George Orwell got shot in the throat fighting fascists in the Spanish Civil War. What have you done to earn your keep?
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Replying to @dsoper3
I'm actually gonna go so far as to seriously say that whatever he did in the war, it does have to be balanced against giving the Cold War paranoiacs a massive blunt instrument they've wielded against the Left in general for 70 years Intentionally or not, that's how it was used
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Replying to @arthur_affect @dsoper3
I mean he wasn't wrong about Stalinist Russia, but I could pay off my student loans with a nickel for every conservative who's yelled "hAvE yOu ReAd OrWeLl" at me after Sean Hannity told them Animal Farm was a metaphor for Obamacare.
1 reply 2 retweets 22 likes -
Replying to @andrewdridgway @dsoper3
It's honestly kind of messed up, however you feel about Animal Farm as history, that when he wrote it he was telling this snarky parable about current events that his audience was generally familiar with and could pick up on
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But now it's the reverse High school kids are learning about the history of the Russian Revolution *from Animal Farm* Their *initial exposure* to the conflict between Stalin and Trotsky is through the cutesy metaphor about Napoleon and Snowball Doesn't that bother anyone?
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You're learning about history via a polemical satire? And not even very deeply -- not going into Orwell's own history as having fought with a Trotskyist militia etc, just saying "Orwell was a smart guy and he knew these people were bad"
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I'm not even saying this to defend the Russian revolutionaries, I'm no tankie But a history book about the Trump administration for the children of 2048 shouldn't just be a John Oliver episode presented with no other context
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Anyway even Animal Farm, which I like substantially less than 1984, gets misread by propagandists as being a much shallower book than it is You all know it's an expression of cynical defeatism, right None of the human farmers are good people either
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The point of the fucking book wasn't "Leave Farmer Jones alone, he's doing his best"
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Replying to @arthur_affect @dsoper3
"No difference between the pigs and the men" isn't exactly a ringing endorsement of the men.
1 reply 1 retweet 15 likes
The specific analogy the book is trying to draw in the end is that Mr Pilkington is FDR (and/or Churchill) splitting the world with Stalin at Yalta And he's a slimy sleazy piece of shit
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