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George Orwell’s 1940 Review of Mein Kampf

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Re: George Orwell’s 1940 Review of Mein Kampf

#351

Post by schroeding »

Pamar wrote: post #261
schroeding wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Second-hand) Anecdata: My Grandpa was born in '39, was 6 when the war ended and lived very close to a big city / region that was bombed regularly by the Allies from '42-'45. He was old enough to remember this and the (light) fighting when the Americans arrived. After the war, he and the local kids played with live guns that the German soldiers just threw away. They used a Flak (anti aircraft cannon) as a carousel, p…

Did you know anything about role preferences (if any)? I mean: would children prefer to be Allies (because they won) or Germans (because, well, they were Germans)...

My grandpa prefered the Americans, because the local soldiers gave him (and the other kids) sometimes sweets or stuff like an orange (which he thought was a ball at first, being disappointed that it didn't bounce :D) and were generally very nice to them.

Some older kids only wanted to play as the Germans or Hungarians (at the end of the war, apparently some Hungarian troops were stationed in the local bunkers to fight off the Americans).

I don't know what the other kids in his age group prefered, though.

Re: George Orwell’s 1940 Review of Mein Kampf

#352

Post by [deleted] »

landryraccoon wrote: post #310
notch656a wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter." --Hemingway

That doesn't sound like fun to me. That sounds more like a nightmarish psychosis.

[deleted]

Re: George Orwell’s 1940 Review of Mein Kampf

#353

Post by Banana699 »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #321
hellgas00 wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any group with unpalatable views to the general public don't want to have their views expressed in the open. There isn't some grand parallel to be had here. The meetings in Davos are never televised despite their influence on the masses. Recently the Washington Post Doxxed the LibsOfTikTok account creator, who's only crime was posting the views of socially liberal people on tiktok. Once your uncommon views become mai…

> Recently the Washington Post Doxxed the LibsOfTikTok account creator, who's only crime was posting the views of socially liberal people on tiktok. Puhleeze. Can totally understand the anger at what WaPo did, but I call major bullshit on "who's only crime was posting the views of socially liberal people on tiktok." Libs of TikTok regularly took things egregiously out of context, like I remember watching a post of he…

>I remember watching a post of hers and thinking "damn, that's fucked up", and then went and investigated the full source material

Any specifics ? what was the actual post and how did LOTT misrepresented it ?

>She also regularly republished obvious troll accounts as fact

The cat litter thing is the only factual incident where LOTT did in fact post false things, you are free to prove me wrong with links. Besides the fact that she did in fact apologize for it, so you seem to be doing a fair bit of misrepresentation yourself, it actually kinda proves her point nonetheless. The kind of people LOTT makes fun of are so far out there that this is the kind of thing you would believe they would do. Like imagine if I told you "Mainland China makes its citizen report dissenting journalists on social media", regardless of whether its true or not (I just made it up, I have no idea), you will believe it because it's the kind of thing you imagine Mainland China does to its citizens, and there is plenty of precedents of it doing far worse things.

Regardless of how this incident happened or developed, I find it quite telling that this the only incident LOTT detractors seems to reach for when they need an example of her supposed misinformation. A twitter account that posts nearly daily or more since march 2021, and the only thing you can find is 1 post. Because news organization and nearly every single source of information out there totally doesn't make mistakes ever.

The truth is that, just like GP said and apparently upsetted HN progressives too hard, progressives (and most people, but we're talking about progressives in this case) hate to have a mirror held up to their faces. They see the ugliness and the raw insanity and think that it must be in the mirror itself ("She's MISREPRESENTING us"), there is no polite way of telling them that mirror is just a neutral reflection.

Re: George Orwell’s 1940 Review of Mein Kampf

#354

Post by lostlogin »

benreesman wrote: post #113
tomkat0789 wrote: post #30

I think he highlights some fundamentally toxic aspects of human nature with this bit: “The Socialist who finds his children playing with soldiers is usually upset, but he is never able to think of a substitute for the tin soldiers; tin pacifists somehow won’t do.” The engineer in me wishes we could substitute the soldiers with construction workers or something, but I can’t deny enjoying war games growing up. These da…

Giving in to the violent tribalism that’s obviously part of humanity’s matrix is bad, but pretending it isn’t there will get you into a tight spot pretty fast too. Violence sells better than sex at the cinema.

The regulation in this space is weird. It’s more acceptable to show someone getting shot than to show a nipple.

Re: George Orwell’s 1940 Review of Mein Kampf

#355

Post by efxhoy »

notRobot wrote: post #216
rossdavidh wrote: post #186

So, there's a lot to be said about Hitler and fascism and propaganda and all the other fascinating topics Orwell brings up here, but I'd just like to point out how routinely excellent Orwell's analysis is. Of course I mostly see the best bits brought out and dusted off, no doubt he did mediocre stuff as well, but it is worth noticing how often it turns out that Orwell, nearly a century on, still has plenty in his wri…

Any recommendations for other writings and analyses by Orwell?

Shooting an elephant is a brilliant short essay from his time as a police officer in Burma. https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...

