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Purging George Orwell's books misses what drives the political right
- jruohonen 3mo agoI suppose he saw also this coming. Ref.: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48737387 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48737387
- yogthos 3mo ago[flagged]
- kfjeifjejfj 3mo ago[flagged]
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- yogthos 3mo agoI find Orwell appeals to the pseudo-intellectual crowd because he says things that don't really have any profound insight, but seem deep to superficial people who want to feel smart. When you look at it critically, his writing has a really strong 'I'm 13 and this is deep' energy to it.
- dash2 3mo agoThis is beyond silly. The guy who wrote Down and Out… and Road to Wigan Pier, and actually fought fascists in Spain, couldn’t imagine proles as anything but brainless subhumans? Orwell in 1948 didn’t predict computers? Have I been trolled?
- VonGuard 3mo agoObvious troll. Calling Orwell a rich kid who got his feelings hurt is obscene. I challenge anyone who says that to work as a plongeur for even one week. Or to live on only toast and tea, bumming around the work houses in the UK. He never begged for money from anyone, he only worked during this time, and his book on the topic is remarkable. It's a must read for anyone who's ever worked in the food service industry. His work house experiences informed 1984. The original poster in this comment thread is just trolling beyond belief, and also, seems to have no grasp of the topics at hand what so ever.
- yogthos 3mo agoThe guy was literally just slumming it by choice. Only one trolling here is you bud.
- gdsimoes 3mo agoI find Orwell to be a much better writer than Asimov, and 1984 was praised by people like Bertrand Russell (who was arguably a greater writer than either of them, even winning a Nobel Prize). Also, Orwell was shot in the neck in Spain while literally fighting fascists. Still, thank you for the link to Asimov’s review. I’ll read it later.
- yogthos 3mo agoI find Orwell is infantile in the extreme.
- circlefavshape 3mo ago> having humans watch every citizen on camera instead of just using computers which even Asimov in the 1980s could see was laughably inefficient 1984 was published in 1949. It's a bit harsh to expect him to have anticipated computers
- TimorousBestie 3mo agoIn addition, he was riffing on Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon, a hub-and-spoke style prison design with a single guard at the hub observing the prisoners in each spoke. 1984 imagines a telecom-enabled nationwide panopticon, which made for good speculative fiction in the 50’s (and also does now). Asimov wishes he had been that prescient.
- yogthos 3mo agoRead what Asimov says in his review, the whole idea is fundamentally absurd when you think about it for even a second.
- isx726552 3mo agoAsimov seems to have missed that the book does not claim that everyone is being watched at all times, but that everyone could be watched at any time, in any place, and that they have no way to know for sure if they are at any given moment. Therefore, they have to behave as if they are under surveillance at all times, just in case. It’s a very effective and practical means of control. See the famous panopticon concept. You don’t even need a guard in the tower, just the threat of one most of the time, and occasional random, unpredictable enforcement just often enough that the surveilled cannot relax. The cost of doing so is not impractical at all. Asimov is missing an important point that is pretty clearly spelled out in the novel, and this severely weakens his critique. I find this pretty funny because he starts off the essay insinuating that others who claim to love the book haven’t read it. Same to you for hating it without having understood it, Asimov!
- yogthos 3mo ago[flagged]
- autoexec 3mo ago> and the technology is nonsensical like having humans watch every citizen on camera instead of just using computers I think our current world proves that being watched by humans hits people in a way that being monitored by computers doesn't. Remember those "Surveillance Camera Man" videos? You can see countless examples online of people freaking out at a human engaging in public photography because they filmed them or snapped a picture. Often they do it while standing directly under surveillance cameras. It doesn't matter to people if their ring camera is using facial recognition and logging everything within its field of view and secretly forwarding that data to law enforcement agencies, but try standing on the sidewalk in front of their house and recording everyone who comes and goes and see how they react.
- willy_k 3mo agoBecause one scenario is more directly tied to potential (undesirable) uses of the photos, and more obviously doing something. If people saw consequences resulting from security cameras, they would pay more mind to them. People aren’t ignoring a security camera in a bathroom.
