[HN Gopher] Orwell Diaries 1938-1942
___________________________________________________________________
Orwell Diaries 1938-1942
Author : bookofjoe
Score : 125 points
Date : 2025-07-10 17:58 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (orwelldiaries.wordpress.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (orwelldiaries.wordpress.com)
| 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.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| My neighbor, who raises chickens for eggs, and has lost many to
| predation, has expressed grief over losing some of them.
|
| She does not spend her time grieving the dead in various
| conflicts currently ongoing, although we both are saddened by
| them.
|
| Proximity amplifies emotion.
| 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.
| debo_ wrote:
| Indeed, I feel exhausted by this. Listless, even.
| 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)
| bloak wrote:
| Eileen's work at the "Ministry of Information" could also be
| an influence.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ministry_of_Information_(Unite.
| ..
| lukan wrote:
| That put me into a deep, deep rabbit hole, learning lots of
| previous unknown facts of WW2 along the way. Thanks for
| wasting my time/giving me the opportunity to learn new
| things ..
| 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.
| skinnymuch wrote:
| Isn't Orwell a fed informant screwing over the left he
| claimed to be a part of? Can't imagine he'd have good
| takes.
| mulmen wrote:
| I didn't say that he'd have a "take". I said he'd find
| the climate familiar.
| pjc50 wrote:
| After he went to fight for the left in Catalonia, and had
| to flee Catalonia for being the wrong kind of Marxist, he
| believed that the best thing for the left was to keep out
| actual Stalinists in order to preserve freedom for
| socialism.
| clarionbell wrote:
| His main gripe was that government wasn't doing enough, that it
| was too passive. He had problems with lot of their other
| policies, but as most people, he understood that defeating
| Nazis is worth compromises.
| 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.
| e40 wrote:
| I see. I'm not a user of Obsidian, but is it really obvious
| where the markdown files live? I use naked markdown and
| have a printed "read this first" that tells the locations
| of all the files (and where the backups are). I've tried to
| make it as simple as possible to find things.
| jjice wrote:
| Yeah it's actually one of the things I like most about
| Obsidian - your "vault" is literally just a directory.
| Everything is just a markdown file and it's just a normal
| directory structure and it's all exactly as you'd expect.
|
| I used to take my normal notes as plain text or markdown
| in a similar structure, so "moving" to Obsidian was just
| opening the directory. It doesn't show plain text by
| default, so you'll have to rename them to .md files, but
| other than that, you're up and running immediately. It's
| saved the exact same way on mobile as well.
|
| It's the most extensive note management software I've
| used that also doesn't remove the basics like letting me
| control the files myself.
| e40 wrote:
| Sounds good. I just installed it and pointed it to my
| "howto/" directory (which has everything in regular
| markdown, with .md files). Normally I use emacs to edit
| my markdown, but I can definitely see some advantages to
| using this. Thanks!
| 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.
| e40 wrote:
| I agree, so for that reason there are some things I print,
| but I do keep 2 local copies and 1 remote copy of all my
| files.
| 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-...
| skinnymuch wrote:
| Yeah. Western hegemony has an interest in presenting the
| Animal Farm guy a certain way.
| mathiaspoint wrote:
| I think most people stop at 1984 or animal farm and have no
| idea what Orwell really thought about society and politics.
| skinnymuch wrote:
| Yes very much so. Thankfully someone in this thread (even if
| only you) saying the correct context.
| 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.
| mc32 wrote:
| Sometimes it's just ideology ploughing through as in the
| cases that happened in Ukraine before WWII but after Lenin
| died.
| throwawayoldie wrote:
| "Ploughing through". I see what you did there.
| Joker_vD wrote:
| Do... you refer to the "korenizatsiya" [0] effort during
| which the Russian language/culture/tradition was _heavily_
| penalized and the local ethnic languages
| /cultures/traditions elevated to the official and mandatory
| status?
|
| There are enough of open letters from the local Russian-
| descended population to the central papers that complained
| about such policy, and even more articles in those papers
| as the response that declare that yes, the Party absolutely
| wants to stamp out the Russian cultural influences from the
| national republics because otherwise there is no chance to
| build the socialism, so if the not quite politically
| correct workers would _please_ stop complaining so much and
| keep in with the Party line, thank you -- or else.
| Thankfully, until the mid-30s that "or else" was mostly
| sacking from the current place of work and expulsion from
| the Party.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korenizatsiia
| thomassmith65 wrote:
| This entry piqued my curiosity, and I did a cursory search for
| the original broadcast; what wording does a government use to
| position an announcement like this? I didn't find a recording,
| but I did find a related article from June 12, 1942
|
| https://nytimes.com/1942/06/12/archives/nazis-kill-34-more-i...
|
| ...and a newsreel statement from Czechoslovakian President-in-
| exile Benes from June 29, 1942
|
| https://youtu.be/QFMJYhJNmeQ
| n4r9 wrote:
| I was also curious as I haven't heard of this before. There's
| a Wikipedia page about the massacre:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lidice_massacre
|
| It links to a Wikimedia page including photos of written
| announcements of the massacre in German: https://commons.wiki
| media.org/wiki/Category:Lidice_massacre#...
|
| Wikipedia also links to Nurembourg Trial proceedings where
| apparently footage of the anihilation was presented. See
| sections 120-121 of https://archive.is/http://avalon.law.yale
| .edu/imt/02-22-46.a...
|
| And footage of the immediate aftermath, kept in a secret
| German archive:
| https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn556023/
| thomassmith65 wrote:
| I wasn't familiar with the incident either. At first, I
| assumed it was Oradour-sur-Glane, which was a similar case
| but in France. I have seen drone footage of current-day
| Oradour-sur-Glane on Youtube.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oradour-sur-Glane_massacre
| 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.
