Posted on 08/11/2018 5:35:15 AM PDT by Chickensoup
Howdy ‘soup! Back from the chores and delighted to see your thread still cooking. One thing I thought fascinating about this book was Orwell’s description of English class structure and behavior in the second half that was already fading as he wrote, and appears to modern American readers as alien as a tribe of Martians. The notion, for example, that you can predict someone’s economic stratum by observing how many servants that individual employs would elicit an awful lot of blank stares around here unless the individual were a high-tech robber baron or a rap star. It becomes clear as the second part proceeds that socialism, aside from being profoundly bourgeois, is also the product of a European class system that was smashed pretty much out of recognition in 1918 and fading even by Orwell’s time. Socialism survived, that class system didn’t.
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I am glad the thread is continuing too. He is describing a fading class system but it has reverberated to at least the millennium and yes it was profoundly bourgeois. However my understanding was that class structure, although denied and derided throughout the mid to latter 20th century, existed and its torch was carried in the public schools and at university.
Good if you want your kids to grow up potentially interested in scouting, science and engineering. Stories were originally printed in the BSA magazine, then collected in book form. Troop of young scouts gets into pranks & hijinks, solves mysteries, that sort of thing - with science.
Yet although the personnel of the ruling elite changed, their pretensions did not, based I suspect heavily on the expectations of someone risen to power in the old system. That certainly was the case in the Soviet Union, where the party assumed the position of the old aristocracy and many of its abuses as well. In fact, it appears to be a signal characteristic of socialist societies in general. The Party bosses had their limos and their dachas, and Orwell’s pigs began walking on two legs. Hugo Chavez’s daughter is now worth 4 billion dollars. It is as good to be Party as it was to be King. And the equality, liberty, and freedom that Orwell hopefully declared would result from socialism never did and likely never will.
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The human basic instinct to accumulate power and concomitant wealth kicks in and socialism becomes a totalitarian fascist nightmare.
I did enjoy his descriptions of the weenie socialists. Boy, their traits have not changed in almost 100 years!
Good conversation with some great Freepers.
Sounds like a great option for Boys. Will investigate. Have some young boys who are coming into my life, the children of younger people that I have mentored and who value me.
So kind of them to include me.
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