1984 - George Orwell

[HuckfromScandal]

Quote from 1984

“Every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered.....history has stopped. Nothing exists except the endless present in which the party is always right.”

Would quite like a thread of quotes that sum up life in 2020 based on George Orwell’s 1984.

Please add the ones that resonate with you.

RoyalCorgi it's all there, maybe we should start an Orwell sticker campaign!
"The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those that speak it."

It’s not a surprise really though, is it? 1984 is rooted in Stalinism and lots of what is happening today with cancel culture and the turning on supporters for the slightest perceived wrong doing has huge echoes of Stalinism as well as McCarthyism.

"Oldthinkers unbellyfeel ingsoc"

Just the whole Newspeak glossary seems pertinent, to be honest.

You're right, Delirium. But it's a curious combination of Stalinism - that desire to control people's thoughts, forcing them to believe stuff that is untrue and punishing them for thinking the wrong thing (and I completely forgot to mention thoughtcrime in my earlier list of things that Nineteen Eight-Four got right) - and postmodernism, which holds that there are no absolute truths, that anything goes.

If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable – what then?

Like others I am latching on to this quote in particular. Is this Orwell anticipating pomo bullshit before it ever happened?

Not only anticipating pomo bullshit, but anticipating how it could be weaponised in the service of tyranny, which is a possibility the world at large is only very slowly waking up to now?

I mean, wow, that is extraordinary prescience. It's been a long time since I read 1984, (though I fucking love "Politics and the English Language" and would relish seeing TRAs try to abide by its proscriptions - they'd be entirely dumbstruck.) I didn't remember that quote and am amazed by it.

As you can see from my username I am a fan. It clicked again for me the other day when at one of the briefings the government announced funding for something( can't remember what) and it was significantly lower than I knew funding had been for that in recent years yet they somehow made it sound like it was better. It was so much like the chocolate rations in 1984.

I love this...

@Deliriumoftheendless

It’s not a surprise really though, is it? 1984 is rooted in Stalinism and lots of what is happening today with cancel culture and the turning on supporters for the slightest perceived wrong doing has huge echoes of Stalinism as well as McCarthyism.

Precisely. It is a critique of totalitarianism written in 1948 when Stalin was still in situ and busy 'purging' or banishing many of those who had defended Russia against Operation Barbarossa. Including General Zhukov, the hero of Stalingrad and Kursk. The endless abundant, fictitious statistics from the Ministry of Plenty in 1984 while the material conditions worsened. Orwell had become disenchanted with his left wing contemporaries who continued to support and justify the murderous tyranny. Animal Farm and 1984 are an indictment of totalitarian regimes.

In the end, the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy

The whole passage on 'how many fingers am I holding up?'

I'd forgotten the passage at the beginning of the thread, and it is scarily apposite for what we are going through at the moment.

On a side note, and I don't want to derail a great thread, it's interesting to compare Orwell's vision of the future with Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. This was written at about the same time as 1984, and has equally prescient prophecies.

What I find upsetting is that the adults seem to have left the room. I long for someone, in politics or the mainstream media, to say 'NO'.

The Marxists of our time would seriously quote 1984 thinking they are the good guys.

The woke aren't Marxists, even if they have picked up some of the language.

“There was a long period during which nearly every thinking man was in some sense a rebel. [...]For two hundred years we had sawed and sawed and sawed at the branch we were sitting on. And in the end, much more suddenly than anyone had forseen, our efforts were rewarded, and down we came. But unfortunately there had been a little mistake. The thing at the bottom had not been a bed of roses after all, it was a cesspool full of barbed wire.”

The ideology that drives our current problems absolutely is Marxist when viewed high level enough.

@Ninkanink

The ideology that drives our current problems absolutely is Marxist when viewed high level enough.

Could you explain that please?

In terms of a drive for ideological power, rather than economics.

Oh I see, interesting, thanks.

Marxism is an economic theory, and to be Marxism it always has to be rooted in material conditions.

A drive for ideological power isn't Marxism.

In today’s world in particular (within this context, or at least the context in which I view this) ideological power drives material conditions (or aims to). Material conditions drive further power, ideologically (in other words, materially), and hence, economically.

It was almost normal for people over thirty to be frightened of their own children

"Do it Julia"
Make the woman suffer and spare me.

It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.

"Do it TO Julia", I meant to type!

In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.

'Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?'

How could you have a slogan like “freedom is slavery” when the concept of freedom has been abolished?

But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.