George Orwell predicted nothing. He was not a prophet. He was merely brilliant at fictionalizing what already was and had been.
He wrote with sheer genius about the horrors of the Twentieth Century and how we got there. It is what he lived through first hand and observed.
I loved your comment. I wanted to share that I recently heard someone say that prophets don't predict the future, they make us see our present more clearly. It's more like they open our eyes to see our current times more clearly. I thought that was interesting.
Orwell was, indeed, no prophet. But he saw the world as it was. He wrote amazing and poignant novels that were thinly veiled warnings of our distopian futures-- should we refuse to take action to preserve hard won justice and individual free will. That was way back in 1947.
These warnings have been repeated numerous times since then--- to little avail. I am reminded of Spencer Tracy's warning at the end of the movie "Judgement at Nuremburg" from 1961, Burt Lancaster, a Nazi judge who was referencing the Holocaust to Spencer by lamenting and pleading with his American counterpart for moral salvation by saying: "I never knew it would come to that. You must believe. You must believe." Tracy responded to him by saying, deadpan: "It came to that the first time you sentenced a man to death you knew to be innocent".
The disintegration of powerful societies can always be traced back to a thousand little lashes of the soul.
In fact, Orwell's concept of "the memory hole" wasn't based on his experience of being targeted by Stalin for being a member of the POUM during the Spanish Civil War. It was based on instantly shifting public opinion in Allied countries concerning Stalin after the Soviet Union became one of the "Allies." Orwell had enormous difficulty getting Animal Farm published for that very reason.
I should have done my research before posting my comment. Some of Orwell's influence for the "memory hole" must have been based on his own experience trying to get Animal Farm published. But as D.J. Taylor writes in his book, On 1984: A Biography (2019):
It was here [in Spain], for the first time in his life, that he had seen a totalitarian regime [the Soviet Union] in action, not only bent on liquidating its enemies--there was even a Spanish Communist Party poster emblazoned with the image of a boot stamping 'on all who resist forever'--but manipulating the past to ensure that its own version of history would be the one that survived. It was in Spain, as [Orwell] later acknowledged, that he read newspaper articles that bore no relation to the known facts and saw troops whom he knew to have fought valiantly denounced as cowards and traitors. It was in Spain, too, that he caught the fist warning signs of a phenomenon that would oppress him until the end of his life, a suspicion that objective truth was 'falling out of the world'. In the future, he believed, history books would simply reflect the prejudices of whomever happened to be in power. [There is no citation for that last sentence; in any case, he already saw in Spain that when the Soviet Union took over the Republican side of the Spanish Revolution, truth was already falling out of the world].
Thank you very much for the "likes." Of course, each of you who hit the like icon are familiar with Orwell's experiences in Spain, and know that he couldn't have written 1984 had he not undergone those experiences. The best source I've found on Orwell's experiences in Spain is a book titled Orwell In Spain: The Full Text of Homage to Catalonia with Associated Articles, Reviews and Letters from The Complete Works of George Orwell (edited by Peter Davison; introduction by Christopher Hitchens) (published in 2010). I wouldn't be surprised if each of you were already familiar with the book.
A personal note:
My father wanted to travel abroad from Poland to do his residency after medical school in 1956. Of course, he couldn't go to Western Europe. So he went to Moscow for a year. This was shortly after the "thaw" began. People in Moscow were still afraid to speak to someone from another country--even an Eastern Bloc country--for fear of being accused of espionage.
In the 1990s, my father discovered that from 1973 (four years after we left the country, when I was four years old) until 1979, he and my late mother were on a list of 34 "registered persons" created by Poland's Ministry of Internal Affairs. That list included some of Poland's best-known dissidents. My mother (in 1968) and her father (in 1956, before de-Stalinization began) took on cases representing dissidents in two of Poland's best known human rights cases before the Solidarity era.
I wanted to see the remnants of the system my family escaped, so I lived in Poland for six months in 1988. At that point, there were very few true believers in Marxist-Leninism left in Poland. The Party's control of the country began unravelling rapidly in April 1989.
I just listened to Christopher Hitchens 11 years ago talking about Putin and the Russian Orthodox Church. This is a Holy War. We have seen enough holy wars to understand understanding is not astrology.
