaign of using the technical term had fully caught on, all
| of same news stations called the original variants the
| "UK/Kent variant" and the "Indian variant" for weeks/months
| until they caught themselves and switched to the Greek
| alphabet. And like programming with too much abstraction and
| bad variable names, the new Greek alphabet names for the
| variants actually obscure useful information -- you no longer
| know where the hotbed locations are for each variant, and you
| have go looking online for their origins, instead of just
| having that info in the name.
|
| West Nile, Guinea Worm, Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, Lyme
| disease, Ross River fever, Omsk Hemorrhagic Fever, Ebola,
| MERS, Marburg Virus, Spanish Flu, Lassa Fever, Legionnaires
| Disease. All without fanfare or protest. Wuhan virus? Oh, no
| no no. That would look bad for the party. Can't have that.
| bellyfullofbac wrote:
| Geez, how hard is it to just call it Covid rather than moan
| about it?
|
| What next, do you want to complain about having to call the
| HIV-caused disease AIDS, do you prefer "gay cancer"? "Gay
| plague"?
|
| As to where the hotbed for Delta variant is: nowadays,
| everywhere!
| joophro wrote:
| Nobody is "moaning". We are pointing out obvious
| inconsistency.
|
| What's ironic about THIS particular virus is that if any
| virus DESERVES a regional origin name, it's this one, as
| this one was most likely created in a lab and released on
| the world due to lab failures. Perhaps I could entertain
| the notion forgoing regional naming for viruses of
| natural origin, so as to not unduly destroy tourism,
| travel, and reputation of areas just got unlucky. In this
| case, though, name and shame is more than fair -- it's
| deserved. And consistent!
| mdp2021 wrote:
| I think the point was that creating a term can create the
| idea of an entity one can taint with emotional meanings which
| may be used to enforce an agenda. <<Telescoped words and
| phrases [and] abbreviations>> for that aim do not need to be
| referencing political entities only. (The poster was probably
| just eliciting smiles or reflections when suggesting 'COVID')
|
| Mussolini, it seems, choose 'OVRA' as a name for the secret
| police to suggest the "piovra" (octopus), the tentacled
| entity which reaches anywhere in agility and hypnotically
| remains fixed at its core while acting with unfolding
| determination at its periphery. These constructions can be
| more easily be emotionally charged. Instrumental emotional
| charge can be invested in terms from other areas, though
| instrumentality may remain political.
| josefx wrote:
| Technical name is a bit funny, in the past we had no issues
| calling something a "spanish flu", "bird flu" or
| "Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease", now these are officially
| considered "inappropriate". With the WHO responsible for
| picking an interim name until an appropriate name could be
| issued when an inappropriate name enters common use. They
| even list tourism among the things that absolutely need
| protection against this type of language misuse[1].
|
| [1] https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/163636/W
| HO_...
| robocat wrote:
| > Spanish Flu
|
| Which the Spanish called "French Flu", and which many signs
| point to it actually being "American Flu":
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC340389/
| jp57 wrote:
| "OLDTHINKERS UNBELLYFEEL INGSOC ... The shortest rendering that
| one could make of this in Oldspeak would be: 'Those whose ideas
| were formed before the Revolution cannot have a full emotional
| understanding of the principles of English Socialism.'"
|
| Does this not perfectly capture the feeling of many left-leaning
| millennials toward boomers and gen-X today?
| Rochus wrote:
| Orwell was a leftist, but also opposed totalitarian societies.
| "1984" was a dystopia to expose such totalitarian societies.
| Unfortunately, much of what he described as a horror scenario
| in "1984" is already reality today, without people being
| bothered by it anymore.
| gotoeleven wrote:
| Perfectly reasonable comments like the grandparent being
| flagged and killed so quickly... looks like the ministry of
| truth is staying busy.
|
| EDIT: I guarantee you everyone working at the ministry of
| truth thought they were the good guys, too.
| Rochus wrote:
| Yes, it almost looks like society values censorship more
| than free speech these days.
| lostlogin wrote:
| I don't think you can accurately call the downvoted
| comments which are still visible and being debated,
| 'censored'.
| Rochus wrote:
| We're talking about the flagged one which is no longer
| visible; the trend to remove comments or even accounts is
| even increasing with the large providers. I responded to
| the flagged comment before it was flagged, and I didn't
| see a reason for flagging it. But you can already tell
| from the downvotes what values certain people here
| represent; obviously not exactly liberal.
|
| EDIT: as it seems it has been unflagged meanwhile, so
| it's again visible and you can check yourself.
| anonymousiam wrote:
| How do you define 'leftist'? Orwell also wrote Animal Farm,
| which is critical of communism.
| lostlogin wrote:
| Arthur Blair spent time in fighting in Spain, as detailed
| in Homage to Catalonia. His views are on the politics of
| both sides are quite well covered there, and he left Spain
| pretty jaded.
|
| It also has an account of trench warfare which is
| completely terrifying.
| detaro wrote:
| How would you define "leftist" in a way that doesn't
| contain Orwell?
|
| _Animal Farm_ fits very well into
|
| > _opposed totalitarian societies_
| revolvingocelot wrote:
| One of the ways in which modern Western newspeak works is
| the relentless conflation of "socialism", "communism",
| and "totalitarianism". Their current project, as far as I
| can tell, is to fold everything left of blue-dog Democrat
| into the definition.
| input_sh wrote:
| If only we had a record of him stating what he's advocating
| for...
|
| Let's see, perhaps an essay titled Why I Write[0] could
| give us some hints:
|
| > Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936
| has been written, directly or indirectly, against
| totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I
| understand it.
|
| That encompasses both Animal Farm (1945) and 1984 (1949).
