"fascistic disposition" paragraph
Dave Monroe
flavordav at yahoo.com
Fri May 9 05:10:45 CDT 2003
Orwell never mentions communism, Stalin, the Soviet Union, or, for that matter, the United States (and most occurences of the word "china" are references to ceramics) in 1984, but he does name English Socialism (a.k.a. Ingsoc) a buncha times (though perhaps just once in full) ...
http://www.online-literature.com/booksearch.php Nontheless, he publishes in 1949, perhaps not so coincidentally at the onset of the Cold War, a novel about a near-future world dominated by Russian-, Chinese- and Anglo-American-centered totalitarian superpowers who maintain their hegemony via surveillance, disinformation and repression. Hm ... Some 54 years later, Pynchon publishes a "Foreword" to this novel. While it doesn't mention, say, President George W. Bush, The U.S. Patriot Act or the September 11th, 2001 destruction of the World Trade Center, it does raise such themes as the "fascistic" abuse of power under 'wartime" conditions, the cooptation of supposed resistance to same, and the increasing pervasiveness of surveillance, disnformation and repression, as well as deploying such highly-charged--in light of the aforementioned events--terms as "homeland." Hm ...
jbor <jbor at bigpond.com> wrote:
there's nothing else that it can refer to.
that it is "both" a "general" allusion and at the same time a specific "reference" to Bush and 9/11 makes no sense at all
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