Comment on Yep, you did.
Grandwolf319@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
No man, not all at.
Not only that, but Orwell has become a dog whistle of the right complaining about social justice issues of the left.
Orwell predicted big brother that was an allegory for communism. Where they threw you in jail for wrong think. Hence why the far right love talking about him.
Imo what we are seeing is far closer to the slow collapse of an empire. The overall process is decay, where it’s like a free for all and crabs in a bucket mentality.
Bottom line is, things are falling apart due to incompetence, not a very competent entity taking full control.
Animal Farm is the allegoric tale about communism in Russia.
1984 is more general about totalitarianism, still based on stuff that went on in Nazi Germany + Soviet union + wartime England, but it wasn’t a full allegory of things that had already happened. It was more like a science-fiction prediction of the bad things that could happen in any nation if democracy and human rights were not protected.
Bottom line is, things are falling apart due to incompetence, not a very competent entity taking full control.
That’s the only thing that gives me hope about us coming out the other side of this as recognizably the same nation that went into it.
I mean, yeah, most cautionary tales have common themes.
In most terrible situations, you’ll often find tyranny in some shape or form.
Imo what we are seeing is far closer to the slow collapse of an empire.
Which, in fairness, 1984 effectively documents.
But Orwell clings to the idea that this collapse (a collapse that his own country of England was already sliding down) was something that could carry on forever. You could keep cutting those chocolate rations year after year and keep throwing away your youngest generation in war after war and keep churning out revisionist history after revisionist history and nothing would ever really change.
Orwell could predict the fall in the States (because, again, England in the 1950s was in the thick of exactly this revanchist totalitarian Red Scare crisis) but he couldn’t see where it all would end.
Bottom line is, things are falling apart due to incompetence, not a very competent entity taking full control.
One could argue that the consolidation of power into an increasingly remote and schloratic aristocracy will inevitably produce incompetent leadership. As voting districts get larger and elected leaders become more insulated from their constituents, they stop responding to the material conditions in their domains.
And as residents grow more hostile to the fumbling, self-important bigots managing the territory, you see vigilante acts that cause the leadership to retreat further and imposing increasingly stringent loyalty tests on their deputies and bureaucrats.
The focus of effort becomes suppressing dissent rather than fixing underlying economic conditions. So more and more resources go into policing, spying, fencing, and propagandizing.
This isn’t a single individual’s failure (even of you could find a host of singularly foolish, craven, or incompetent individuals) but a function of an aristocracy consumed by paranoia in a society with a shrinking supply of economic goods to spread around.
Urfgurgle@reddthat.com 1 week ago
Orwell was a leftist who wrote from a leftist perspective. 1984 is about Stalinism specifically and totalitarianism generally. It is not about communism, unless your definition of “communism” only includes the Soviet variety.
Awesomo85@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
“We’ve never seen REAL Communism!!”
That line is older and more tired than my 92 year old uncle.
Maggoty@lemmy.world 1 week ago
It’s also true though. We’ve seen people try. We’ve seen how authoritarians coop it and do horrible shit. But we’ve never actually seen communism.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 1 week ago
We’ve had plenty of instances of “Real Communism” being tried at various stages of social and industrial development. And we’ve had a wide range of results, from the abysmal failures in Romania and Israel to the marginal victories in South Africa and Vietnam to the genuine economic miracles in China and Yugoslavia.
What we haven’t seen is an ideal Star Trek style global utopia. As a result, countries with large capitalist run media tend to suffocate any kind of domestic progressive dialogue with “Um, aktuly…” critiques while their own leadership does Nazi salutes at Presidential inaugurations and sells the munitions used to flatten whole townships in Gaza neighborhoods.
At some level, you can’t take this critique seriously because its purely reactionary. The folks who insist efforts at socialist reform should never have been tried are the same ones that want us to get back to a Bourbon Dynasty ruling the world.
Urfgurgle@reddthat.com 1 week ago
That’s not what I said, nor is it something I ever would say. We have, in fact, seen “real communism,” and we see it still today. The largest-scale example in history is the Ukrainian Free Territory, which functioned through a decentralized system of direct democracy at the community level. It lasted about four years during the Russian Civil War and was ultimately destroyed by Soviet invasion. For centuries, examples of communities functioning through mutual aid and other left anarchist principles have existed and continue to exist. I have personally visited several such communities and cooperatives, briefly living with one of them. Just because there is no “communist country” (which is an oxymoronic phrase) does not mean “real communism” has never existed.