|
| [0] https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-
| foundation/orwel...
| quartesixte wrote:
| Orwell was definitely left/labour leaning in his later
| years and supported democratic socialism.
|
| As a younger man he was very much a Marxist revolutionary,
| but getting shot through the jaws in Spain and then
| subsequently witnessing the totalitarianism of Stalin
| quickly changed his mind. Animal Farm is a criticism of
| Stalinism in particular.
| Rochus wrote:
| Looks like you got a lot of answers already; if you're
| interested, there are good biographies; also
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Orwell is quite good.
| spijdar wrote:
| Orwell disliked Communism with a capital C, probably
| influenced by his participation in the Spanish civil war
| fighting _alongside_ the Soviet Russians, but his
| allegiance was clearly to very leftist socialist causes,
| leaning towards the anarchist side of leftism.
|
| He was also a pretty intelligent guy, and didn't blindly
| subscribe to partisan politics. More than anything, he
| disliked authoritarianism.
| Gimpei wrote:
| I think Animal Farm provides a nice answer to that. In my
| reading of the text, the problem was not necessarily with
| the revolution, it was the fact that the revolution was
| perverted and in the end the pigs (communist cadre) simply
| replaced the bourgeoisie (farmers) preserving the system.
| Orwell was a socialist, believing in large scale
| redistribution, government involvement in the economy, etc.
| He just thought this be done in a democratic fashion and
| actually benefit the working classes. He looked at the
| Soviet Union and saw it as a totalitarian nightmare that
| didn't live up to its ideals.
| anonymousiam wrote:
| I seem to be burning my Karma on this thread, but what
| the heck. One more question for the group.
|
| Can anyone name a communist country that did not devolve
| into (or begin as) a dictatorship? In the history of the
| world, has there ever been a truly communist government?
|
| I believe the answer is no, and that none will ever
| emerge because of human nature.
| krapp wrote:
| Orwell was a socialist, and he supported democratic
| socialism, but he vehemently opposed (and wrote Animal Farm
| as a mocking satire of) totalitarian Soviet communism[0],
| which he didn't consider to be socialist at all.
|
| [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Orwell#Politics
| anonymousiam wrote:
| Okay, so now we're getting somewhere. He was a socialist,
| but not a leftist. So were the NAZIs right wing or left
| wing?
| krapp wrote:
| He was a socialist and a leftist but not a communist. Not
| all leftists or socialists are communists, not all
| communists are Leninists or Stalinists.
|
| >So were the NAZIs right wing or left wing?
|
| Right-wing. The only reason anyone claims otherwise is
| that "socialist" is in their name, but National Socialism
| isn't socialism any more than North Korea is a Democratic
| Republic, and the proof is otherwise in the pudding as
| far as Nazi politics and ideals are concerned.
| InTheArena wrote:
| This is a gross simplification, and not really accurate.
| The nazi party grew from both left and right leaning
| aspects. (Booth anti-communist and anti-capitalist) Many
| of the aspects of nazi ideology where socialist in nature
| - for example, the building projects, the "strength
| through joy" institutions, and much of their early party
| doctrine. The Strassers and Goebbels in particular were
| deeply aligned to the socialist portion of the doctrine,
| suggesting tie-ups with communism at different points.
| This combination of socialist plus nationalist was
| responsible a lot of the parties early ideological
| success.
|
| As time went on the party increasingly shifted more to
| the "nationalist" then the "socialist" - culminating in
| the night of the long knives where most of the
| "socialist" camp (Gregor Strasser in particular) were
| purged, and Goebbels appears to have given up on his
| socialist tendencies.
|
| The Nazis obviously where not communists - but the
| ideology is much more similar than not in some key ways.
| Instead of Marx's race war, the Nazis instead believed in
| Racial War.
|
| Of course, the only reason this really comes up is
| because people want to tar and feather political
| opponents as being fascist, socialist, or communists. The
| best way to break down all of these movements is simply
| Authoritarian or Totalitarian or not. If socialism is the
| thought that the means of production and organization of
| society should belong to society, Totalitarianism is
| simply that the state is the society, and thus the means
| of production and th organization of society belongs to
| the state.
|
| So where the Marxists would call for a class war to
| violently overthrow the evil capitalists in a all-
| composing global struggle for communism, the Nazis called
| for a a "blood and soil" war to eliminate the enemies of
| the people - with everything subjugated to that violence.
|
| Both were totalitarian in their nature.
| detaro wrote:
| How do you define "leftist" then? (The dictionary says "a
| supporter of the political left", which pretty clearly
| includes socialists)
| nonfamous wrote:
| The fact that "leftist" is today invoked in relation to
| communism is an excellent example of Newspeak deployed in
| the actual world.
| [deleted]
| quartesixte wrote:
| 1984 and The Giver (both featuring dystopian societies with
| strict rules on language usage) has left me with a distinct
| distaste for the constant skirmishing over terminology
| currently active in our current "culture war".
|
| It frustrates me to no end that English teachers, while
| assigning both books with high frequency, completely miss the
| language control part of both novels and focus instead on the
| other things. It frustrated me as a student, it frustrates me
| as an adult, and more importantly it frustrates me as a
| friend/peer to many schoolteachers of English.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I read "1984" in high school and the language control was
| very much a part of the lesson.
| InTheArena wrote:
| I can't think of a more fitting printed phrase that seems to
| apply quality well to all sides of the cultural war then the
| statement - "All animals are equal, but some animals are more
| equal then others..."
| blacktriangle wrote:
| 2 + 2 = 5
|
| There are five lights instead of four
|
| That's a woman not a man
|
| All the same damn thing, designed to break down your sense of
| truth so you can be convinced of anything.
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