Archived material Access restricted Article
Rantburg

Today's Front Page   View All of Sun 07/14/2019 View Sat 07/13/2019 View Fri 07/12/2019 View Thu 07/11/2019 View Wed 07/10/2019 View Tue 07/09/2019 View Mon 07/08/2019
1
2019-07-14 Home Front: Culture Wars
Nineteen Eighty-Four at 70: What Orwell Got Right
Archived material is restricted to Rantburg regulars and members. If you need access email fred.pruitt=at=gmail.com with your nick to be added to the members list. There is no charge to join Rantburg as a member.
Posted by Besoeker 2019-07-14 02:00|| || Front Page|| [3 views ]  Top

#1 Nostradamus would be jealous of Orwell.
Posted by One Eyed Tsar 2019-07-14 06:54||   2019-07-14 06:54|| Front Page Top

#2 What Orwell Got Right - everything.
Posted by Raj 2019-07-14 06:59||   2019-07-14 06:59|| Front Page Top

#3 Aesop, Orwell, once you get a drift of human behavior, it really doesn't change. Orwell figured out rather early what power and the concentration of power leads to in the modern world. BTW, the founders thought the same thing which is the reason for the separation of powers among the branches of the national government and between the states and national government. That's an arrangement that the Judiciary has been attacking in its assumption of authority and power that was never intended.
Posted by Procopius2k 2019-07-14 08:14||   2019-07-14 08:14|| Front Page Top

#4 So might as well call London "Airstrip One" from now on...no "Steamers" yet but plenty of knife and acid attacks.
Posted by Unosh Hupinelet8756  2019-07-14 09:30||   2019-07-14 09:30|| Front Page Top

#5 Of course Orwell was liberal. Many think of him as an atheist and rebel, like Hitchens, seeking to find common ground with his genius. I believe he was more christian than christians try to be, and never knew it. He did hate the roman catholic creeds anyway, and saw the same bureaucratic bullshit in organized religion as in any other political committee.

Any liberal of Orwell's kind would probably see the 'liberals' of today as bloody fools, anarchy cultists with zero understanding, free time and money on their hands. If Marx met AOC for example, he'd rip his manifesto to shreds and stomp on it. Liberal thinkers have appropriated his legacy to spell out 'Big Brother' and its connotations with national security agencies Poor, desperate bastards and surveillance. But that's the problem with so many supposed 'thinkers', lauded by committees and rulers as visionaries because their enterprise borrows from unreal doctrine to gain acceptance. These thinkers can opine on utopias and possible outcomes of theoretical prescriptions to be inserted in legislation, because it's easy to think in terms of 'the written word.' Scholars and academics, have so very little connect with real life and almost always die adamant, narcissistic old farts.

What the Bible teaches is that it's the spirit behind every word that is more important. Because word is thought expressed and thoughts originate in spirit(or mind, if you're so inclined). An evil spirit expressing seemingly kind, generous words and humanist theories still aims to wreak havoc by supplanting mankind. And you know the spirit by it's fruits. So if it has once produced mayhem and destruction, the result the second time round, with revised theories and new words won't be any different. For example, the first evil spirit that controlled mankind and taught us about 'Big Government' and globalism was in Babylon.

It was Nimrod who united every known tribe into constructing the first self licking ice-cream cone. His administration taught them government - the so called social compact, and the enslavement of man by other men. And every organization, bureaucracy and committee today swears by its efficacy.

America is not yet a dystopia, only because there still have to be people there who believe in the first word, from God. The Bible.
Posted by Dron66046 2019-07-14 10:36||   2019-07-14 10:36|| Front Page Top

#6 Can someone say AMEN???

Wonderful post.

As long as we who believe continue to witness to the word, we have a chance.
Posted by Sock Puppet of Doom 2019-07-14 10:40||   2019-07-14 10:40|| Front Page Top

#7 Everything - you (in USA) have seen nothing yet.
Posted by g(r)omgoru 2019-07-14 11:11||   2019-07-14 11:11|| Front Page Top

#8 This article is exactly right.

Newspeak is everywhere, and the goal is exactly as Orwell predicted: to restrict thought by declaring certain ways of thinking to be culturally and even legally unacceptable.

We see this in Ontario's ridiculous tranny legislation that compels the use of Newspeak.

We see it in the ubiquitous use of the bullshit, nonsense-on-stilts neologism undocumented that has displaced the clear and universally-understood, standard legal term used in the statutes, illegal alien.

We see it in the complete degradation of the word diversity, to the point where it denotes the absence of diversity.

"Tolerance" means intolerance.

"Progressive" denotes reactionary politics.

"Conservative" describes radicalism and extreme market mania.

"Shareholder value" describes the practice of corporate insiders lining their own pockets.

Etc etc

Posted by Lex 2019-07-14 12:14||   2019-07-14 12:14|| Front Page Top

#9 We've got a lot of Brave New World features: distraction by entertainment and soma and sex. So far.
Posted by james 2019-07-14 14:24||   2019-07-14 14:24|| Front Page Top

#10 Orwell didn't write Brave New World. He wrote 1984.
Posted by Herb McCoy  2019-07-14 15:13||   2019-07-14 15:13|| Front Page Top

#11 Of course he didn't. That was kind of the point--he missed some things. So far: A real life Brave New World isn't exactly a stable society.
Posted by james 2019-07-14 22:33||   2019-07-14 22:33|| Front Page Top

22:33 james
22:08 Snavimble Bucket1794
21:36 Procopius2k
21:17 trailing wife
21:02 trailing wife
20:57 M. Murcek
20:46 SteveS
20:45 SteveS
20:13 crazyhorse
20:01 DarthVader
19:25 rammer
19:20 rammer
19:06 JohnQC
19:02 JohnQC
18:31 The peanut gallery
18:18 Lex
18:06 trailing wife
17:22 Frank G
17:02 chris
17:01 chris
16:59 chris
16:40 Bertie Snereting9692
16:11 jpal
15:54 jpal









Paypal:
Google
Search WWW Search rantburg.com