Like he knew that was bullshit, he'd had it done to him, *as a communist* And then 1984 becomes this Red Scare bludgeon on a grand scale "This is what commies want They want you to hate your parents, to hate sex and pleasure, to believe 2+2=5, to get your face eaten by rats"
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Laurent_Weppe
And if you're like "That's not true, that's not what *actually happens* in totalitarian countries, even at its worst Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia or Maoist China didn't actually look like this, this is a cartoon" "...That's what a brainwashed Party member would say"
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Laurent_Weppe
Welp Can't interrupt the Two Minutes' Hate, right Goldstein - er, I mean Big Brother - and the Brotherhood - er, I mean the Party - are everywhere Hiding in every dark corner, infiltrating every office and factory, responsible for all harm that comes to the world
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Laurent_Weppe
So fucking depressing And people just straight up say "Oh well this is a book about communism and Stalin MAYBE it's also about Nazi Germany" Pluck the damn log out of your own eye How is the most relevant thing it's about, to you and your students, not McCarthyism
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Laurent_Weppe
But it's the McCarthyists who wanted this book taught! Who used it as a justification for suppressing leftist ideas! We had to censor and surveil people so we didn't wake up in a society of censorship and surveillance! Ffffffffff
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Laurent_Weppe
I've always found it remarkable how the right is *constantly* arguing that concepts actually mean the direct inversion of their intuitive meanings, e.g. "freedom of speech should mean that wealthy people cannot be criticised" (1/?)
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or "economic freedom is maximised when people's choices are to unconditionally obey the wealthy or die" or "being an open-minded rebel means uncritically agreeing with popular consensus"
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or "the people who threaten us with overwhelming power are the faction that has had zero representation in government for around half a century and who virtually everyone else openly hates". And this ridiculous doublespeak, analogous to "war is peace, freedom is slavery"...
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*never* gets pulled up as Orwellian despite the obvious and direct analogy.
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Replying to @quantum_boulder @Laurent_Weppe
In the context of actual American politics Goldstein and the Brotherhood were Karl Marx and communism for the whole 20th century This is overwhelmingly obvious It is the most obvious comparison one could possibly make The Two Minutes' Hate against commies was constant
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Orwell himself did not see it this way What he meant by it was that Goldstein was Trotsky and the Brotherhood were Mensheviks If you said "Okay but in most of the Western world, Stalin himself is obviously an exaggerated bogeyman", he would've gotten very very angry with you
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Because he was, to be blunt, Extremely Online (The "online" of the day being internecine conflict with other British left-wing intellectuals in academia and upper-class media) Like seriously earnestly worrying the West would fall to Stalin, or to Marxist-Leninist ideology
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Come the fuck on Eric Maybe we can give you personally a pass because you died in 1950 and you had issues But in hindsight, being really really scared the Reds might quietly win the Cold War by persuasion is the STUPIDEST FUCKING THING AND THEY'RE STILL SAYING IT
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