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Trump supporters have been discussing "1984" for about a year now, well before the book shot up on Amazon because "Trump is literally 1984." It kept coming up
by gukov 10y ago
Trump supporters have been discussing "1984" for about a year now, well before the book shot up on Amazon because "Trump is literally 1984."
It kept coming up because of the rampant censorship by mass media, social media, and especially sites like reddit, not in small part thanks to efforts by Correct The Record and now ShareBlue.
- maus42 10y agoI think this is a good observation and deserves more attention. Everybody loves Orwell, on both sides of the Great American Culture War. During the election campaign I saw my US friends to compare Trump speeches to Two Minutes of Hate from the 1984 book. It was funny, I remarked, because the Trump-leaning people I occasionally argue with in the Internet had been calling angry Twitter users attacking various Republicans or Brendan Eich of Mozilla or whoever was the target of the latest scandal a social media version of Two Minutes of Hate years earlier. Then I wondered about where the Gamergate lashing out at "immoral journalists" fit in. Is Orwell popular today because everyone loves to metaphorically hit their enemies with a famous author who described famous dystopia, or is it because both sides are equally guilty, well, I don't know. My personal favorite dystopian author is Ray Bradbury and Fahrenheit 451. It is a book about an age where it's not the totalitarian government that burns books, but people who don't want to read books because they might be uncomfortable with the old ideas they might find, preferring spending their time in a room covered by flat screens, talking with their 'friends'. Quite remarkable for a book written in 1950s.