The 3 Great Early 20th C. Dystopian Sci-Fi Novels Explain Today's World Power Structure

Eyes Open | 01-19-01 | Charlesoconnell

[CharlesOConnell]

Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World", Eric Blair's "1984" (George Orwell) and Yevgeny Zamyatin's "We" meld to give a true analysis of complex contemporary issues. I.E., why was the Bolshevik Revolution supported by Wall St.? Because from 1880 on, forced world industrialization into a unified market system was impossible while vast stretches of northern Asia remained independent. Quigley explained that the 1929 market crash was the first of the unified world market; it was so bad because of that unity, unmanageable to blocs formerly under central national banks. Why did the Rockefeller and Carnegie supported Institute of Pacific Relations under Owen Lattimore undercut the American modelled Kuomintang Chinese Constitution to support Mao on his Long March to fight alongside the Japanese? The same unified world market coalescence. All peoples must be bridled in their secret parts, no innocence allowed among children, as the Government in "We" makes rotating assignments of sexual partners. Read with eyes open, how this world is structured. The temporary truce cannot last. Continual warfare is the lubricant of the world economy. Oceania is at war with Eastasia. Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.

[CharlesOConnell]

Oh, it's tinfoil hat? Go back to sleep.

[Red Badger]

“The best books... are those that tell you what you know already.”
― George Orwell, 1984

[dljordan]

Rockefeller had his fingers in a number of globalist pies.

[MikeyB806]

I’ve only read “1984,” but I don’t understand your explanation relative to the (oppressive) one-world government (and presumed unity and peace) that seems to be the objective of the modern-day commies. Seems the world is taking a different turn than prophesized by those authors.

[DannyTN]

So should we encourage Sci Fi novels as warnings of what might occur?

Or ban them because they are being used as how to manuals?

[CharlesOConnell]

“So should we encourage Sci Fi novels as warnings of what might occur?”

“Or ban them because they are being used as how to manuals?”

BEST COMMENT EVER.

[ptsal]

Encourage used book stores and reading rather than three-minute long video summaries.

[Migraine]

While “Animal Farm” isn’t exactly sci-fi (it’s a fairy tale), like all good fairy tales and nursery rhymes, it is a commentary on tyrants.

There is ample allusion to the revisionism and cheating we are seeing in such abundance today. History gravitates along these same lines, time and again.

[Flick Lives]

Written in 1948, Orwell may have labeled his novel ‘1984’ as a warning not about the future, but about the present. His world of 1984 was already playing out in 1948. “Always been at war with Eastasia” showed the shifting alliances and the idea of perpetual war. Russians are our allies. Russians are our enemy. Japan is our enemy. Japan is our fried. China is our ally. China is our enemy.

https://fee.org/articles/ten-things-you-never-knew-about-orwells-nineteen-eighty-four/

[CharlesOConnell]

“Animal Farm” … is a fairy tale…”

(Tell your children fairy tales, they’ll yawn but you’ll get nightmares.)

J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis nailed mythology in their Inklinkgs literary club meetings.

Mythology compresses complex issues that suffer overall meaning from zooming-in & out, from mega-view to finely granular.

Sci-Fi is the mythology of the present.

Try any sci-fi with any originality — Invaders from Mars, Day the Earth Stood Still, Invasion of the Body Snatchers … to the Matrix, there is unknown truth about the Sci-Fi Present that is condensed and made workable.

I hardly know any good sci-fi that lies.

[dfwgator]

You could just listen to Pink Floyd’s “Animals”

Have you heard the news?
The dogs are dead
You better stay home
And do as you’re told
Get out of the road if you want to grow old

[Southside_Chicago_Republican]

I read “1984” in ancient times when I was in high school and have started to read it again. Orwell isn’t accurate on every point, but he nails it much of the time. I don’t take it as a prophecy, except in the sense that the biblical prophets warned of the logical conclusions and dire consequences of certain conduct. Orwell mined the totalitarianisms of his time to give an example of what happens when morally and intellectually-decayed societies head down a certain path.

[Diana in Wisconsin]

Life these days feels more like being trapped in a story by ‘The Brothers Grimm.’

The ORIGINAL tales, not the sanitized versions...

[TBP]

Maybe colleges ought to have courses on dystopian literature:

The three mentioned:

1984 by George Orwell
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
We by Yevgeny Zamyatin

Also:

Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
The Giver by Lois Lowry
Animal Farm by Orwell

Several novels by Heinlein. Any others?

[Lazamataz]

Your post makes the mistake many authors make.

They assume we know, in detail, the points they simply mention and gloss over.

In order for your post to be truly meaningful to me, I’d ask you rewrite it in much greater detail. Explain to me things you think I should already know.

[MarDav]

Here is the forward of Neil Postman's book Amusing Ourselves to Death in which he compares and contrasts 1984 and Brave New World:

"We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn’t, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.

But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell’s dark vision, there was another - slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions”. In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.

This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right."

Postman, who passed away many years ago, was a media and cultural critic back in the 80's. I wonder what his take would be today.

[Migraine]

I’m glad you tossed in some Floyd along with Orwell’s pink pigs...

[CharlesOConnell]

” Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing.”

Yes, and there’s another wrinkle, in that Winston Smith was, to mix metaphors with Brave New World, a Beta, he was in the administrative class, they had to be watched, that’s what 1984 was all about, Smith got thru the Room with No Off Switch on the Light, he betrayed his love over his fear of a face-cage of rats to eat your face, he ended up sipping absinthe in a Beta cafe, knowing it was only a matter of time before they put a bullet in his brain, just as, now, as soon as the people repeating the BLM & Antifa lines realize how sickening it is, they will become class enemies. The left eat their own because Joe Sixpack and Sally Entertainment Tonight are too bland of fare.

But for the mass of Proles in 1984, there was agreement with the state getting people to love their prisons: Think of Ralph Cramden of the Honeymooners without the perpetural rancor—Ralph was too smart, he had Norton, the dummy, the Barney Rubble, to calm him down.

In both 1984 and Brave New World, Ralph Cramden would have to be liguidated.

[CharlesOConnell]

The Book People out in the sticks in Farenheit 451 - YouTube

It didn't work out like that. From the very start of universal compulsory schooling in 1880 at the behests of J.P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, later John D. Rockefeller 1st, they wanted to dumb down the people who had once had fine cultural aspirations, they'd read Thomas Paine during the American Revolution, but if the elder students in the 1 room school who were starting to be run thru the Normal Schools, wanted that Carnegie Foundation pension, they'd better teach the dumbed-down curriculum.

Between 1920 and 1930, the Christian acceptance of the classics of Western Civilization were purged from the curriculum, it was "Jane, See Dick Run", the teachers by the 1940s had themselves been trained without the fine curriculum of homeschooling and 1 room schools that was higher than graduate schools today.

The result: books didn't have to be burned. No one reads them.

[MarDav]

I’m sensing a merging of the two paths to dystopia. We have the pleasure-numbing of Brave New World all around us (drugs, alcohol, sports, entertainment). This “soma drip” has been steadily increasing the past few decades (since at least the 60’s with the “Tune in, turn on, drop out” crowd really kicking it into high gear). We’ve also seen the increasing assault on liberty, speech and history, coupled with the intrusive nature of technology so that Big Brother/Cancel Culture has many hushed into silence with their figurative backs to the telescreen.

My guess is the purge of the older generations/traditional Americans will continue with all its ferocity and threat until such time that only the addle-brained younger folk will be left and can easily be placated with soma and sex. These are the ones that O’Brien talked about “loving Big Brother.”

Winston Smith stares into his cup of Victory Gin trying (but not too hard) to remember, as we speak