1984 Foreword "fascistic disposition"

[jbor]

on 2/5/03 8:09 PM, Otto wrote:
 
> 1. Hitler has been elected 1933 as democratically (under the Weimar
> Constitution) as Attlee, given the Florida-incident maybe even more than
> Bush. But this has to be decided by later historians. How likely is it that
> he will share Churchill's fate of being elected out of office after having
> won the war?

He gets two terms at most, as I understand it. The U.S. and Great Britain
are and were constitutional/parliamentary democracies. Nazi Germany quickly
became a totalitarian state. There's literally a world of difference, and
it's one which Orwell acknowledges and foregrounds in _1984_.

> 2. Now there are thousands of Iraqis killed by Saddam and thousands killed
> by the coalition troops for a simple Iraqi (Shia, Sunni or Kurd) this
> doesn't make a big difference. Whether your child has died of the
> Baath-party, UN-sanctions or precision guided missiles doesn't matter in the
> end.

But the numbers and circumstances don't match like that at all. Saddam
murdered hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions of innocent Iraqis.
Murdered them deliberately. The number of Iraqi civilians killed in the war,
deplorable though it still is, isn't even one percent of that number, and
they weren't killed deliberately. It isn't the same. They aren't comparable.

> Nowhere at all; the "dissident Left" never won any power, in becoming
> "official" like Stalin it looses its "dissident" qualities.

I think I agree with this, and the examples you give. So, I repeat my
question. Is Pynchon anti-government? And, if so, what's the alternative?
Does he pose an alternative?

> In Pynchon's
> view Orwell has been afraid of the official Left becoming stalinist, not of
> some dissidents starting a revolution.

But that's not quite how it happens in the novel. Orwell describes how "the
original leaders of the Revolution were wiped out once and for all" by Big
Brother. Jones, Aaronson and Rutherford are "relics of the ancient world,
almost the last great figures left over from the heroic early days of the
Party." (Part 1, Ch. 7) It's not "dissident Left" vs "official Left" at all.
It's Socialist Revolution metamorphosing, perhaps inevitably, into soulless
totalitarianism.

> Again, I don't see a big difference to democrats defending racial filing,
> the right to torture or to put people into camps without the chance of
> seeing a lawyer (as in Guantanamo). It's very offensive to anybody who
> thinks democracy is inevitably bound to justice for everybody. To put it
> plain: it's in these details where he violates the American Constitution
> that Bush has become some kind of nazi-ruler because he does things Hitler
> has done too and to think that this could be right or justified because
> we're at war is falling to Doublethink. And I'm not defending the rights of
> terrorists here but the American Constitution that defends our democracy
> too.

It's interesting that that famous opening from the U.S. Constitution crops
up right near the end of the Appendix to _1984_ too, the statement of an
ideology which has been rendered "unintelligible" through the advent of
Newspeak, and that it plays a significant role in _M&D_.

I'm not defending Bush either. But I think the infringements of civil
liberties which an American, or anyone living in Western democracy, are
complaining about are totally trivial when compared to what the people of
Iraq or Afghanistan have had to endure. There is no legitimate comparison
between Bush and Saddam, or Bush and Hitler, between a Western democracy and
Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia, between Guantanamo Bay and Auschwitz, or
the Gulags, between life in the U.S. and life in Saddam's Iraq. I think that
claiming there is a comparison is an example of "doublethink".

best