1984 Foreword "fascistic disposition"

[jbor]

>> No need to get all polemical. I've been talking about democracy versus
>> totalitarianism, not "capitalism".

on 9/5/03 12:51 PM, Mike Weaver wrote:

> All the "democracies" of which you write are liberal capitalist economies.
> You cannot separate the political and economic aspects of a society.

Are you saying that democracy is dependent upon capitalism? Or vice versa?
They aren't. Or are you suggesting that totalitarianism is preferable to
democracy? What, exactly, are you proposing as an alternative to a
democratic system of government?

>> The great majority of people
>> living in Western democracies are "politically equal" and "intellectually
>> free".
> 
> Will Hutton and others have proposed that western societies these days
> split populationwise into a roughly 30% secure and well off, 40% doing okay
> and 30% spending most of their time bouncing along the bottom. My
> observations here in the UK suggest this is so and it is not getting any
> better.

But "well off", "doing okay" and "along the bottom" as compared to what? To
1853? To 1503? To the lost city of Atlantis? Against what standard are these
demographic categories being defined? How does "doing okay" -  standard of
living, I assume - in Britain or the U.S. compare with the same middle
percentile groups in Zimbabwe or Iraq under Saddam? All that aside, this
economic scale has nothing to do with the levels of political equality and
intellectual freedom which exist in a society.

What, apart from your own political bias, is the "realistic context" you're
offering to this discussion.

> Take into account what Mutualcode has just pointed out and the contrast
> between the virtuous Western democracies and the vile dictatorships fades
> into insignificance. The misery and mortalities generated by the workings
> of all these systems cannot be described as compatible with the rhetoric of
> the French or American revolutions, which I think we might all agree
> underpin the socio-political ideals of our western world.

Porter rarely bothers to let history or the real world get in the way of the
political generalisations he offers, in much the same way that he doesn't
see a need for interpretation to have any basis in the text under notice.
The types of comparisons you're trying to make, and which both Orwell and
Pynchon are not making - between Hitler and Bush, and between
totalitarianism and democratic government - remain spurious.

best