|
| I suspect young people reading BNW wouldn't pick up on that... It
| would go right over their heads that things were once different
| and expressing compliance with the mainstream ideology didn't
| earn you any social status (at least not in the west). It was
| kind of the opposite.
| leoh wrote:
| There's a lot more in 1984 than the high-level ideas which are
| held in contrast to Huxley (risks of oppression versus risks of
| opulence). Both are certainly at play.
|
| A few of the things from 1984 that I've noticed or have been
| told about and often reflect upon:
|
| * 1984 is a book that is concerned with the physical body and
| the deprivations experienced in Oceania -- ie Winston's gastric
| distress is articulated on the first page; many of us
| experience meaningful bodily distress on account of our food
| systems, stress, disconnection, and other issues
|
| * 1984 is largely about alienation -- many of us prioritize our
| work and other fears over connection in the same ways that
| Winston and Julia do (engaging in sex is taboo in Oceania);
| although engaging in sex is not forbidden in our culture,
| taking the time to really connect with others when so many of
| us feel so much constant pressure to work can feel "wrong"
|
| * stirring up hatred among the populace in 1984 is a common
| theme; in our culture, on both the right and the left, an
| insistence on hating others, other political parties, other
| countries, and injustice (ie as opposed to cultivating love and
| compassion for those suffering) form the basis of profound
| issues we face today
| hulitu wrote:
| Also the doublespeak, the "War is peace": we need soldiers,
| we need more guns; the surveillance, everyday terrorism, etc.
| willvarfar wrote:
| Orwell suffered and died from tuberculosis.
| https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/george-orwell-
| wrot... talks about the parallels with Winston's experiences
| in the book.
| Xmd5a wrote:
| Orwell tried to anticipate the reception of his own book by
| projecting it into fiction as Immanuel Goldstein's Theory and
| Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, but it ultimately became
| fully integrated into our society, which leans more toward
| Brave New World. Ironically, Goldstein's book is ideologically
| closer to Brave New World than to 1984.
|
| Another interesting example of a meta-reflexive dystopia is the
| British series Utopia. Its plot revolves around a fictional
| comic book of the same name, which is believed to predict a
| conspiracy to cause population reduction through forced
| vaccination following an engineered pandemic. There is
| something fascinating about these narratives; intentionally or
| not, they seem to call fiction into reality. It's as if Orwell
| genuinely tried to create a transcendent critique to out-
| compete the very system whose rise he was witnessing.
| Ultimately, he may have failed, not because the system is
| inherently stronger, but because our thoughts are never
| entirely our own to begin with.
|
| Edit: what I'm talking about is no stranger to what is called
| "predictive programming", and whichever meaning you attach to
| this phrase, I believe the poster I'm replying to is sensing
| its effects.
|
| The question then becomes: to what extent are we merely
| engaging in hindsight bias or reacting to engineered shifts in
| attention? Furthermore, is it possible to analyze these mass
| manipulation techniques, even just for one's own clarity,
| without the guarantee that your own line of thinking won't
| become a mental trap?
|
| After all, if I were one of "them" - subtly pulling the strings
| in an open society where consent is manufactured rather than
| coerced, where events are influenced rather than dictated - the
| social stigma against "conspiracy theorists" would be a far
| more efficient and durable tool than any of the impossibly
| risky plots those theorists imagine. In fact, it would be the
| only tool I would dare to use.
|
| So perhaps the safest way to run a conspiracy is to first
| astroturf a community of conspiracy theorists.
|
| Yet even this thinking keeps us trapped, circling the idea of
| 'them.' The crucial idea I must utter is this: it's not about
| their existence or non-existence. It is that at the genesis of
| these roles, there is an infinitely nested psychological
| bedrock. Isn't thi common ground from which the mind of the
| conspirator, who seeks to impose a hidden order, and the mind
| of the theorist, who seeks to reveal one, both arise ?
| bpshaver wrote:
| I'm a little tired of this comparison and this point. Its fine
| if you like Brave New World more than 1984. But does this need
| to be mentioned every time Orwell is mentioned? Orwell wrote a
| lot more than 1984 and Animal Farm.
|
| I mean, this article doesn't mention 1984 at all.
| solumunus wrote:
| > 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.
|
| This seems contrary to reality. Shared culture is becoming more
| disparate and people are living in alternative realities
| according to their own individual algorithms.
| willvarfar wrote:
| I think the polarisation we see in society may be because
| everyone seems to end up getting to the same handful of
| places rather than to individual bubbles.
| southernplaces7 wrote:
| In the typical childish hive-mind logic of comments on this
| site, yours get downvoted for no discernible reason other than,
| apparently, politely adding a slightly different point of view
| and mentioning the interesting contrast with another book.
| Upvote from me, at the very least to counter such idiocies.
|
| Maybe this resonates a bit too uncomfortably here:
|
| >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..
|
| I too thought that Brave New World gets nowhere near enough
| attention despite being much closer to the mark on describing
| our present world, though i'd say we live more in something of
| our own unique creation, with elements from both novels: BNW
| closer to the mark in describing our social world and 1984
| somewhat resonating with creeping tendencies in mass politics.
| However, I'd say we live in a reality much more fragmented and
| complex than the simplistic and very era-bound one described by
| 1984.
| HAMSHAMA wrote:
| I really loved "Down and out in Paris and London" and "Homage to
| Catalonia".
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-07-11 23:01 UTC)