In 1992 Canadian Philosopher John Ralston Saul published Voltaire's Bastards (The Dictatorship of Reason in the West).
The attempt to understand Putin through reason is to try to understand insanity.
Listen to Irving Layton in 1960 talking about censorship, poetry and reason to the dumbest of all Canadians the Toronto Intelligentia. Layton talks about Russia, the Soviet Union and the arrogance of the "Reasoned" in a species not inclined to be reasonable.
The arrogance and stupidity of our intellectual elite is nauseating. I know what poetry is and it is hard to argue that Drake isn't among Canada's greatest living poets but they may be right that they own poetry; not the great unwashed for whom it was written.
I think it is time to listen to Jean Redpath sing the songs of Robbie Burns.
I haven't a clue who Alex Dugin and Stephen Kotkin are. I think this is a Holy War. I do know who Christopher Hitchens was. I know who Chrystia Freeland is. I know who Pope Francis is and now Poland and Hungary are at war with the Russian Patriarchy as are the other Orthodox Churches. All Putin has left is the GOP and China and America's belief in "reason".
You are somewhat correct in that this is a continuation of an ongoing war between the Latins (Poland/Austria-Hungary/Germany, etc.) and Russia which is not under Rome. Ukraine had been both under the Western Pope and not under it depending on which side has been in charge. How about Russia and the West both leaving Ukraine alone and let them decide for themselves?
Patriarch Kiril is a leftover from the Soviet Russian Orthodox Church. He has never actually believed in the faith, but has used it for political control. This actually happened during the Stalin era as well - Stalin, like Putin was seen as a renewer of the Church in Russia - although in both cases said Church has been tainted with non-Orthodox Christian agendas...agendas that rea those of the banks and not of the actual Russian People. The Russian People are being attacked both by Putin and the West and religion is being used.
The same is happening in Ukraine - where many share the same faith as the Russians but are divided on political lines. The Azov, however tend to be the Polish and Ruthenians that got stuck in Ukraine and are hard core anti-Orthodox, anti Russia. Then there is the problem that Ukraine has long been the locus of the underworld that oligarchs world over are connected wtih.
Ukraine for Ukraine and time for religion and politics to stay separate. I will never accept the Moscow Patriarchate as a representative of my own Russian Orthodox Faith, because given his past, any true bishop would have stepped down due to the sins committed in the Soviet era. Since this did not happen, I do not consider the Moscow Patriarch to have ever repented from the errors of the Stalin era...
Thus, do know that Putin and Kiril do NOT represent Russian Orthodox around the world, and that includes many dissidents within Putin's Russia.
The actual "war," however is the WEF war on all religion, because religion believes in the dignity of the human being as more than something to be manipulated like an OS by big pharma or digital enslavement.
My forefathers fled Ukraine and the Pogroms in the 19th century. My paternal forefathers fled the Inquisition. I grew up in the Quebec of the Catholic church and the Protestant oligarchs. I went to Protestant schools. I am a secular humanist. There is nothing human about holy wars. They are an abomination Putin is not logical , The Krill is not Logical this goes back to when Moscow was a forest and Odessa and Pella were cities about 2500 years ago.
HIs book wasn't intended to predict the future, but it was set in the future and involves a landscape he could not have possibly lived through first hand. Of course, Stalin's purge of the POUM in Spain opened Orwell's eyes. He experienced the fear of knowing he was on Stalin's wanted list as he and his wife hid in abandoned buildings for about five days, before escaping Spain. But he never lived through the dystoptian nightmare he descrcibed. And he took a lot of inspiration from Zamyatin's We (written in the Soviet Union in 1920-1921; Zamyatin was one of the few openly opposed Stalin, but was allowed to emigrate after he resigned from the Writers's Union in 1929 as his colleagues were denouncing him. Like Victor Serge, he complained directly to Stalin of the oppression he was experiencing, and like Serge, he was allowed to leave the country with Gorky's interrcession. Sometimes thugs and mass murdererers do unpredictbable things, such as allowing their bravest crritics to leave the country. Zamyatin was allowed to leave in the early 30s, and Victor Serge was allowed to leave in 1936 after directly criticizing Stalin for his consolidation of power and persecution of his victims, also with Gorky's intercession. Serge also wrote to Stalin directly, complainining that Stalin had made it impossible for him to work. Gorky the lackey put in a word for both few writers of far higher calibre than him while Gorky felt insulated from the purges, although an interntational campaign by writers on Serge's behalf is what resulted in the sole instance of dissident writer being forced out of the country instead of murdered during the Great Terror of the mid-1930s.