Re: George Orwell’s 1940 Review of Mein Kampf

#356

Post by lostlogin »

mikaeluman wrote: post #335

Just have to admit to being impressed by how succinct and clear yet deep this writing was. Easy to read and understand, and certainly gets the point across.

Reading the comments below the article (generally a bad idea) show that a paragraph of the article seems to have been ‘redacted’. Sources are quoted but I don’t see a reason for the change.

“I should like to put it on record that I have never been able to dislike Hitler. Ever since he came to power - till then, like nearly everyone, I had been deceived into thinking that he did not matter - I have reflected that I would certainly kill him if I could get within reach of him, but that I could feel no personal animosity.”

Re: George Orwell’s 1940 Review of Mein Kampf

#357

Post by moritzwarhier »

dalbasal wrote: post #344
moritzwarhier wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think I agree with you. I don't think that the integrity of elections and democracy are the main point of this essay. Orwell wrote a lot about authoritarianism, and as you say, "communism" was the prime example at the time. What he hints at here is not only the fragility of democracy. It's about the fragility of civilization. It's about the "will to power" as defined by Nietzsche, and the power of belief systems, a…

I must disagree. Orwell is not the bible, or an if-by-whiskey politician. Everybody reads him differently because they're combining hearsay, random quotes and attributions. If you read Orwell's essays or articles directly, he's extremely clear and unambiguous. The fact that people think Orwell agrees with them despite having polar opposite views is a testament to people's laziness, not Orwell's interpretability. On c…

Thanks for the reply.

I have read Down&Out and the odd essay in addition to the ones I mentioned.

I have heard the shortened trope "Orwell was a socialist, even fought in the Spanish civil war, then became a vocal critique and disillusioned socialist" often enough so that my reply partly argued against this simplification.

There's some hard-to-explain background for my comments:

1) The above-mentioned simplification: I grew up with socialism and fascism equally being put under the "totalitarianism" umbrella in media and education. In German we call it "Hufeisentheorie". There's probably some truth to this. But I incrasingly feel that for capitalism to appear "human", an exponentially growing amount of available natural resources and slave labour is needed.

2) The post-war generation of which i.e. my parents were a part; they were in a way the undertakers of mainstream leftism.

3) You hint at it: Fascism and capitalism tend to go hand in hand. We have just been brainwashed to forget about it. See US foreign policy in Latin America.

Re: George Orwell’s 1940 Review of Mein Kampf

#358

Post by Xeronate »

afarrell wrote: post #273
Xeronate wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sports are better, but I think encouraging competition and tribal urges are a waste of time in general. Better to encourage collaboration and self expression.

You need some amount of brotherly conflict and competition in order to have healthy collaboration. Otherwise, you just get the pretense of agreement and a slow slouch into frustration and resentment.

Disagree that sports are a form of brotherly conflict. Maybe within the same team but definitely not considering the win/loss dynamic between teams. You can approach disagreements with the idea that both people are working together to make the best product and are are disagreeing with the same goal in kind; a different type of argument than the one opposing teams are engaged in.

Re: George Orwell’s 1940 Review of Mein Kampf

#359

Post by masswerk »

sudosysgen wrote: post #274
watwut wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is true, but also that tend to be true in multi-party voting system in general. Having over 50% is not routine at all. Generally, the leading party must make coalition of some sort. I think that if you want to attack legitimacy of that election, going through the street violence and voter intimidation Nazi party produced is closer to mark. Also communists were actual communists alien with Russian communist party…

By the time of the KPD-SPD split, Stalin was not in power. In fact, the KPD split from the SPD in 1918, when the USSR was still being born. And far from taking orders from the Bolsheviks, they actually had a fair amount of influence on them. The idea that they split because the meek SPD was afraid of the Stalinists is revisionist history, and the SPD itself at various points in its history was far from above purges a…

What is often forgotten, by the early 1930s, the split between SPD and KPD (which dates back to Marx and Engels and the condemnation of the "Bernsteinian revisionism" on the one hand and the SPD not being a revolutionary party after 1903) had become an abyss: to the KPD the SPD was a "social-fascist movement" and the SPD had adopted the three-arrows symbol, which symbolized an equidistance to fascism, communism and monarchism. There was probably not much room for a scenario of united forces.

Re: George Orwell’s 1940 Review of Mein Kampf

#360

Post by gumby »

MichaelMoser123 wrote: post #240

Orwell omitted a few details: Hitler never had a majority in the Reichstag/german parliament - he benefited from the enmity between the Social democrats and the Communist. I mean a popular front, like in France of 1936 would have stopped them. The German soial dems and communist were mortal enemies, because the social dems shot a lot of communists in the aftermath of the Kapp putsch. Also Hitler had the massive suppo…

> Also Hitler had the massive support of German industrialists, they bailed him out in 1932, and both Thyssen and Schlacht urged Hindenburg to appoint Hitler.

From the essay: “It is easy to say that at one stage of his career he was financed by the heavy industrialists, who saw in him the man who would smash the Socialists and Communists. They would not have backed him, however, if he had not talked a great movement into existence already. ”

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