Did Orwell ever talk about what he was trying to accomplish with 1984?
Did Orwell ever talk about what he was trying to accomplish with 1984?
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?
Orwell's works make more sense as critiques of the US and that's really funny to me.
Because liberals project all their flaws onto AES countries.
Exactly, I read 1984 when I was still kind of a lib and I still thought "hey, this just sounds like the US!" lol
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.
Yeah 1984 is a great takedown of Churchill-era policy stretched to its extremes, which is why modern-day Britain and other capitalist countries fit the mold much better despite the anti-stalinist brainworms.
Orwell [...] had an admiration for Hitler
Source?
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.
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.
Yeah, it's pretty standard for MI5 and MI6. The Met does it too but not on the same level and especially not recently. Orwell was a colonial cop, he likely had first or second hand knowledge of British torture practices. Never put that together before.
I don’t think there was much of anything other than “Stalin bad” going on in Orwell’s head when he wrote the book
Whatever Orwell intended, I doubt very much that he intended 1984 to become the training manual it has become today.
The guy was dying of tuberculosis in the months after it was published, so I don't think he did any interviews about it.
What a fucker. Denying me slop to mock him.
40k fans are like "OH NO SEXZ IS HERESY!"
Most romantically successful Warhammer 40k fans
RE: Orwell, he was a raging misogynist and I feel like 1984's "defying an authoritarian regime's aversion to sex by banging someone young enough to be my daughter" shit was just his barely concealed fetish. Also always worth remembering that a lot of his inspiration for Oceania actually came from his time as a colonial police officer in Burma (epic leftist moment) and was pure projection on his part.
I really want to write a fic where a military Sororitas chapter goes on leave on some poor, unsuspecting planet and everyone finds out that no, Sororitas are not sworn to chastity, but yes, they will try to set your priests on fire if their vestments are two inches too short. I think the combination of raw "We just got back from holy combat and we need to fuck" energy mixed with the turbo-nazi-fanaticism could be hilarious. Just the silliest stuff imaginable like a sister hearing a liturgy being played in the wrong key, jumping off a bewildered guy, and storming butt ass naked in to a chapel waving a flamer and yelling that she's going to tune the organ and anyone who tries to stop her is getting cremated. Then just blissfully walking back to her confused lover's room like nothing happened. Or holding sexual education courses for the miserably ignorant population where they explain the correct thirty minute long prayer to the emprah you're supposed to recite before boning. Set things up to be super
and then have it just go bizarrely off the rails right before the hanky panky gets interesting."Shooting an Elephant" is just a weird ass read. I should go through it again.
'Defying an authoritarian regime' so hard that he helped the British Empire in fighting against his supposedly-fellow anarchists and against racial minority rights advocates and activists.
Oh definitely, I fucking hate Orwell, but it's 100% how he saw himself lmao
The Blair snitch project
I know it's a boring answer that has already been given, but I really think it's just projection + making the book more marketable by putting a sex fantasy plot in it. I've never seen even a vague gesture at what the USSR would have had as an "Anti-Sex League", and the anglosphere is filled with them (and was even more so at the time), and it's objectifying Julia in a perfectly anglo fashion, i.e. a young maiden presses you, a middle-aged schlub, into cradle-robbing
The UKKK has had a long cultural history of sexual pathology percolating up from normalized sexual repression and I think
is a part of that.The UKKK failed to develop Republicanism because the guys who killed the king hated fun too much
"I'm especially liking the sound of the USSR right now."
(cw: sa)
probably has something do with how Eric Blair attempted toremoved his childhood friend (when they were both adults, iirc one was 18 and one was 20) and she never spoke to him again
is there some reason the brassica napus filter cannot be fixed? really makes it feel like no one's at the wheel of this bus
EDIT: what I mean is, the regex eats the character priot to the proscribed word, making it even harder to read
thinking about it more, Julia is probably the author's fantasy version of Jacintha Buddicom
this isn't by orwell himself but here's an interesting essay i found on the subject
https://www.maramarietta.com/the-arts/fiction/george-orwell/
This is the full text of Cass Sunstein’s chapter, ‘Sexual Freedom and Political Freedom’ in A. Gleason et al., editors, On Nineteen Eighty-Four: Orwell and our Future (Princeton University Press, 2005) pp. 233-241.