Serge's The Case of Comrade Tulayev is a masterpiece in the same vein as Darkness At Noon. Serge finished writing the book in 1942, and he died in 1947. Orwell attempted to help Serge get the book published in the mid-1940s, but Orwell could not get Animal Farm published for roughly a year because of the alliance with Uncle Joe. Serge was apparently the first person to describe the Soviet Union as a "totaitarian" state, in a letter he wrote to friends in Paris on the ever of his arrest in Leningrad in 1933.
I'd say The Case of Comrade Tulayev is as powerful a book as 1984.
Like Orwell, Serge fought as a member of the POUM in Spain. Serge was an early member of the Bolsheviks, but he became openly critical of Stalin by 1925 (or a few years earlier). He was first exiled internally before Stalin put him on a train in 1936 going west.
Although 1984 is a better written book in just about everyone's opinion than We, it is very much like Zamyatin's book. Of course, Orwell wrote that he wanted to write the same kind of book as We. Orwell did a much better job conveying the schizophrenic effect of double-think, and of conveying the fear the main character experienced. Zamyatin's main characIer, D-503, was only discovering that he was a person and not just a scientific worker bee assigned to build a space ship. D-503's range of feeling was not nearly as deep as Winston's. We would have been much more like 1984 had it been written from the perspective I-330, the woman who helped lead the revolt against OneState and it's leader, the Benefactor, and recruited D-503 to the cause.
If Zamyatin hadn't beat Orwell to the theme, I would say that limited aspects of 1984 did turn out to be prophetic. There was no privacy in Zamyatin's OneState or in Orwell's Oceana. There is no privacy in the United States (as you know, the NSA can listen to you using your cell phone while it is off). But the technology to listen to everyone is hardly necessary to create a terror state, and I'm not saying the United States has become even remotely comparable to the Soviet Union under Stalin, or at all comparable to the dystopian novels mentioned in this posting. That would be a prepostrous comparison. On the other hand, the United States has truly horrific nightmares in other countries, such as Guatemala and El Salvador (two of over a dozen such examples), where dissidents or just being the wrong person in the wrong place resulted in unspeakable torture and hacking off of limbs before one's corpse was found on a garbage heap.
Although domestic conditions in the U.S. are not at all comparable to the Soviet Union under Stalin, I see the possibility of things turning in that direction. I'm very fearful when an increasingly large segment of the public advocates for a postmodernist, totalitarian agenda. Humans can be so savage toward each other that it defies belief. Our species will not last, of course. We will destroy ourselves, or die out for other reasons.
Sorry this is so disjointed and for any typos. Time to go to sleep.
He codified it with uncanny accuracy and insight; he wasn't merely a scribe. But, people are thick. Or, as Huxley said, we'd fall because people don't read at all. I watched CNN for the first time in years for its war coverage. Ten minutes in, Jim Acosta used the phenomenon of Russians telling sons and daughters in Ukraine that Russia was not bombing Ukraine-- that this was Western propaganda, to drive home the message that "that's what happens with state-run media." Of course it is, and Acosta himself contributed mightily to the problem. While Goldstein didn't really exist, Orwell did advise that if we keep what makes us human, we defeat them, it. Caring about and wanting to stop the destruction visited on Ukrainians keeps us human. The implication that we shouldn't care, or care too much?? because of not forgetting makes us less so. The U S. never invaded Canada or Mexico.
Regarding Canada, I had ancestors in the War of 1812, so I know that too. How shall I phrase this: modern warfare- tanks, missiles, that sort of thing. Someone was always taking something, even before we got here. We were just more efficient and deadly. With humans and wildlife.
I love Orwell but we need to clarify.
George Orwell predicted nothing. He was not a prophet. He was merely brilliant at fictionalizing what already was and had been.
He wrote with sheer genius about the horrors of the Twentieth Century and how we got there. It is what he lived through first hand and observed.
We are supposed to read his books so that history does not repeat itself, as it has time and time again - nothing new under the sun.