- autoexec 3mo agoI mean, when it comes to things like ring/nest cameras and ALPRs everybody is pretty upfront about the fact that all the footage they collect is going to be used against you in one way or another. It's pretty hard to get a more direct tie to potential (undesirable) uses. Amazon has made headlines after being sued for giving employees and contractors "unfettered" access to personal videos, and for allowing contractors to listen to people having sex, and for giving police access to the feeds without consent, but people are still buying them up and using them. A street photographer is a much smaller threat. What's the worst some random person on a public street can do with your photograph? Compare that with the harm that can be done by a massive corporation with billions at their disposal who has been building a dossier on you for decades and who records you 24/7 and is determined to use that data in any way that makes them profit regardless of what you want or what the law says.
- redsocksfan45 3mo ago[dead]
- tomhow 3mo agoIt's fine, indeed great, to express a less common point of view on HN. But could you please not fulminate like this? The guidelines specifically ask us to avoid that, and make it clear we're hoping for something better than this. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- Ancapistani 3mo agoSomewhat meta: this is perhaps the most fertile ground for an online flamewar I've ever seen. It's got something for everyone. Any ideology I can think of could be applied both for and against with equal ferocity.
- _doctor_love 3mo agoHey, as long as the masses are looking to the left and the right for their enemies, rather than up, that's what's desired.
- tharmas 3mo agoYes, THIS!!!!!!
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- Oarch 3mo agoBut popcorn sales are through the roof!
- kstenerud 3mo agoHow so? Orwell's stories dealt with class protectionism, and how the average person unwittingly contributes to systems of oppression and exclusion. Empire is about outsourcing the bottom end of inequality.
- Ancapistani 3mo agoThe article is about how removing those books - for the very stated reasons you outlines - could, according to the author, contribute to the rise of the right and the destruction of those ends. (just an example; it really can be framed from pretty much any angle)
- deleted 3mo ago
- _doctor_love 3mo agoReminds me of an observation made when they removed Maus from a library in Tennessee I think it was: "these people want a kinder gentler Holocaust." It's totally idiotic the state we have reached, with an absolutely equal number of stupid people on the left and the right.
- DougN7 3mo agoI have come to the same conclusion. Not sure how we pull people towards the center.
- _doctor_love 3mo agoI am sad to say it but I am not sure it is possible in the short term. It seems that there is a taste for conflict in the air and we are cruising towards another world-level spasm of violence before we can return to some semblance of sanity.
- mdlxxv 3mo agoPurging 1984 sounds like something out of 1984.
- motohagiography 3mo agoOrwell's work was peak english literary culture, and what they call criticim and theory are really just a way to dissolve meaning and kill culture by preventing it from persisting as coherent meaning in time. It's an unmooring and uprooting, and it does not produce anything anyone actually desires other than a set of shibboleths for a conspiracy to destroy a culture and rule over its ashes. There is no political-right, it is an artifact of whatever these people are criticizing to destroy and rule over the ashes of, it means nothing. Specifically, it uses ideology to assign or project an othering counter-ideology on its enemies to manage them with further criticism. It's mesmerist gibberish all the way down. That we need words at all to describe it is a fairly modern invention, because historically it was just evil trying to dissolve your society and enslave it, everyone saw it, and you just smote it for what it was. In their own words, suffocate it from the oxygen of attention it needs to survive.
- willy_k 3mo agoVery well put. > it means nothing. Specifically, it uses ideology to assign or project an othering counter-ideology on its enemies to manage them with further criticism. It's mesmerist gibberish all the way down. This exactly, I hope for opportunities to repeat as much.
