Posted on 01/27/2019 10:15:54 PM PST by vannrox
As the back cover of my cheap paperback copy of George Orwells masterpiece dictates
1984 has come and gone, but George Orwells prophetic, nightmarish vision in 1949 of the world we were becoming is timelier than ever. 1984 is still the great modern classic of Negative Utopia.
I recently revisited this book after many years of absence, and while reading along I highlighted many quotes and passages which struck me as relevant to the social justice zeitgeist of the late 2010s. To little surprise, I discovered that what the political left seeks in this day and age is well and truly like the negative utopia described in this classic story.
Here are twenty passages from the book which many of us have to live suffer through everyday in its the current year!
The instrument (the telescreen, it was called) could be dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off completely.
The patrols did not matter, however. Only the Thought Police mattered.
It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy.
The idea had even crossed his mind that she might be an agent of the Thought Police. That, it was true, was very unlikely. Still, he continued to feel a peculiar uneasiness, which had fear mixed up in it as well as hostility, whenever she was anywhere near him.
The next moment a hideous, grinding screech, as of some monstrous machine running without oil, burst from the big telescreen at the end of the room. It was a noise that set ones teeth on edge and bristled the hair at the back of ones neck. The Hate had started.
The program of the Two Minutes Hate varied from day to day, but there was none in which Goldstein [Donald Trump] was not the principal figure. He was the primal traitor, the earliest defiler of the Partys purity. All subsequent crimes against the Party, all treacheries, acts of sabotage, heresies, deviations, sprang directly out of his teaching.
To dissemble your feelings, to control your face, to do what everyone else was doing, was an instinctive reaction.
Thought-crime was not a thing that could be concealed forever. You might dodge successfully for a while, even for years, but sooner or later they were bound to get you.
People simply disappeared, always during the night. Your name was removed from the registers, every record of everything you had ever done was wiped out, your one-time existence was denied and then forgotten. You were abolished, annihilated: vaporized was the usual word.
Parsons [Tim Wise] was Winstons fellow employee at the Ministry of Truth. He was a fattish but active man of paralyzing stupidity, a mass of imbecile enthusiasmsone of those completely unquestioning, devoted drudges on whom, more even than on the Thought Police, the stability of the Party depended.
It was almost normal for people over thirty to be frightened of their own children. And with good reason, for hardly a week passed in which the Times did not carry a paragraph describing how some eavesdropping little sneakchild hero was the phrase generally usedhad overheard some compromising remark and denounced his parents to the Thought Police.
12. Literally Hitler
The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and it followed that any past or future agreement with him was impossible.
13. Rewriting history
Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct; nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary.
14. Fake news
Beyond, above, below, were other swarms of workers engaged in an unimaginable multitude of jobs. There were the huge printing shops with their sub-editors, their typography experts, and their elaborately equipped studios for the faking of photographs.
15. Threats to state power
One of these days, thought Winston with sudden deep conviction, Syme [Jared Taylor] will be vaporized. He is too intelligent. He sees too clearly and speaks too plainly. The Party does not like such people. One day he will disappear. It is written in his face.
16. Narrative zombies
As he watched the eyeless face with the jaw moving rapidly up and down, Winston had a curious feeling that this was not a real human being but some kind of dummy. It was not the mans brain that was speaking; it was his larynx. The stuff that was coming out of him consisted of words, but it was not speech in the true sense: it was a noise uttered in unconsciousness, like the quacking of a duck.
17. Shaping reality
In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense.
18. Lowest common denominator
There was a small bookcase in the other corner, and Winston had already gravitated toward it. It contained nothing but rubbish. The hunting-down and destruction of books had been done with the same thoroughness in the prole quarters as everywhere else.
19. Changing the past
One could not learn history from architecture any more than one could learn it from books. Statues, inscriptions, memorial stones, the names of streetsanything that might throw light upon the past had been systematically altered.
20. Destruction of sex relations
He thought of her naked, youthful body, as he had seen it in his dream. He had imagined her a fool like all the rest of them, her head stuffed with lies and hatred, her belly full of ice. A kind of fever seized him at the thought he might lose her, the white youthful body might slip away from him!
Truly captivating stuff from a literary classic. Also bear in mind that these passages were only taken out of the first 100 pages of the book. Such is the scope of modern day social justice insanity that many great passages cannot fit in just one article.