Read 1984 as education, open your eyes and finally put a stop to it because it already has been-so many times before.
I loved your comment. I wanted to share that I recently heard someone say that prophets don't predict the future, they make us see our present more clearly. It's more like they open our eyes to see our current times more clearly. I thought that was interesting.
It's true. When we read PK Dick or JG Ballard and are astonished at the predictive power, we're really seeing how little has changed.
I like that. Noce way of putting things.
Orwell was, indeed, no prophet. But he saw the world as it was. He wrote amazing and poignant novels that were thinly veiled warnings of our distopian futures-- should we refuse to take action to preserve hard won justice and individual free will. That was way back in 1947.
These warnings have been repeated numerous times since then--- to little avail. I am reminded of Spencer Tracy's warning at the end of the movie "Judgement at Nuremburg" from 1961, Burt Lancaster, a Nazi judge who was referencing the Holocaust to Spencer by lamenting and pleading with his American counterpart for moral salvation by saying: "I never knew it would come to that. You must believe. You must believe." Tracy responded to him by saying, deadpan: "It came to that the first time you sentenced a man to death you knew to be innocent".
The disintegration of powerful societies can always be traced back to a thousand little lashes of the soul.
In fact, Orwell's concept of "the memory hole" wasn't based on his experience of being targeted by Stalin for being a member of the POUM during the Spanish Civil War. It was based on instantly shifting public opinion in Allied countries concerning Stalin after the Soviet Union became one of the "Allies." Orwell had enormous difficulty getting Animal Farm published for that very reason.
I should have done my research before posting my comment. Some of Orwell's influence for the "memory hole" must have been based on his own experience trying to get Animal Farm published. But as D.J. Taylor writes in his book, On 1984: A Biography (2019):
It was here [in Spain], for the first time in his life, that he had seen a totalitarian regime [the Soviet Union] in action, not only bent on liquidating its enemies--there was even a Spanish Communist Party poster emblazoned with the image of a boot stamping 'on all who resist forever'--but manipulating the past to ensure that its own version of history would be the one that survived. It was in Spain, as [Orwell] later acknowledged, that he read newspaper articles that bore no relation to the known facts and saw troops whom he knew to have fought valiantly denounced as cowards and traitors. It was in Spain, too, that he caught the fist warning signs of a phenomenon that would oppress him until the end of his life, a suspicion that objective truth was 'falling out of the world'. In the future, he believed, history books would simply reflect the prejudices of whomever happened to be in power. [There is no citation for that last sentence; in any case, he already saw in Spain that when the Soviet Union took over the Republican side of the Spanish Revolution, truth was already falling out of the world].
Thank you very much for the "likes." Of course, each of you who hit the like icon are familiar with Orwell's experiences in Spain, and know that he couldn't have written 1984 had he not undergone those experiences. The best source I've found on Orwell's experiences in Spain is a book titled Orwell In Spain: The Full Text of Homage to Catalonia with Associated Articles, Reviews and Letters from The Complete Works of George Orwell (edited by Peter Davison; introduction by Christopher Hitchens) (published in 2010). I wouldn't be surprised if each of you were already familiar with the book.
A personal note:
My father wanted to travel abroad from Poland to do his residency after medical school in 1956. Of course, he couldn't go to Western Europe. So he went to Moscow for a year. This was shortly after the "thaw" began. People in Moscow were still afraid to speak to someone from another country--even an Eastern Bloc country--for fear of being accused of espionage.
In the 1990s, my father discovered that from 1973 (four years after we left the country, when I was four years old) until 1979, he and my late mother were on a list of 34 "registered persons" created by Poland's Ministry of Internal Affairs. That list included some of Poland's best-known dissidents. My mother (in 1968) and her father (in 1956, before de-Stalinization began) took on cases representing dissidents in two of Poland's best known human rights cases before the Solidarity era.
I wanted to see the remnants of the system my family escaped, so I lived in Poland for six months in 1988. At that point, there were very few true believers in Marxist-Leninism left in Poland. The Party's control of the country began unravelling rapidly in April 1989.
I just listened to Christopher Hitchens 11 years ago talking about Putin and the Russian Orthodox Church. This is a Holy War. We have seen enough holy wars to understand understanding is not astrology.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IS_tjw5psUE
In 1992 Canadian Philosopher John Ralston Saul published Voltaire's Bastards (The Dictatorship of Reason in the West).