Awesomo85@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
Ok, I misspoke.
Sure, Communism can work at small scales where there is a culturally homogeneous population. Which is why cities and municipalities have the freedom to adopt communist ideals.
The USA in total is far too large and diverse to make it work country wide. We are, by design, neither culturally, politically, or geographically homogeneous.
It would take an all powerful small ruling class forcing compliance in order to make it work on such a large scale. Now we are back to Totalitarianism operating under the guise of “the good of the people!!”
Even at the small scale, we have examples of this not working. CHAZ/CHOP were taken over by opportunists that wanted to benefit themselves at the expense of all others in the community. There is simply too much diversity of thought in the USA to make it work.
PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca 1 week ago
What is the point of this comment?
The world is worse off for having spent time reading this
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 1 week ago
It’s the click-whir response of someone who has been programmed to hear an argument that only reactionaries are making.
Rookwood@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 week ago
The truth often gets repeated.
BothsidesistFraud@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Here’s where you point out credible alternatives at national scale, where the powerful machinery of state which even Lenin requires doesn’t get taken over by dictatorial narcissist psychos
Sturgist@lemmy.ca 1 week ago
Isn’t it possible that all of the options we’ve thought of are incompatible with the basic nature of a few sociopaths seizing everything and grinding decent folk under their boot?
BothsidesistFraud@lemmy.world 1 week ago
That’s exactly my belief. Stationary bandit theory is very strong. So the best you can do is a democracy where at least you can kick out bad guys every so often.
ZMoney@lemmy.world 1 week ago
There are some exceptions of egalitarian societies here and there over the past 6000 years but more or less yes.
PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca 1 week ago
The point was this was about totalitarianism, not about communism. Stalinism was the particular flavour of totalitarianism that is the backdrop of the story, but that’s not the important part, because totalitarianism comes in many flavors along the left/right political spectrum. he had to choose one, and this was an easy one, given the time period.
As we’re currently witnessing, it doesn’t seem like any system is immune from takeover by a cabal of powerful narcissists.
Grandwolf319@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
I’m not saying Orwell is only about communism, I’m actually agreeing that Orwell’s book was something rather specific that doesn’t apply 100% to today.
Today’s situation is shaping to be more like the Wild West where anything goes as long as your rich enough instead of a single omnipresent entity having full control.
uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 week ago
Except that the oligarchs are now using the legal system to create an oppressive regime for the working class. In the meantime they’ll get to stabbing at each other. In the end, monarchy will remain.
Monarchism is the only end for capitalism (according to Marx’ Das Kapital …and the steady march of history has been consistent so far with this). So for those who disparage capitalism, they’re choosing the despotic totalitarian situation that Washington fought against during the origin of the US.
Grandwolf319@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
Oh I 100% agree that feudalism is the end goal of capitalism, I actually think the US is getting too unstable for that. Imo civil war is closer than full on dictatorship, or at least I hope so.
Urfgurgle@reddthat.com 1 week ago
Fair enough, I agree with you. Orwell lacked imagination and was waaay too focused on Stalinism to see what horror was already shaping in the West.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Orwell spent five years from 1922 to 1927 as a police officer in the Indian Imperial Police force in Burma (now Myanmar). The British had gradually annexed Burma in stages, and it was not until 1885, when they captured the royal capital of Mandalay, that Burma as a whole could be declared part of the British Empire. Migrant workers from India and China supplemented the native Burmese population. Although Burma was the wealthiest country in Southeast Asia under British rule, much of the wealth was in the hands of Europeans. As colony it was seen very much as a backwater. Under the British administration, the people of Burma were at the bottom of social hierarchy, with Europeans at the top, Indians, Chinese, and Christianised minorities in the middle, and Buddhist Burmese at the bottom
He was a liberal who operated as an agent of an oppressive fascist government and developed pangs of remorse, which he then translated into his writings.
Also, not to be totally essentialist, but…
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Come on. The dude even looks like Hitler.