Foreword, Churchill, Orwell, old hat and all that

[jbor]

>> 1984 is a wonderful book, but it is not a prophetic text, its author
>> could only see what was ahead and not too far into the future.
 
on 27/4/03 4:29 AM, Otto wrote:
 
> This is true about GR too. Both novels are warnings against technologically
> advanced totalitarism.

There is, however, a basic and important difference in that Orwell's text
projects into a fictitious future, at what could happen, while _GR_ looks
back on the historical past, at what did happen, though I agree that both
texts can be described as "warnings". I think that, at the time of writing
for Orwell, the type of technologically-advanced totalitarian society he
depicts in the novel was certainly a real danger which he could foresee. Of
course, the Third Reich and Stalinism provided both a recent and a current
example of technologically-advanced totalitarianism. But the danger which
Orwell warns against is of a world-wide, or globalised form of this
phenomenon, which is as much coded into Nazi-style plans for world
domination as it is into the credo of "universal" socialism which might or
might not have eventually have been a component of one of Stalin's "five
year plans", but which was certainly an aspect or political philosophy
within Marxism/communism. I think the interesting thing which Pynchon seems
to be addressing in the Foreword is the way that Orwell also foresaw the
danger of technologically-advanced totalitarianism on this type of global
scale as being a part of a "New World Order" orchestrated by the "good
guys", i.e. the Allies of WW II, the "democratic" states of the "free"
world, as well. Which seems to be where he picks up the ball in his own
fiction.

And I think it's in this latter sense that _1984_ is most relevant in 2003.

best