21–30 of 73 posts
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)
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.
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Any time a comment goes, "So you're saying..." the commenter is unable to say anything more intelligent.
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."
This takedown of 1984 and Orwell in general was really good IMO: https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-most-overrated-novel-of-th...
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.
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)
This takedown of 1984 and Orwell in general was really good IMO: https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-most-overrated-novel-of-th...
"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.
This takedown of 1984 and Orwell in general was really good IMO: https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-most-overrated-novel-of-th...
"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.
“[A] world in which it is wrong to murder an individual civilian and right to drop a thousand tons of high explosive on a residential area does sometimes make me wonder whether this earth of ours is not a loony bin made use of by some other planet.” George Orwell (31 December 1943)
“Take away freedom of speech, and the creative faculties dry up.”
“Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac.”
“The further a society drifts from truth the more it will hate those who speak it.”
“The primary aim of modern warfare is to use up the products of the machine without raising the general standard of living.”
“Totalitarianism, however, does not so much promise an age of faith as an age of schizophrenia. A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial: that is, when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud. Such a society, no matter how long it persists, can never afford to become either tolerant or intellectually stable. It can never permit either the truthful recording of facts or the emotional sincerity that literary creation demands.”
I guess welcome to the age of schizophrenia. For those who are interested, his membership of the Fabian Society is key to understanding how he was so spot on about today's world (eg: planned). Wolf in sheeps clothing indeed.
https://modernhistoryproject.org/mhp?Article=FabianSociety&C...
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 Wig…
"Ideally, the worst type of slum landlord is a fat wicked man, preferably a bishop, who is drawing an immense income from extortionate rents. Actually, it is a poor old woman who has invested her life's savings in three slum houses, inhabits one of them, and tries to live on the rent of the other two — never, in consequence, having any money for repairs."