AH Challange: 1984

I agree with you on the question of China/Japan, but the flavour I detected was, as I said, neither one nor the other, but rather created by taking their common characteristics and stripping fown to their essentials. The internal enemy is not "Jews" or "capitalists" but simply a man (probably fictional) who opposes the regime, as the regime is the whole frame of reference for its citizens. The external enemy is not fascism or Bolshevism, but is constantly switching. The leader is venerated because he's the leader, the tribalistic divisions drawn are purely between us and them. The dictatorships are, in fact, quite deliberately without flavour, and I think saying that orwell was attacking this-or-that ideology misses the point of the work and detracts from the horrific simplicity of its archetype.

Well I was under the impression it was suppost to be satiring hypocrisy with that flavor :D
 
I'm sorry, I don't think we can keep going with this conversation, it is too far gone. *facepalm*

Are you trying to claim that "1984" was some sort of Trotskyist tract showing that the USSR and China were actually fascist? Because that's the impression I've got from your vaguely-worded posts and it's silly.
 

Susano

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Are you trying to claim that "1984" was some sort of Trotskyist tract showing that the USSR and China were actually fascist? Because that's the impression I've got from your vaguely-worded posts and it's silly.

Eh, Orwell was a socialist. Apparently he had even argued before how WW2 could lead to a shiny, happy, socialist UK, but became pretty disenchanted of the idea by sying communism in action in Stalins regime. So I guess one could argue wether its Orwell generally turning away from his earlier, more radical believes, or holding to them but becrying how Stalin has betrayed them. OAM's position is somewhat valid at least, even though Orwell was no Trostkyite - but that was your conjencture ;)
 
Eh, Orwell was a socialist. Apparently he had even argued before how WW2 could lead to a shiny, happy, socialist UK, but became pretty disenchanted of the idea by sying communism in action in Stalins regime. So I guess one could argue wether its Orwell generally turning away from his earlier, more radical believes, or holding to them but becrying how Stalin has betrayed them. OAM's position is somewhat valid at least, even though Orwell was no Trostkyite - but that was your conjencture ;)

Three years before 1984, he wrote "Notes on Nationalism" (great essay, and one in which the ideas which would give birth to 1984 are clearly visisble), in which not only is he equally rough on the Moscow line, the trots, and fascism (and all sorts of other stupid doctrines), he even maybe-sorta gives half-support to constitutional monarchy as a guard against tyranny and organised religion against superstition, so by 1948 he was definately a not-at-all-radical demcoratic-socialist type (IIRC, Trotsnowball's portrayal in Animal Farm was purely out of sympathy for the man, not his ideas). OAM's position is in my opinion not only hard to swallow when you look at the man, but also detracts from the novel. We shouldn't plaster our own ideological concerns onto what is supposed to be an ageless archetype.
 
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Dude, you are not understanding me at all, and I'd like you to stop talking about my position because you have it so wrong.

My position is that Orwell made it hard to tell what they are suppost to be on purpose, as a paradoy of how authoritarian regimes are hardly ever what they claim to be. Before I could even get into what I thought they were, you starting messing up the conversation.
 
Dude, you are not understanding me at all, and I'd like you to stop talking about my position because you have it so wrong.

My position is that Orwell made it hard to tell what they are suppost to be on purpose, as a paradoy of how authoritarian regimes are hardly ever what they claim to be. Before I could even get into what I thought they were, you starting messing up the conversation.

You haven't made clear what you actually did mean, so you can hardly complain if people misunderstand your short, vague phrases. And your first one, that the Three Powers were fascists, I maintain was wrong and was in any case hardly avoiding controversy. If I was "messing up the conversation", maybe you should have started it with something that made your position more clear.

My position is that Orwell made it perfectly clear that they are nothing so much as the intellectual acrobatics he explores in that essay I mentioned, but summarised by his famous phrase "power-hunger tempered by self-deception" turned into a self-perpetuating system for the debasement of mankind, and I repeat that taking the ideological struggles of everyday and plastering them over his vision misses the point.
 
You haven't made clear what you actually did mean, so you can hardly complain if people misunderstand your short, vague phrases. And your first one, that the Three Powers were fascists, I maintain was wrong and was in any case hardly avoiding controversy. If I was "messing up the conversation", maybe you should have started it with something that made your position more clear.

My position is that Orwell made it perfectly clear that they are nothing so much as the intellectual acrobatics he explores in that essay I mentioned, but summarised by his famous phrase "power-hunger tempered by self-deception" turned into a self-perpetuating system for the debasement of mankind, and I repeat that taking the ideological struggles of everyday and plastering them over his vision misses the point.

I never said they were fascist... YOU said they were fascist.
 
I never said they were fascist... YOU said they were fascist.

Oh. Strange...

I'm under the impression that ComChi conquering Japan works better. Despite all these countries being fascist, they pretend to be communist.

And my first response...

Eh? They're not any more fascist than they are communist (they're neither, their system is a creation of Orwell designed to show totalitarianism taken to a logical ideological conclusion that would never happen in practice)/ How do you work that out?
 
I was referring to what they actualy are, not what they are suppost to be.

Yes, and I've already explained several times now why I think they're not fascist or anything else. I first raised this ina spirit of polite literary debate and you've started to behave increasingly strangely. The fact is, you statement that you didn't call them fascist and I did was, as I have just demonstrated, a barefaced lie.
 
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