Chuds might as well quote Tekashi 6ix9ine whenever someone they like is banned from creating bad content on the internet
Best response to right wingers citing Animal Farm is to ask them who the farmers are supposed to represent
But it’s defeatist. The message is, yes the capitalists were bad, BUT trying to do anything about it with a central system like ML’s propose (the people who have brought you the overwhelming majority of successful revolutions and all powerful states ruled by a communist party so far) just results in the same kind of exploitation by those people becoming the very thing they replaced. It fits perfectly in the liberal idea of “yeah capitalism isn’t perfect, but it is eternal and any attempts to replace it will just result in the same kind of exploitation but by different people”. Orwell was not a fucking anarchist so don’t give me shit about that. Real Anarchists ™ don’t have colonial worldviews and snitch on people.
I used to think 1984 was kinda bad politically but a good book in general, then I read Isaac Asimov’s critique and now I think it’s just trash lol. Never before has a critique made me go “wow, I thought it was good while I was reading it but… Holy shit it really IS bad, I didn’t think of all this stuff” to such an extent.
Critique Linked Here (I believe this is it, anyway): http://www.newworker.org/ncptrory/1984.htm
What’s so bad about George Orwell?
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He’s antisemitic, homophobic, and racist. Specifically, he snitched out Jews, Black people, Homosexuals, and communists to British Intelligence. His list, here, includes him writing:
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8 variations of “Jewish?” (Charlie Chaplin), “Polish Jew, (Tom Driberg)” “English Jew,” or “Jewess.”
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Paul Robeson - “ROBESON, Paul (US Negro) …Very anti-white. [Henry] Wallace supporter.”
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Paul Robeson wasn’t anti-white, just look at the welsh coal miners for whom Robeson Campaigned.
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The testimony of Paul Robeson (one of the people Orwell snitched on), to HUAC (House of Unamerican activities committee) during the red scare.
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Stephen Spender - “Sentimental sympathiser… Tendency towards homosexuality”
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Hugh MacDiarmid, Scottish nationalist poet, and anti-imperialist.
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George Padmore, Trinidadian journalist and anti-imperialist campaigner.
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His books Animal Farm and 1984 are used widely as anti-communist propaganda in schools in the US and UK. So much so that his animated animal farm film was funded by the CIA . There’s a reason they teach George Orwell in schools and not Franz Fanon, Che, Huey P Newton, Malcolm X, Lenin, CLR James, etc. (Why do you people defending him as having communist value think you know better than the CIA? I think they know how to fight communism, tyvm.)
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Orwell, anti-communist: A criticism of Orwell and his Work - By Isaac Asimov.
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Orwell worked as a British imperial cop in Burma for 5 years. His short story, Shooting an Elephant, uses ethnic slurs and denigrates burmese people.
He attempted to commit a rape.
Originally posted by reddit user parentis_shotgun.
There’s a reason they teach George Orwell in schools and not Franz Fanon, Che, Huey P Newton, Malcolm X, Lenin, CLR James
In fairness I don’t believe any of these other people ever wrote books that could be read and comprehended by middle schoolers.
I admit I haven’t actually read any of the works of any of these people. Yet. I will, I promise
The point stands. There are child accessible novels that look positively on communism, anarchist systems, etc. I can’t think of any off the top of my head. Steinbeck is the closest I can come but his works weren’t really explicitly pro-communist so much as sympathetic to the plight of working people and critical of the system’s flaws.
And there is a reason why certain books are so widely read. Yes an individual teacher or school with “progressive” administrations can set curriculum that involves books that challenge the American consensus but widely and broadly these books (Orwell) are popular, are recommended, are demanded or strongly encouraged by school board policy, are bulk bought, are included in study guides and teacher materials. Same thing with the Ayn Rand trash, purchasing of which is often funded by large donations by libertarian “think” tanks and private businesses. Books are a racket. School books especially so and many schools still use overly worn, quite old books because they simply cannot afford to replace them. A teacher who wants to assign reading typically must have enough copies of that book for everyone in the class plus themselves. That’s often 25-30 or more books.
I’ve never heard the first bit, do you have a writeup anywhere?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_%26_Us
Eric & Us is a 1974 memoir by Jacintha Buddicom recalling her childhood friendship with Eric Blair, the real name of author George Orwell. Buddicom first met Blair when he was eleven and he became very close to her family. Their friendship lasted until Blair became a policeman in Burma and the two lost touch. Blair and Buddicom never saw one another again and did not resume contact until 1949, shortly before Orwell’s death from tuberculosis…
Buddicom’s cousin, Dione Venables, added a postscript to the memoir in 2006, suggesting that the real reason for the ending of Blair and Buddicom’s friendship was the possibility that Blair, in an attempt to further their relationship, may have tried to rape Buddicom. Dione Venables responded by revealing that Buddicom never interpreted Blair’s adolescent fumbling as rape, but that the incident was merely a moment when his immature desires got the better of him.
This is all the information I know. If this is the extent of the story, it can be read in multiple ways, one of which is “he tried to rape a childhood friend, that ended their relationship, and when the story came out decades later someone threw in the type of excuse polite society often uses to excuse rapists.” It could be read more generously in Orwell’s favor, too, but it really doesn’t matter one way or the other.
I think the far more compelling rebuttal to people who default to “this is 1984” is “maybe you shouldn’t base your political opinions on young adult literature.”
Stupid libs on the r*edit SRA pages kept trying to white wash him and be like “I’m actually sweetie he only wrote down the name of socialists for something else and no one was hurt”
