And that's actually one of the great weaknesses of 1984 It DOESN'T depict the transitional period, at all It's actually a major plot point that NO ONE CAN REMEMBER IT (except maybe O'Brien dropping tantalizing hints) Winston keeps trying to remember but he can't
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Replying to @arthur_affect @trans_victory and
And honestly I think that's because he couldn't show the transition because he wasn't sure what the story would be There's a lot of shit you'd have to figure out for how this exaggerated nightmare scenario might occur
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Replying to @arthur_affect @trans_victory and
It's easier not to explain it, let the Party appear all-powerful and eternal, make the story be about the fact that no one can actually know anything about the reality of the world I get that, but it remains a cop out
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Replying to @arthur_affect @trans_victory and
I thinkn you're a bit wrong about people knowing the past; Smith himself can recall a world before the Party came to power (and notes that there was, it seems, a nuclear war). So clearly there was a transition that likely resulted from a huge upheaval, destruction of the old
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Replying to @Mad_Science_Guy @arthur_affect and
Smith, as an ordinary citizen, might have been too young to understand it. And remember Orwell was writing when the big bombs were Hiroshima, not bikini atoll. (H-bombs wouldn't appear for another several years).
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Replying to @Mad_Science_Guy @trans_victory and
I'm not really arguing that Winston's lack of memory is unrealistic - as far as realism goes it's fine I'm talking about the Doylist choice to frame the story this way so the history is treated as irrelevant to us, the audience
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Mad_Science_Guy and
(I find it annoying that the one old prole he bothers talking to has dementia, and this causes him to just give up on his whole amateur oral history project because he assumes they're all like that But hey that's who Winston is)
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Mad_Science_Guy and
What I am saying is that this lacuna in the book is a big gaping hole the conservative reading comes rampaging through I'm saying it's incredibly telling that "creeping Orwellianism" is a clichéd phrase even though the Party in the novel does not creep
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Mad_Science_Guy and
Like they all have this very clear mental image of what this book is about and the book does not talk about any of this shit
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Mad_Science_Guy and
For all we know the only reason the Ingsoc state exists in 1984 was a total lack of creeping Big nuclear war, millions of deaths, establishing a new government wholesale in the ashes among the scattered survivors
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But no, all the right wing fans of this book think of it as "creeping", they all have false memories of the "creeping" being in the book, they treat the book like it's an actual cautionary tale about a happy functional liberal democracy being quietly subverted by infiltrators
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Mad_Science_Guy and
(Because that's the ur-fascist narrative That's what they try to turn every narrative into, that's how they see the world -- shady cabals of seductive infiltrators And even though that's not Orwell's thing he foolishly left the door open inviting it)
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Replying to @arthur_affect @trans_victory and
I don't think it was foolish, necessarily. Remember the Hitler/Mussolini/Tojo model had *just been beaten* and quite roundly at that. It wasn't out of the question then to think that a future conflict could collapse everything
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