The attempt to understand Putin through reason is to try to understand insanity.
Listen to Irving Layton in 1960 talking about censorship, poetry and reason to the dumbest of all Canadians the Toronto Intelligentia. Layton talks about Russia, the Soviet Union and the arrogance of the "Reasoned" in a species not inclined to be reasonable.
https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/1870623763
The arrogance and stupidity of our intellectual elite is nauseating. I know what poetry is and it is hard to argue that Drake isn't among Canada's greatest living poets but they may be right that they own poetry; not the great unwashed for whom it was written.
I think it is time to listen to Jean Redpath sing the songs of Robbie Burns.
Alex Dugin and Stephen Kotkin agree that this is a Holy War.
I haven't a clue who Alex Dugin and Stephen Kotkin are. I think this is a Holy War. I do know who Christopher Hitchens was. I know who Chrystia Freeland is. I know who Pope Francis is and now Poland and Hungary are at war with the Russian Patriarchy as are the other Orthodox Churches. All Putin has left is the GOP and China and America's belief in "reason".
You are somewhat correct in that this is a continuation of an ongoing war between the Latins (Poland/Austria-Hungary/Germany, etc.) and Russia which is not under Rome. Ukraine had been both under the Western Pope and not under it depending on which side has been in charge. How about Russia and the West both leaving Ukraine alone and let them decide for themselves?
Patriarch Kiril is a leftover from the Soviet Russian Orthodox Church. He has never actually believed in the faith, but has used it for political control. This actually happened during the Stalin era as well - Stalin, like Putin was seen as a renewer of the Church in Russia - although in both cases said Church has been tainted with non-Orthodox Christian agendas...agendas that rea those of the banks and not of the actual Russian People. The Russian People are being attacked both by Putin and the West and religion is being used.
The same is happening in Ukraine - where many share the same faith as the Russians but are divided on political lines. The Azov, however tend to be the Polish and Ruthenians that got stuck in Ukraine and are hard core anti-Orthodox, anti Russia. Then there is the problem that Ukraine has long been the locus of the underworld that oligarchs world over are connected wtih.
Ukraine for Ukraine and time for religion and politics to stay separate. I will never accept the Moscow Patriarchate as a representative of my own Russian Orthodox Faith, because given his past, any true bishop would have stepped down due to the sins committed in the Soviet era. Since this did not happen, I do not consider the Moscow Patriarch to have ever repented from the errors of the Stalin era...
Thus, do know that Putin and Kiril do NOT represent Russian Orthodox around the world, and that includes many dissidents within Putin's Russia.
The actual "war," however is the WEF war on all religion, because religion believes in the dignity of the human being as more than something to be manipulated like an OS by big pharma or digital enslavement.
My forefathers fled Ukraine and the Pogroms in the 19th century. My paternal forefathers fled the Inquisition. I grew up in the Quebec of the Catholic church and the Protestant oligarchs. I went to Protestant schools. I am a secular humanist. There is nothing human about holy wars. They are an abomination Putin is not logical , The Krill is not Logical this goes back to when Moscow was a forest and Odessa and Pella were cities about 2500 years ago.
Religion is what Voltaire called absurdity.
Did you know you kind of drool when you talk?
e.pierce--a legend in his own mind...
HIs book wasn't intended to predict the future, but it was set in the future and involves a landscape he could not have possibly lived through first hand. Of course, Stalin's purge of the POUM in Spain opened Orwell's eyes. He experienced the fear of knowing he was on Stalin's wanted list as he and his wife hid in abandoned buildings for about five days, before escaping Spain. But he never lived through the dystoptian nightmare he descrcibed. And he took a lot of inspiration from Zamyatin's We (written in the Soviet Union in 1920-1921; Zamyatin was one of the few openly opposed Stalin, but was allowed to emigrate after he resigned from the Writers's Union in 1929 as his colleagues were denouncing him. Like Victor Serge, he complained directly to Stalin of the oppression he was experiencing, and like Serge, he was allowed to leave the country with Gorky's interrcession. Sometimes thugs and mass murdererers do unpredictbable things, such as allowing their bravest crritics to leave the country. Zamyatin was allowed to leave in the early 30s, and Victor Serge was allowed to leave in 1936 after directly criticizing Stalin for his consolidation of power and persecution of his victims, also with Gorky's intercession. Serge also wrote to Stalin directly, complainining that Stalin had made it impossible for him to work. Gorky the lackey put in a word for both few writers of far higher calibre than him while Gorky felt insulated from the purges, although an interntational campaign by writers on Serge's behalf is what resulted in the sole instance of dissident writer being forced out of the country instead of murdered during the Great Terror of the mid-1930s.