- jdw64 3mo agoSometimes I find myself wondering what "thinking" even means. Someone proposes a frame, and then people who buy into that frame rally around it and work to reinforce it. Is that really thinking? I keep coming back to this article's whole framing around the "culture war." Maybe it's because I'm not sharp enough to fully follow what smart people are saying, but this piece feels less like thinking and more like its arguments are running wild. The article ends up repeating the very error of the identity politics it sets out to criticize. It takes aim at identity centered interpretation, yet its own argument sets up class and identity as rivals in a zero sum game. On the mechanisms of imperialism that the article lays out, I think it overreaches. Yes, we need to examine how relative status security works, things like class anxiety fused with racial superiority and imperial citizenship, and how material class anxiety gets politically channeled through identity hierarchies like race, nation, nationality, and gender. That's a worthwhile line of inquiry. But the article seems to be offering a reductive, first order causal explanation of imperialism. The main drivers of imperialism were numerous: interstate competition, capital accumulation, bureaucratic organization, and more. The notion that the metropolitan working class and lower middle class derived psychological compensation from imperial status looks less like a cause of imperialism and more like a legitimizing mechanism after the fact. I suspect the author is channeling Orwell's own perspective as a socialist here. If not, then the level of analysis is simply too shallow. And can we really pin the rise of the modern far right on economic anxiety alone? I don't think so. Not everyone facing similar economic conditions turns to right wing populism. What matters is how political leaders, the media, the collapse of local industry, generation, education, the loss of cultural status, and the party system organize that anxiety into a particular political language. Forces like MAGA are fundamentally rooted in the Bible Belt. Their lives are bound up with religious community, and they become right wing based on those values. In the end, it's a complex entanglement of cultural and geographical positioning. That said, I do agree that some political demagogues use cultural codes as fuel. So honestly, I don't really know. It's frustrating not being able to write logically in English, as if I've been muzzled. It's not my native language. But here's the core of it: even if we assume AI was behind the exclusion, we don't know the premise behind that decision. So how can anyone call it a "purge"? It could be an AI hallucination. Or maybe the AI judged that dystopian novels don't fit the modern context. Without any account of the process, I find it hard to follow the logic that just leaps straight to framing it as class warfare.
- wtfHN26 3mo ago> We can see similar patterns today. The European working class can no longer seek status in the colonies, so it is turning to the political right. Deprived of the security and opportunities promised by neoliberalism, the working classes increasingly seek inclusion through the exclusion of others. I see the same on HN when a topic about H1 B visas is posted. Going by comments on such posts Immigration seems to be fine as long as it is affecting blue collar work. The pitchforks are out when it concerns one's own job. Then they talk about quality of programmers, outsourcing companies, the process of H1B not being fair etc. Makes me think that it's insecurity about finance and status, but not limited to a certain economic class. > Populist parties frame migration as an economic and cultural threat. They blame migrants for problems ranging from crime to unemployment. And while social democratic parties are campaigning on ideological platforms, many voters still prioritise material security. Voting patterns suggest that class remains central. This framing of the issue suggests that the issue is not real, while it could be a simple matter of people being worried about their financial well being and safety. Consider the Pakistani Grooming gangs in UK with estimates suggesting up to 250,000 potential victims nationwide over several decades. Many of the victims were young working class. Their plight was ignored so as not to antagonize a community. Dismissive attitudes towards victims: Many of the victims were working-class, vulnerable, or living in state care. Authorities often stigmatized them as "troubled" or "consenting," systematically ignoring their cries for help and failing to implement a child-centered approach. As per BBC - Institutional paralysis: Police forces and local authorities lacked adequate training and suffered from severe bureaucratic dysfunction. In some instances, agencies viewed the gangs’ ethnic minority status and cultural backgrounds as "no-go" zones, allowing criminal networks to operate hidden behind the shield of "cultural sensitivities" So to ensure that you are not being 'against migrants' created a situation that was hell for a lot of women. We don't know if European Working class in other countries are seeing similar issues that happened in UK but were brushed under by the police and the British Media. Let's not paint the working class as naive and just against migrants as 'seek inclusion through the exclusion of others." The working class was not against migrants all along. If something changed, we should try to find out what the real issue is.
- M95D 3mo agoCome on, it's not that bad! Children today barely read anyway. And even if they do, they won't understand what 1984's fuss is all about. Surveilance is normal. Censorship is what their parents have been doing since they were born. Simplified language is how the president talks. Historical events happening or not depends on who's youtube video they're viewing. There's nothing interesting in that book. /s