Nineteen Eighty-FourOn a scarlet-draped platform an orator of the Inner Party, a small lean man with disproportionately long arms and a large bald skull over which a few lank locks straggled, was haranguing the crowd. A little Rumpelstiltskin figure, contorted with hatred, he gripped the neck of the microphone with one hand while the other, enormous at the end of a bony arm, clawed the air menacingly above his head. His voice, made metallic by the amplifiers, boomed forth an endless catalogue of atrocities, massacres, deportations, lootings, rapings, torture of prisoners, bombing of civilians, lying propaganda, unjust aggressions, broken treaties. It was almost impossible to listen to him without being first convinced and then maddened. At every few moments the fury of the crowd boiled over and the voice of the speaker was drowned by a wild beast-like roaring that rose uncontrollably from thousands of throats. The most savage yells of all came from the schoolchildren. The speech had been proceeding for perhaps twenty minutes when a messenger hurried on to the platform and a scrap of paper was slipped into the speaker's hand. He unrolled and read it without pausing in his speech. Nothing altered in his voice or manner, or in the content of what he was saying, but suddenly the names were different. Without words said, a wave of understanding rippled through the crowd. Oceania was at war with Eastasia! The next moment there was a tremendous commotion. The banners and posters with which the square was decorated were all wrong! Quite half of them had the wrong faces on them. It was sabotage ! The agents of Goldstein had been at work ! There was a riotous interlude while posters were ripped from the walls, banners torn to shreds and trampled underfoot. The Spies performed prodigies of activity in clambering over the rooftops and cutting the streamers that fluttered from the chimneys. But within two or three minutes it was all over. The orator, still gripping the neck of the microphone, his shoulders hunched forward, his free hand clawing at the air, had gone straight on with his speech. One minute more, and the feral roars of rage were again bursting from the crowd. The Hate continued exactly as before, except that the target had been changed.
by George Orwell
(from chapter 17)
The thing that impressed Winston in looking back was that the speaker had switched from one line to the other actually in midsentence, not only without a pause, but without even breaking the syntax... Oceania was at war with Eastasia : Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia. A large part of the political literature of five years was now completely obsolete.
If you came out of high school and college in the 1970s...there was a 10-percent chance that you read ‘1984’ at some point and were aware of the story. Today? I would suggest that less than .5-percent have read the book. You can find journalists with the top networks who will admit that they’ve never read the book.
The other one was "Animal Farm."
bttt
The authors Twitter account has been suspended for violating the rules.
Recently read it again myself and watched the John Hurt movie. I found the movie failed a bit, concentrating too much on the interrogation as if that was a greater horror than the disordered society rather than just its inevitable end. The book however never fails to feel like something that could quite easily occur given enough gullible people and a perceived need to give over control
I hated both books.
I can appreciate how they were written and the message they contain, but that someone would LIKE that speaks a lot about that individual.
It’s more than a little disturbing how fast these changes are happening and being pushed.
One wonders IF the pendulum will one day swing back the other way. I have no doubt if Hitlery had been elected all of this would have gone into warp speed with little we could do other than be in that civil war we were all looking at before President Trump was elected.
I think the only way that venomous snake was going to stop is if its head had been removed. All the heads of all the snakes (rats).
I read “1984” twice, “Brave New World” several times.
“1984” is much more terrifying.
Ya. It “speaks” that they recognize true intellect.
No none of this is happening. Don’t believe your lying eyes.
It’s just a tinfoil nut-job conspiracy.
Yup. He hurt their feelings!
It is on the banned list in many schools... Was just talking to a friend about this about a year ago and she said she asked her kids teachers what grade they would be reading it in... They said the district (they live in Glendale, Arizona) won’t allow them to assign it to be read and the book is not even in their libraries.
Here is a FREE pdf version of 1984 if anybody is interested...
https://www.planetebook.com/free-ebooks/1984.pdf
Item #7. Conformity re the Pink Pussy Hat Wearers.
They are stupid but if you want to have fun, get one or make a big one and put an “Animal House” saying on it, like they did to Flounder’s Continental. It said in big letters, “EAT ME”!
You’ll get a lot of laughs from our side, but I hope you can run like hell from the Left.
However, if you stage it properly, letting local and friendly TV and videogroups know what you are going to do, as you run from the mob of Pink Pussy Hats, you can say loudly to the world (via TV or video), “I didn’t know Vaginas could run so fast!!”
Let the laughter begin!!
There was a cartoon film made of “Animal Farm”. It is time for people to find it and start playing it for family, friends, parents groups, esp. PTAs, at religious institutions/schools, and at community centers.
Do it for free but make sure that you have widespread publicity, be prepared for the need for more showings, and have some serious security (ex-GI’s, parents, local police and take no shit from the disruptive Left. Have them charged).
Saul Alinsky would like my proposal because he was a big proponent of the use of “ridicule” to expose his capitalist enemies. I’m a big fan of Alinsky’s techniques that work, so let’s use them against the Alinskyites like Hillary, Obamites and Progressives.
bookmark
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Heh.
You’ve got Tim Wise down to a tee!
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