Serge's The Case of Comrade Tulayev is a masterpiece in the same vein as Darkness At Noon. Serge finished writing the book in 1942, and he died in 1947. Orwell attempted to help Serge get the book published in the mid-1940s, but Orwell could not get Animal Farm published for roughly a year because of the alliance with Uncle Joe. Serge was apparently the first person to describe the Soviet Union as a "totaitarian" state, in a letter he wrote to friends in Paris on the ever of his arrest in Leningrad in 1933.
I'd say The Case of Comrade Tulayev is as powerful a book as 1984.
Like Orwell, Serge fought as a member of the POUM in Spain. Serge was an early member of the Bolsheviks, but he became openly critical of Stalin by 1925 (or a few years earlier). He was first exiled internally before Stalin put him on a train in 1936 going west.
Although 1984 is a better written book in just about everyone's opinion than We, it is very much like Zamyatin's book. Of course, Orwell wrote that he wanted to write the same kind of book as We. Orwell did a much better job conveying the schizophrenic effect of double-think, and of conveying the fear the main character experienced. Zamyatin's main characIer, D-503, was only discovering that he was a person and not just a scientific worker bee assigned to build a space ship. D-503's range of feeling was not nearly as deep as Winston's. We would have been much more like 1984 had it been written from the perspective I-330, the woman who helped lead the revolt against OneState and it's leader, the Benefactor, and recruited D-503 to the cause.
If Zamyatin hadn't beat Orwell to the theme, I would say that limited aspects of 1984 did turn out to be prophetic. There was no privacy in Zamyatin's OneState or in Orwell's Oceana. There is no privacy in the United States (as you know, the NSA can listen to you using your cell phone while it is off). But the technology to listen to everyone is hardly necessary to create a terror state, and I'm not saying the United States has become even remotely comparable to the Soviet Union under Stalin, or at all comparable to the dystopian novels mentioned in this posting. That would be a prepostrous comparison. On the other hand, the United States has truly horrific nightmares in other countries, such as Guatemala and El Salvador (two of over a dozen such examples), where dissidents or just being the wrong person in the wrong place resulted in unspeakable torture and hacking off of limbs before one's corpse was found on a garbage heap.
Although domestic conditions in the U.S. are not at all comparable to the Soviet Union under Stalin, I see the possibility of things turning in that direction. I'm very fearful when an increasingly large segment of the public advocates for a postmodernist, totalitarian agenda. Humans can be so savage toward each other that it defies belief. Our species will not last, of course. We will destroy ourselves, or die out for other reasons.
Sorry this is so disjointed and for any typos. Time to go to sleep.
He codified it with uncanny accuracy and insight; he wasn't merely a scribe. But, people are thick. Or, as Huxley said, we'd fall because people don't read at all. I watched CNN for the first time in years for its war coverage. Ten minutes in, Jim Acosta used the phenomenon of Russians telling sons and daughters in Ukraine that Russia was not bombing Ukraine-- that this was Western propaganda, to drive home the message that "that's what happens with state-run media." Of course it is, and Acosta himself contributed mightily to the problem. While Goldstein didn't really exist, Orwell did advise that if we keep what makes us human, we defeat them, it. Caring about and wanting to stop the destruction visited on Ukrainians keeps us human. The implication that we shouldn't care, or care too much?? because of not forgetting makes us less so. The U S. never invaded Canada or Mexico.
I meant recently. It could be argued that Mexico had been invading the U.S.
Regarding Canada, I had ancestors in the War of 1812, so I know that too. How shall I phrase this: modern warfare- tanks, missiles, that sort of thing. Someone was always taking something, even before we got here. We were just more efficient and deadly. With humans and wildlife.
Sounds about right.