[HN Gopher] Before he was George Orwell, he was Eric Blair, poli...
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Before he was George Orwell, he was Eric Blair, police officer
Author : pepys
Score : 34 points
Date : 2024-02-12 23:47 UTC (23 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nytimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nytimes.com)
| jhbadger wrote:
| I haven't read the novel, and yes, Theroux is generally a good
| writer, but I'm not really seeing the point of writing a novel
| about Orwell's time in Burma. It's not like Orwell hid this part
| of his past -- he wrote a novel of his own ( _Burmese Days_ )
| influenced by his time there, and some of his more famous essays
| e.g. _Shooting an Elephant_ deal with his time as a colonial
| police officer.
| dcist wrote:
| I came here to write precisely this! You're not alone in your
| thoughts.
| hulitu wrote:
| The purpose of propaganda is to create an alternate truth.
| Orwell is a good target because of its writings.
| grugagag wrote:
| Propaganda in whose favor though?
| matrix_overload wrote:
| Nah, the purpose of propaganda is to control which subset of
| infinitely complex reality will get remembered.
|
| Make enough people associate Orwell's works with the dark
| pages of his past, and the focus will shift from the ideas of
| the works to the identity of the writer. Then use it to
| attack those who still dare to bring up those ideas, and you
| have driven them off the public's attention span for good.
| confidantlake wrote:
| Fantastic book. Enjoyed it more than his more famous ones.
| zever wrote:
| I highly recommend Orwell's Roses by Rebecca Solnit for a broad
| view of Orwell's life, and a really enjoyable read in general.
| lawlessone wrote:
| If George Owell was alive today, he'd be very old.
| pinkmuffinere wrote:
| This comment reads like a Mitch Hedberg joke
| alliao wrote:
| Literature's power lies in it's low cost and broad viewpoints.
| And whatever topic became popular because they reflect the times.
|
| We must be in trouble, given Orwell became so popular. Extra so
| if powers that be deemed worthwhile to character assassinate
| someone who writes "All animals are equal, but some animals are
| more equal than others". It should have never gotten as popular
| as it did.
| moate wrote:
| So you're saying we're in a bad spot because _checks notes_
| democratic socialism and anti-fascism gained traction?
|
| I'm going to need some clarity on what you're getting at here.
| xkcd-sucks wrote:
| i.e., fascism is a necessary precondition of anti-fascism
| mistermann wrote:
| It is not necessary for beliefs or stories about it though!
| DiscourseFan wrote:
| The neoliberalism of the 80s was a conservative movement, but
| it was still _liberal_ , it still allowed for the
| proliferations of basic freedoms, and people's lives
| (depending on where you lived in the world) either stayed
| mostly the same or improved dramatically.
|
| Now that neoliberalism is falling apart, and the world is
| careening towards an ecological catastrophe, and no
| established state government is able to manage the crisis,
| totalitarian powers are coming to prominence to fill in the
| gap for people's despair: but little do they know, these
| leaders (or at least the people _actually_ running the show)
| don 't even care about their people, they care about
| transforming the human world into a purely aesthetic,
| destructive, violent and chaotic place for the purposes of
| some sort of sublime limit-breaking enjoyment beyond what can
| be achieved under the regular conditions of capitalism--the
| ritual sacrifice of the entire world.
|
| Now, if you don't get duped by these Nazi types, then you'd
| want to figure out a way to resist that, but even democratic
| socialism and anti-fascism are not enough: recall that the
| Nazis only ever came to power because the German revolution
| failed, _because_ the SDP (social democratic party)
| intentionally bombed it so they could retain parlimentary
| power, and employed who would later become the SA, the
| Freikorps, to do the dirty work and kill all the
| revolutionaries.
|
| In fact, the political ideology one would have to adopt under
| these circumstances could not be positively described, since
| all positivity gets swept under the totalizing system of
| neoliberal (or what the Frankfurt school called late)
| capitalism. The power of fascism is a kind of rationalizing
| of what is essentially irrational: the destruction of all
| humanity for a new machine god (call it AI or whatever you
| want). The rationality that overcomes this irrationality
| would appear _within_ the irrational rationality _as itself_
| totally irrational. Something completely crazy, but in fact
| its so crazy that it starts to become the only thing that
| makes sense: demands that reach well beyond the stars. Its
| like Charles Fourier, who "claimed a shift in our local
| cosmic conditions would change the chemical makeup of the
| earth's oceans, so that they would taste like lemonade."[0]
| It may sound absurd, but why is it more absurd than choosing
| to live in a society that is actively trying to kill you?
|
| [0]https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/get-thee-to-a-
| phalanste...
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Corollary to Betteridge's Law of Headlines:
|
| Any time a comment goes, "So you're saying...<ridiculous
| explanation>" the commenter is unable to say anything more
| intelligent.
| verisimi wrote:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20240000000000*/https://www.nyti...
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Just finished his "Down and out in Paris and London"[1] about
| life in extreme poverty as an unemployed man, as a low-wage
| worker and as a tramp in the 1930s. A good read and a short book.
|
| [1] https://annas-
| archive.org/md5/6486c7cb2f83f4a97cc02728ff77c2... (Public domain)
| cryptoz wrote:
| I've read this 3-4 times and can't state enough that it's my
| favorite Orwell book (haven't read them all, but you know).
| rodgerd wrote:
| One of his most crucial, but under-appreciated, works.
| vinceguidry wrote:
| This takedown of 1984 and Orwell in general was really good IMO:
| https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-most-overrated-novel-of-th...
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| "Really good" is a baffling take on a post that accuses Orwell
| of being "extraordinarily uninterested in socialism" despite
| _voluntarily joining and fighting in a socialist revolution_.
|
| If picking up a rifle and traveling to a foreign country to
| participate in their socialist revolution isn't enough to bury
| any accusations of not being a true believer, I can't imagine
| what is.
| echelon_musk wrote:
| Having read Burmese Days, this comes as no shock whatsoever.
| echtroipolemos wrote:
| The material for Down and Out in Paris and London was due to his
| disgust and self-loathing which arose from his time serving as a
| lapdog of the Colonial Raj. Following his time as a dishwasher
| (plongeur) in Paris and the ensuing poverty - which he
| characterised as an intensely boring endeavor - he moved to the
| UK and lived amongst the tramps - following them from spike to
| spike and writing travelogues.
|
| In Road to Wigan Pier - to the decry of mainstream Marxists - he
| noted that blind opposition to landlords is nuanced in working
| class coal mining communities. Generally the property would have
| been the only source of income for an old widow. I believe that's
| the project in which he remarked that, "The working classes
| smell."
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