1984 Foreword "fascistic disposition"

[jbor]

As I was reading the "other" discussion of the Foreword which James linked
to (and lamenting the fact that there are articulate, intelligent, polite
people out there somewhere in cyber-land after all), I noticed the link to
Menand's piece in the New Yorker which Otto also posted back in January.

http://www.newyorker.com/critics/atlarge/?030127crat_atlarge

How much better than Pynchon's Foreword is that piece.

best


 on 7/5/03 12:40 AM, Malignd wrote:

> 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."
>