Lemmy Shitpost @lemmy.world octopus_ink @lemmy.ml 4mo ago

Yep, you did.

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No man, not all at.

Not only that, but Orwell has become a dog whistle of the right complaining about social justice issues of the left.

Orwell predicted big brother that was an allegory for communism. Where they threw you in jail for wrong think. Hence why the far right love talking about him.

Imo what we are seeing is far closer to the slow collapse of an empire. The overall process is decay, where it’s like a free for all and crabs in a bucket mentality.

Bottom line is, things are falling apart due to incompetence, not a very competent entity taking full control.
- Orwell was a leftist who wrote from a leftist perspective. 1984 is about Stalinism specifically and totalitarianism generally. It is not about communism, unless your definition of "communism" only includes the Soviet variety.
  
  I’m not saying Orwell is only about communism, I’m actually agreeing that Orwell’s book was something rather specific that doesn’t apply 100% to today.
  
  Today’s situation is shaping to be more like the Wild West where anything goes as long as your rich enough instead of a single omnipresent entity having full control.
  
  Except that the oligarchs are now using the legal system to create an oppressive regime for the working class. In the meantime they'll get to stabbing at each other. In the end, monarchy will remain.
  
  Monarchism is the only end for capitalism (according to Marx' Das Kapital ...and the steady march of history has been consistent so far with this). So for those who disparage capitalism, they're choosing the despotic totalitarian situation that Washington fought against during the origin of the US.
  
  Oh I 100% agree that feudalism is the end goal of capitalism, I actually think the US is getting too unstable for that. Imo civil war is closer than full on dictatorship, or at least I hope so.
  
  Fair enough, I agree with you. Orwell lacked imagination and was waaay too focused on Stalinism to see what horror was already shaping in the West.
  
  Orwell was a leftist
  
  Orwell spent five years from 1922 to 1927 as a police officer in the Indian Imperial Police force in Burma (now Myanmar). The British had gradually annexed Burma in stages, and it was not until 1885, when they captured the royal capital of Mandalay, that Burma as a whole could be declared part of the British Empire. Migrant workers from India and China supplemented the native Burmese population. Although Burma was the wealthiest country in Southeast Asia under British rule, much of the wealth was in the hands of Europeans. As colony it was seen very much as a backwater. Under the British administration, the people of Burma were at the bottom of social hierarchy, with Europeans at the top, Indians, Chinese, and Christianised minorities in the middle, and Buddhist Burmese at the bottom
  
  He was a liberal who operated as an agent of an oppressive fascist government and developed pangs of remorse, which he then translated into his writings.
  
  Also, not to be totally essentialist, but...
  
  Come on. The dude even looks like Hitler.
- Bottom line is, things are falling apart due to incompetence, not a very competent entity taking full control.
  
  That's the only thing that gives me hope about us coming out the other side of this as recognizably the same nation that went into it.
  
  I get your other points, but (as I addressed elsewhere in the discussion) I find it "close enough" for my purposes.
  
  I mean, yeah, most cautionary tales have common themes.
  
  In most terrible situations, you’ll often find tyranny in some shape or form.
- Imo what we are seeing is far closer to the slow collapse of an empire.
  
  Which, in fairness, 1984 effectively documents.
  
  But Orwell clings to the idea that this collapse (a collapse that his own country of England was already sliding down) was something that could carry on forever. You could keep cutting those chocolate rations year after year and keep throwing away your youngest generation in war after war and keep churning out revisionist history after revisionist history and nothing would ever really change.
  
  Orwell could predict the fall in the States (because, again, England in the 1950s was in the thick of exactly this revanchist totalitarian Red Scare crisis) but he couldn't see where it all would end.
  
  Bottom line is, things are falling apart due to incompetence, not a very competent entity taking full control.
  
  One could argue that the consolidation of power into an increasingly remote and schloratic aristocracy will inevitably produce incompetent leadership. As voting districts get larger and elected leaders become more insulated from their constituents, they stop responding to the material conditions in their domains.
  
  And as residents grow more hostile to the fumbling, self-important bigots managing the territory, you see vigilante acts that cause the leadership to retreat further and imposing increasingly stringent loyalty tests on their deputies and bureaucrats.
  
  The focus of effort becomes suppressing dissent rather than fixing underlying economic conditions. So more and more resources go into policing, spying, fencing, and propagandizing.
  
  This isn't a single individual's failure (even of you could find a host of singularly foolish, craven, or incompetent individuals) but a function of an aristocracy consumed by paranoia in a society with a shrinking supply of economic goods to spread around.

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