[HN Gopher] Orwell Diaries 1938-1942
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Orwell Diaries 1938-1942
Author : bookofjoe
Score : 83 points
Date : 2025-07-10 17:58 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (orwelldiaries.wordpress.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (orwelldiaries.wordpress.com)
| farts_mckensy wrote:
| [flagged]
| dang wrote:
| Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and
| flamebait? It's not what this site is for, and we ban accounts
| that keep doing it.
|
| If you wouldn't mind reviewing
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the
| intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
| vodou wrote:
| I remember this blog! It was posting diary entries 70 years after
| they were written. This was a good time in the history of
| Internet and the diary/blog ended at the dawn of the golden era
| of the "blogosphere".
|
| George/Eric paid a lot of attention to how many eggs his hens
| laid. It almost became somewhat of a joke in the comments. But
| good content!
|
| https://orwelldiaries.wordpress.com/2008/12/01/11238/
|
| Lots of great quotes (quite a few hen related):
|
| > This morning a disaster. One hen dead, another evidently dying.
|
| I am pretty sure he wrote more about hens and other birds than
| the ongoing world war.
| kleiba wrote:
| The combination of reverse chronological order and infinite
| scroll is a little silly, no?
|
| (Note that there's also an index on the right-hand side.)
| martin-t wrote:
| This seems to be a Wordpress thing and I hate it.
|
| We have supercomputers in our packets and websites can't even
| do a thing as basic as showing a list of posts, all the posts,
| on one page.
| empiricus wrote:
| lists have become a lost technology. youtube, spotify are not
| able to implement a list correctly.
| perihelions wrote:
| I guess this is the key biographic context,
|
| > _" In August 1941, Orwell finally obtained "war work" when he
| was taken on full-time by the BBC's Eastern Service.[111] He
| supervised cultural broadcasts_ [sic] _to India, to counter
| propaganda from Nazi Germany designed to undermine imperial
| links.[112] "_
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Orwell#Second_World_War...
|
| There's quite a visible gap between his nominal role as a
| propagandist for Britain in India, and his private views
| expressed here. I mean: _" quite truly the way the British
| Government is now behaving upsets me more than a military
| defeat"_--wow!
|
| (Meta: the part where Wikipedia's obviously very not-neutral
| editors inserted that exemplar of newspeak, "cultural broadcasts"
| for "propaganda", into the biography of _Orwell himself_ is
| just... doubleplus).
| lukan wrote:
| In 1984, the office rooms for the ministry of lies were
| directly inspired from his work for the BBC ..
| robocat wrote:
| > ministry of lies
|
| Winston worked in the Ministry of Truth.
|
| By doublethink, internally you know there are two meanings
| although you can never actually do the crimethink of
| believing or saying any ungood connotations. Edit - added
| quote:
|
| _Doublethink_ means the power of holding two contradictory
| beliefs in one 's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of
| them. ... To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing
| in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient,
| [and remember it if necessary]. To deny the existence of
| objective reality and all the while to take account of the
| reality which one denies.
| lukan wrote:
| My bad. You are of course correct.
|
| Also I never said anything about a ministry of lies. I only
| spoke of a ministry of truth of course.
|
| (That is, if the 2 h edit window would not have been
| already over now)
| bee_rider wrote:
| I wonder how he'd feel about current trends. There's a certain
| honesty to just blaring out propaganda that's kinda missing in
| this era of influence operations.
| mulmen wrote:
| The winning strategy in the previous US presidential election
| was to scream obvious lies blaming the immigrants,
| minorities, or opposition for any perceived slight.
|
| I think Orwell would find this all very familiar.
| submeta wrote:
| Reminder to myself: My journal entries on my computer in Obsidian
| won't survive even a year after I die. My child probably won't
| look into the thousands of files to find my journal entries.
| Whereas my paper diaries from 30years ago will be perfectly fine
| in a few decades from now.
| Aperocky wrote:
| print and staple it.
