1984 Foreword "fascistic disposition"

[Otto]

----- Original Message -----
From: "jbor" <jbor at bigpond.com>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Friday, May 02, 2003 3:37 PM
Subject: Re: 1984 Foreword "fascistic disposition"


> 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_.
>

Yeah, and I think this is a great achievement and better as it is in our
"Grundgesetz" over here - where someone like Kohl could stay in and
accumulate power for more than 15 years.

> > 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.
>

Try to sell that to the demonstrating Iraqis.

> > 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?
>

Staying critical to all those who remain all to ready to justify any
government action, whether right or wrong.

> > 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_.
>

Because nobody can deny that this text stating the famous 'Pursuit of
Happiness' for the first time was a great achievement in the development of
modern democracy. The mere expression bears some poetic force.

> 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
>

1. I'm defending him every time some idiot calls Mr. Bush crazy without
being able to give proper reasons for this opinion, and I attack him every
time he is praised uncritically by "Those who remain (...)."

2. There remains the structural similarity of denying constitutional human
rights to people. To what extent and how to judge this is another story. I'm
not at all unwilling to see the differences (as David says) but I'm also
absolutely inclined to look out for & register any violation of the
democratic principles we all agree about.

Otto