cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/32730153
“The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command. His heart sank as he thought of the enormous power arrayed against him, the ease with which any Party intellectual would overthrow him in debate, the subtle arguments which he would not be able to understand, much less answer. And yet he was in the right! They were wrong and he was right.” — George Orwell, 1984
Uh… Yeah? If you’ve never read Nineteen Eighty-Four, it’s a phenomenal and bone-chilling read, but as a minor spoiler you’d figure out not too far into the book: Orwell, an anarcho-socialist(asterisk), is critiquing authoritarianism through an attack on Soviet-style socialism.
Haven’t read it. I know about it obviously but never gotten around to it. I’ll probably read it soon though, I’ve been putting it off too long.
Well, technically he’s attacking a fictional strawman of soviet-style socialism, which ends up drawing more on British liberalism.
Ah yes, much like Catch-22 is a strawman of war. Or The Handmaid’s Tale is a strawman of patriarchy and theocracy. You know what, like, themes are, right? Is “dystopia novels aren’t literally reality but are designed to critique existing political structures through an exaggerated late-stage version of them” too nuanced for ML?
Is there a rule when you join .world that you have to explicitly point out .ml user’s instance every time you see them? You realize this is just lazy ad-hom.
As for 1984, it’s a critical description of British authoritarianism, which is then projected onto the USSR in a “I have already depicted you as a soyjack” kind of way. Which makes sense given your reference to Catch-22, which is based on the authors own experience in WW2. Meanwhile Orwell’s own experience was composing lists of communists and minorities for the British government (and being a rapist, bust that’s neither here nor there).
Ultimatum, describing a one dimensionaly evil society, then pointing at your ideological enemies and declaring “this may not describe you in any literal sense, but it’s you thematically!” is a completely vacuous thing that anyone can do to anyone and there’s no real way of arguing one way of the other.