| diego898 wrote:
| startup idea? upload an obsidian vault, receive a printed,
| bound notebook(s)
| rhcom2 wrote:
| You can pretty much do this already by sending it to a
| Staples
| drfuchs wrote:
| But will your grandchild be able to read handwriting?
| Retric wrote:
| I've already used a computer to interpret old handwriting.
| e40 wrote:
| This is why I use markdown. I figure that will be easily
| viewable for as long as the files are around.
| jjice wrote:
| Obsidian is all markdown. I assume OP was referring to no one
| keeping that data preserved post death.
| asciimov wrote:
| And why I still use paper. Hard drives die, and I don't
| expect any one to be going through them when I'm gone.
|
| Paper on the other hand they at least will pick it up to
| throw away, likely flipping through it just to look for
| anything of monetary value.
| regularization wrote:
| About seven years before he was sending letters to the British
| Foreign Office of who to blackball during the UK's version of the
| Red Scare - people like Charlie Chaplin.
|
| He even wrote a book a year before this (1984) denouncing
| societies that had people denouncing each other for political
| heresy. Psychological projection. What a htpocrite.
| rhcom2 wrote:
| Pretty interesting, I had no idea about this:
|
| The George Orwell Paradox: From Spy Target to Informant
| https://spyscape.com/article/surveillance-state-how-british-...
| thomassmith65 wrote:
| The Germans announce over the wireless that as the inhabitants of
| a Czech village called Lidice [...] were guilty of harbouring the
| assassins of Heydrich, they have shot all the males in the
| village, sent all the women to concentration camps, sent all the
| children to be "re-educated", razed the whole village to the
| ground and changed its name. [...] It does not
| particularly surprise me that people do this kind of thing, nor
| even that they announce that they are doing them. What does
| impress me, however, is that other people's reaction to such
| happenings is governed solely by the political fashion of the
| moment. [...] In a little while you will be jeered at if you
| suggest that the story of Lidice could possibly be true. And yet
| there the facts are, announced by the Germans themselves and
| recorded on gramophone discs
|
| In our age of social media, that phenomenon is no longer
| surprising.
| gleenn wrote:
| Screwing the other side is far easier to sell than having
| things be good for the average person. Some pretty gross
| displays of greed and hypocrisy.
| ivape wrote:
| I was actually looking into reading some of his other candid
| works:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_and_Out_in_Paris_and_Lond...
|
| Semi-autobiographical about when he was nearly homeless and
| living in poverty in Europe. He also went after how hospitals
| mistreat patients and poor people in Paris.
| specproc wrote:
| I picked a book of his diaries up recently, it's been great to
| pick at. The copy I have has _a lot_ about his garden and the
| countryside around him, which has been fun to read whilst working
| on mine.
|
| Lots of very terse household entries like, "July 11: 12 eggs".
| jongjong wrote:
| It's strange why Orwell gets so much more attention than Aldous
| Huxley. I feel like modern reality is a lot closer to 'Brave New
| World' than '1984'.
|
| Brave New World describes a world saturated with endless streams
| of information and entertainment and yet almost everyone
| basically acts the same way; everyone chooses to engage in the
| same kinds of 'pleasure seeking' activities; they all think the
| same and they all want to watch and experience the same things,
| despite the fact that many alternatives exist.
|
| Ironically, it might be partly because BNW is becoming real that
| those in charge are drawing attention towards 1984; this form of
| subtle attention manipulation is very BNW-like.
|
| Another thing though is that as the world becomes more like BNW,
| the book itself becomes less interesting to read for younger
| people. For example, I remember being surprised when characters
| in the book asked each other if they had watched a 'Feelie' (a
| Movie with sensory experience) about 'Swimming with whales'. I
| remember thinking that the way the characters kept asking each
| other about their opinions on the same boring things and
| expecting them to answer in the same predictable way as some kind
| of status symbol was weird... But nowadays it's basically the
| reality; people praise each other for compliance. Basically for
| being boring and having predictable boring thoughts.
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