Some nerds were doing that thing where 40k fans are like “OH NO SEXZ IS HERESY!” when it’s pretty definitively not and is basically one of the only things in 40k that isn’t heretical (as long as you’re not doing evil slannesh shit) and it got me thinking about repression of sex under “in bad country regimes”.
And a whoooooooooooooooooooooooooole fucking thing in 1984 was how liberating and humanizing it was that the author’s grungy middle aged self-insert was boning a 19 year old member of the Junior Anti-Sex League, and, like… America has several thousand different Junior Anti-Sex League and I’m not sure if the USSR ever had any? Like, yeah, maybe they did, but under capitalism Americans have literally convinced themselves they’ll go to hell if they see a tiddy and the English famously just hate joy. So what the fuck was Orwell trying to critique with his “Junior Anti-Sex League” in spoooooky Stalinist England?
The greatest irony about 1984 is the the bulk of the concepts in it like “memory holes”, “doublethink”, “room 101”, perpetual war ect. ect. were directly inspired from Orwell working in a British propaganda ministry during WW2. NOT THE SOVIET UNION. Orwell never even visited the Soviet Union and had an admiration for Hitler. Everything else in the book is literally just a rehash of tired old anti-communist memes from the 1930s.
I should like to put it on record that I have never been able to dislike Hitler. Ever since he came to power—till then, like nearly everyone, I had been deceived into thinking that he did not matter—I have reflected that I would certainly kill him if I could get within reach of him, but that I could feel no personal animosity. The fact is that there is something deeply appealing about him. One feels it again when one sees his photographs—and I recommend especially the photograph at the beginning of Hurst and Blackett’s edition, which shows Hitler in his early Brownshirt days. It is a pathetic, dog-like face, the face of a man suffering under intolerable wrongs. In a rather more manly way it reproduces the expression of innumerable pictures of Christ crucified, and there is little doubt that that is how Hitler sees himself. The initial, personal cause of his grievance against the universe can only be guessed at; but at any rate the grievance is here. He is the martyr, the victim, Prometheus chained to the rock, the self-sacrificing hero who fights single-handed against impossible odds. If he were killing a mouse he would know how to make it seem like a dragon. One feels, as with Napoleon, that he is fighting against destiny, that he can’t win, and yet that he somehow deserves to. The attraction of such a pose is of course enormous; half the films that one sees turn upon some such theme.
I dunno, saying this is admiration is a mischaracterization. It is possible to find someone charismatic without admiring them. I mean, Orwell literally says he would kill Hitler if he had the chance - a sentiment I would not associate with an admirer.
you got your direct link but I highly recommend these as additional reading
What’s the connection between Britain and Room 101? Well, I guess they probably did a fair amount of torture.
Orwell’s works make more sense as critiques of the US and that’s really funny to me.
Exactly, I read 1984 when I was still kind of a lib and I still thought “hey, this just sounds like the US!” lol
I was a very young american conservative boy when I read it and I also was like “wow this is a critique of my country!” The book was one of many baby steps left for me and so I always find it extremely funny that it wasn’t supposed to do that.
Same, but with Animal Farm.
Now I’m a girl and I respect Stalin.
Sorry Orwell, you fucked up.
Word. I hope there’s a hell so he has been able to watch his beloved Capitalism turn in to the hell he thought Stalin’s USSR was.
One of those Isekais, except it’s Orwell in a cyberpunk realizing “I fucked up I fucked up”
Whatever Orwell intended, I doubt very much that he intended 1984 to become the training manual it has become today.
I don’t think there was much of anything other than “Stalin bad” going on in Orwell’s head when he wrote the book
The guy was dying of tuberculosis in the months after it was published, so I don’t think he did any interviews about it.
