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Orwell: Bad role-model for an age that needs honest grappling with complexity?

#1
C C Offline
https://www.the-american-interest.com/20...ge-orwell/

EXCERPT: [...] But none of Orwell’s silly predictions would really irritate if the canonisation of *1984* was not a net negative for our political debate. This is not to say the novel is not a decent evocation of Stalinism -- it is. It’s just that its lodging itself as the English language’s only universally-read dystopia hampers awareness of what really threatens democracy today. [...] Orwell’s actual warnings -- about homogenization, the destruction of information, a world without wealth and only unlimited powers of the state -- are now miles away. If anything, the threats to democracy are the opposite of “Orwellian.”

This is the problem of bringing everything, always, back to Orwell. He has nothing to say about social fragmentation, financialisation, ethnic splintering, unaccountable corporations, offshore kleptocrats, or echo chambers, to name but a few. Instead, he leaves too many political minds forever chasing, Quixote-like, the totalitarian windmill of untrammeled state power. They ignore the real anemic state before their eyes, which struggles to keep up with corporate algorithms, is unable to fulfil its promises, or tax the super-rich.

Orwell was no visionary when it comes to economics, either. [...] His inability to meaningfully reflect on the dynamics of capitalism (beyond moralising condemnation), let alone imagine a consumer society, is a fascinating wooly mammoth frozen in ice from the postwar era. It is a reminder of how utterly written-off by European intellectuals the market economy was immediately after the war -- and what a shock the 1950s consumerist takeoff in living standards proved to be.

Most of the Orwell cult only irritates, but one thing legitimately grates: the idea of Eric Blair as a monument to British decency. The author of *1984* not only wrote a deathbed list for the authorities denouncing notable writers and public figures as Communist sympathisers. He had meticulously kept throughout the last decade of his life a paranoid notebook filled with 135 names. These, he had variously labelled what he called “cryptos,” “F.T.s” for fellow travellers, or those he alleged were Stalinist sympathisers, suspect agents or outright members of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Orwell’s list included figures as eminent as the future leader of the Labour Party Michael Foot, the broadcaster and writer J.B. Priestly, and the the historian E.H. Carr. Whilst occasionally it was right, more often than not the list was absurd.

There is a notable and obvious overlap in Orwell’s notebook between many of 1940s London’s prominent gay, Jewish and anti-colonial public figures and the accused “cryptos.” Orwell’s bigoted commentaries fill his suspects notebook....

MORE: https://www.the-american-interest.com/20...ge-orwell/
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#2
Syne Offline
Echo chambers and identity politics, especially on the left, are exactly what motivates people to want governments that restrict freedom of speech and thus thought. Mob justice can be just as totalitarian as any government.

The author is an obvious leftist, trying desperately to discredit the accurate characterization of his own ideology.
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