31–40 of 61 posts
Would you trust someone who makes the kind of decisions Smith makes? Or advocates some of the courses of action he suggests to O'Brien? Are there more likely explanations for everything in the first two sections than Smith's narrative?
Nineteen Eighty-Four, and most of Orwell's other works (including his essays) are freely available at: https://orwell.ru/ Edited to add direct link to the appendix to Nineteen Eighty-Four, as referenced at the end of the article: https://orwell.ru/library/novels/1984/english/en_app
Thank you for this, this is a wonderful resource! I found the link to download an ASCII version of 1984 by reading the readme.txt file, the anchor link seemed broken. Hope this helps another seeker: https://orwell.ru/Download/1984/e84_asc.zip One of the cool things I think about 1984 that occurred to me while re-reading the appendix now as suggested by the article is that in order for Orwell to say something very new…
Examine the world of 1984 from Goldstein on out, and it's an excellent example of what might happen if one took Plato's Republic[0] and attempted to practically implement it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24069572
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
[0] I'm not sure if the Republic referents are direct, or indirect due to Orwell's second rate boarding school having stanned the greeks.
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I'm not clear what your position is, but what does it say about one, in one can only see the tyranny in a book but not be able to see it in real life?
That it's not there or at least looks radically different?
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Thank you for this, this is a wonderful resource! I found the link to download an ASCII version of 1984 by reading the readme.txt file, the anchor link seemed broken. Hope this helps another seeker: https://orwell.ru/Download/1984/e84_asc.zip One of the cool things I think about 1984 that occurred to me while re-reading the appendix now as suggested by the article is that in order for Orwell to say something very new…
And by writing the appendix, he re-enabled that time line since everyone was assured of the inevitable fall of English socialism...
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> he was writing about the dystopian present he was already aware of Correct. After signing up with the left-wing forces in the Spanish Civil War, and getting betrayed by the Stalinists, he was one of the left-wing British writers who could see what Stalinism was and wrote about it. The whole "memory hole" business is a reference to the removal of Trotsky from photographs, for example. This has nothing to do with ant…
If Big Brother hadn't told you about Covid, would you even know?
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/03/happy-hypoxia-...
Nineteen Eighty-Four, and most of Orwell's other works (including his essays) are freely available at: https://orwell.ru/ Edited to add direct link to the appendix to Nineteen Eighty-Four, as referenced at the end of the article: https://orwell.ru/library/novels/1984/english/en_app
It's not newspeak that causes crimestop. It's that "quiet desperation is the english way", it's the middle class attitudes of the title of "Keep the Aspidistra Flying", etc. that cause crimestop. Orwell was aware of crimestop from his own experiences, and he was aware that he lived in a world with, admittedly, bureaucratese, but without newspeak.
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Thank you for this, this is a wonderful resource! I found the link to download an ASCII version of 1984 by reading the readme.txt file, the anchor link seemed broken. Hope this helps another seeker: https://orwell.ru/Download/1984/e84_asc.zip One of the cool things I think about 1984 that occurred to me while re-reading the appendix now as suggested by the article is that in order for Orwell to say something very new…
The whole Smith story is just fast-forward for what Orwell wanted to say, which is all contained in Goldstein. Examine the world of 1984 from Goldstein on out, and it's an excellent example of what might happen if one took Plato's Republic[0] and attempted to practically implement it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24069572 https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... [0] I'm not sure if the…
Great to hear that science (neuroscience) here is catching up with Orwell. It is a great book, and Orwell was spot on with so much of what he wrote. How did he do it? I think I know. I don't think Orwell (Erik Blair) was writing a book about a dystopian future. No. I think he was writing about the dystopian present he was already aware of, and then projecting that a little into the future. From personal experience wi…
> It is a great book, and Orwell was spot on with so much of what he wrote. How did he do it? Not to diminish Orwell's prescience in any way, but Yevgeny Zamyatin's novel We precedes Orwell's work by almost 30 years. It contains all the same themes, and without a shadow of a doubt, had a massive influence on Orwell's work.
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The whole Smith story is just fast-forward for what Orwell wanted to say, which is all contained in Goldstein. Examine the world of 1984 from Goldstein on out, and it's an excellent example of what might happen if one took Plato's Republic[0] and attempted to practically implement it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24069572 https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... [0] I'm not sure if the…
I like your take. My take, is that Orwell is actually a closet totalitarian, and was singing the praises of such, albeit covertly and in the guise which he knew the public could fawn about and accept. I imagine Orwell smoking his pipe and chuckling to himself, "...and they thought it was against totalitarianism, that's why they swallowed it whole!" After all, the Party is really the victor and hero of the novel. The…
Certainly I believe that he could chuckle over Animal Farm being eagerly taken up and sold as an anti-communist, rather than an anti-dog-and-pig, book.