Oh you’re not wrong! I just think you’re mistaking that for a good thing when “I’d rather live directly underneath the mushroom cloud” is a sentiment that I’ve heard expressed w/ a degree of regularity and seems to be shared by many. Also, well, *gestures at Threads*
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Replying to @OneiricCanid @perdricof
You're missing what she's saying, which is that a REALLY cruel fate for the UK would for the rest of the world to be a happy, functioning utopia and the UK and the UK alone to be a failed state kept in quarantine behind a wall
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This is something Kim Stanley Robinson did with his future version of the USA in The Wild Shore, and that's actually fairly common with American cyberpunk dystopias (which have tended to play on American fears of obsolescence next to Japan, or China)
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But it's a rare theme for British writers to explore
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I mean that's why I brought up Orwell, who throws this humiliation in your face in the opening of 1984 - the whole island of Great Britain has been renamed "Airstrip One", the empire of Oceania, based in the former USA, sees Britain as nothing but a forward base against Eurasia
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But the weird thing is this is brought up at the very beginning then dropped, it has no effect on anything The Party's ideology is called English Socialism or Ingsoc even though England isn't supposed to be important
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Big Brother and Emmanuel Goldstein are treated as though they're British and their old stomping grounds were in London even though the Airstrip One thing means they should probably be Americans The whole thing is in this kind of weird limbo, possibly intentionally
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Replying to @arthur_affect @OneiricCanid
there's approximately no american cultural influence either, nor presence of vast numbers of american troops on british bases, no foreign commanders in charge of ministries none of the spillover you'd expect from being a colony, in other words
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Replying to @perdricof @OneiricCanid
The only actual proof the rest of the world even exists, IIRC, is a bit about how the military parade has on display a bunch of POWs from Eastasia (with which Oceania is at war and always has been at war) "Little yellow men" whose odd appearance Winston takes note of
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But yeah Orwell himself interestingly did this whole rundown on what he saw as peculiar to British virus ("The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius") where he said it was a mixed blessing that Britain being an island nation lent it a certain provinciality
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Like the Brits, or at least the English, meant it when they said they really couldn't imagine being invaded, conquered and enslaved An actual ground war was something alien RI they cultural experience The trauma of the Blitz, as searing as it was, was explicitly not that
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Which he said in his view was why Brits were kind of stuck up in an oblivious way even compared to very wealthy Americans but didn't have the capacity for raw brutal hatred he saw in US culture of the time
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That Americans in the back of their minds knew their fortune was built in slavery, genocide and race war right in their own backyards while the English carefully kept the ugly side of Empire well at arms length
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