1984 Foreword "fascistic disposition"

[Malignd]

Rob Jackson wrote:

<<I'm criticising those who compare liberal
democracies to totalitarian dictatorships, elected
political leaders like Churchill, Attlee or Bush to
murderous tyrants like Hitler, Stalin and Saddam,
without ever acknowledging that, on the whole and in
every detail and respect, it's the *differences* which
are so overwhelming.>>

>From an article by Louis Menand on Orwell:

"'Big Brother' and 'doublethink' and 'thought police'
are frequently cited as contributions to the language.
They are, but they belong to the same category as
'liar' and 'pervert' and 'madman.' They are
conversation-stoppers. When a court allows videotape
from a hidden camera to be used in a trial, people
shout 'Big Brother.' When a politician refers to his
proposal to permit logging on national land as
'environmentally friendly,' he is charged with
'doublethink.' When a critic finds sexism in a poem,
she is accused of being a member of the 'thought
police.' The terms can be used to discredit virtually
any position, which is one of the reasons that Orwell
became everyone's favorite political thinker. People
learned to make any deviation from their own platform
seem the first step on the slippery slope to '1984.'
There are Big Brothers and thought police in the
world, just as there are liars and madmen. '1984' may
have been intended to expose the true character of
Soviet Communism, but, because it describes a world in
which there are no moral distinctions among the three
fictional regimes that dominate the globe, it ended up
encouraging people to see totalitarian 'tendencies'
everywhere. There was visible totalitarianism, in
Russia and in Eastern Europe; but there was also the
invisible totalitarianism of the so-called 'free
world.' When people talk about Big Brother, they
generally mean a system of covert surveillance and
manipulation, oppression in democratic disguise
(unlike the system in Orwell's book, which is so overt
that it is advertised). '1984' taught people to
imagine government as a conspiracy against liberty.
This is why the John Birch Society used 1984 as the
last four digits in the phone number of its Washington
office."


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