...
My claim here, however, is that Orwell’s claim is wrong—that there is no ‘direct, intimate connection between chastity and political orthodoxy.’ The links between ‘sexual privation’ and ‘orthodoxy’ are much less direct and intimate, and sometimes the two are antagonists, not allies. Orwell’s treatment of the issue is diminished by the fact that Julia, most of all on this count, emerges as less a person than an adolescent male fantasy, a point that may also shed light on the weakness of the link that Orwell draws between sexual freedom and totalitarianism. Orwell has at most identified a mechanism, not a lawlike generalization.
edit: liberalism warning lol
On this view, it is no accident that authoritarian nations—Afghanistan under the Taliban, for example, or communist China—are concerned both to crush dissent and to suppress sexual liberty.
“When you make love you’re using up energy; and afterwards you feel happyand don’t give a damn for anything. They can’t bear you to feel like that. Theywant you to be bursting with energy all the time. All this marching up anddown and cheering and waving flags is simply sex gone sour. If you’re happyinside yourself, why should you get excited about Big Brother and the Three-Year Plans and the Two Minutes Hate and all the rest of their bloody rot?”This was very true, he thought. There was a direct, intimate connectionbetween chastity and political orthodoxy. (110–11)
This is so perfectly British.
Orwell was just ahead of his time, depicting his enemies as the virgin incel soyjaks
intimate connectionbetween chastity and political orthodoxy
what i'm hearing is that following your volcel oath is the path to ideological purity. a hexbear before his time
What no training in anthropology does to a MF smdh. Tell people that relaxing old cultural restrictons on dating, public affection, and sexuality was one of the demands of the Maoists in Tienamen Square during the June 4th incident and their eyes just glaze over. Casually throwing Afghanistan and China together in the same sentence about sexuality is just... like...
Sexual Freedom and Political Freedom
Islam is actually a really good case for the complexities of sexual repression, and how you can't make blanket statements about it at all. In most mainstream Islamic trends you're not supposed to have sex outside of marriage ever, people are expected to dress and behave modestly within the norms of the culture, etc. But within marriage you're supposed to have sex and it's supposed to be good for both partners. The Gulf states are semi-famously one of hte world's largest consumers of lingerie. Islamic history is filled with erotic art and sex manuals. And attitudes about what is or is not acceptable can vary wildly across the Islamic world, across different cultures, and at different times in history. "Islam is sexually repressive" just isn't sufficient to have any understanding of what's happening across the Islamic world.
It's a long time since I read it, but I think the idea is to suggest dehumanization and artificiality in people who totally subsume themselves to political identity. Which I think is how Orwell basically saw supporters of Stalin, as mindless political fanatics
I remember reading a report by a Japanese think tank on the history of film in the dprk, where they described a film that had a fairly plain romance plot as being incredible because up to that point "state ideology only acknowledged love between the people and the Glorious Leader, not between individuals," which is just the most unhinged take.
It's so weird. There is a literal mural of George Washington displayed as God in the capital rotunda. Like, not next to god, not wearing the attire of god, not god like. As God.
But in bad country...
where 40k fans are like “OH NO SEXZ IS HERESY!”
I read plenty of books from 40k and there's barely any sex and even romance in most of them, idk where they even get the notion, probably from furious masturbating to Sisters of Battle. Also in 40K, even slaaneshi crowd in licenced materials seems to distinctly avoid anything sexual probably to avoid age labels put on said materials.
I’m not sure if the USSR ever had any?
I could assume it came from the anti-prostitution and pro-emancipation stance of USSR, to an incel and sex pest like Orwell this was probably tantamount to being anti-sex.
A science fi author being weird about sex is the most expected outcome. That venn diagram while not a circle has got to be an obliate sphereoid.
copy Zamyatin
Memes
