Careful. That’s not allowed even in the Pit. (More’s the Pity. 
)
I was going to write something like ‘If this is really true, kill me now.’
But I starting thinking how odd that expression was.
I was trying to joke. Did not work.
I apologize. Will not happen again. I do not wish any harm to either of those guys. I just sincerely hope they are wrong for the sake of the children.
I’m glad somebody is at last thinking of the children.
I began reading Orwell’s essays and editorials on a slow day at work a few summers ago, and I have to agree with those who say that he was one of the best writers ever to have lived. He had a way of taking the indecipherable and explaining it in such clear terms without oversimplifying that I spent the rest of the day pondering the problem in a new light. Also, given current events, quite a bit of what he says might have been put to paper yesterday. Read The Lion and the Unicorn and tell me that what he writes about Chamberlain couldn’t be applied to certain current leaders of the free world I could mention.
He also serves up some pretty amazing stuff both good and bad in his As I Please editorials. Most of what he writes isn’t really that deep. He goes off a lot on roses and bad architecture, but occasionally, he’ll talk about commentators of his day and things like revenge as a foreign policy, and man, he shines. He’ll talk about rightwing journo’s who were already obscure by the time his editorial came out, and I thought of Ann Coulter, and how people spend too much time worrying about her impact. This is the kind of advice that we could use today!
Of course, some of the other stuff he prints is jaw-droppingly bad. In the very same As I Please section, he advocates bombing civilians of an enemy country as a viable tactic, and he minimizes the cruelty of the French Terror, actually trying to frame it in socialist rhetoric–and that snippit, I have printed out somewhere just waiting for one of my republican friends to sound off about how Orwell was some hero of the conservative movement.
But just the existence of this stuff, whether you agree with it or not, is enough to really make you ponder. And in the end, while Orwell was very, very wrong about a lot of what he believed, he did make you think. I just wish we still had pundits like him.
Sorry if this is a hijack, but since when is Communism’s twin fascism? I’m pretty sure there were plenty of fascists who were right-wing, and I’m also pretty sure those were the ones Orwell spoke against. One can support Communism as an ideology (which I don’t, before anyone jumps on that) and still be against fascism - the two don’t have any overlap, theoretically speaking.
Depends how you look at it. Fascism and Communism are grouped together on the Nolan Chart but separated on the Pournelle Chart. FWIW. Orwell certainly saw both the differences and the similarities between them.
BTW, Orwell never supported Communism strictly speaking. He said more than once that we was no Marxist and had no interest in following the Comintern line. In Spain he fought for the POUM, a Marxist-but-anti-Stalinist party which I’ve often seen described as “anarchist.” He was always a serious critic of the Soviet Union, and his own vision of socialism (discussed in excerpts upthread) was a democratic and non-totalitarian one.
No he doesn’t. He ROCKS!
In light of what is happening I can’t help but think that 1984 is beyond anything Nostradamus ever predicted. That alone makes a visionary. And that’s just scratching the surface for as others have noted, that is far from his best literary work.
See, almost all things are subjective. Including me thinking that this OP was the product of knee-jerk criticism from a miserly wanna-be Right-wing ideologue.
Well, that was easy.
The funny thing is I have no problem with him hating whatever-politics-he-hated. I just think he was awfully obnoxious about it, and pretty damn hypcritical. Sure, he was a great writer; that’s what makes it so infuriating. It’s like having a nice peice of chocolate that somebody whacked off onto. You’d love to enjoy the chocolate, but you’d have to choke down some guy’s jizz.
After watching a recent PBS American Experiance episode, I’ll add that Whitman sucks also.
I can probably get behind that. (Gay Joke!)
Whitman never really did it for me. Yes, whee, expressive, yay, ok done now. He never really touched me (Gay Joke!) in the way Edgar Lee Masters did, precisely because he kept trying for these huge cosmically important things. Just way too far away from little ole me. I mean, he was a great poet, like Orwell was a great writer.
But both are people who are very clearly identified with a certain time and era, and they can’t go as far out of it. Both were somewhat trapped in their writings by their experiences, and don’t reach across time like some others.
You lie. You would not have Pitted Orwell if he had been a conservative with the same style and all the same failings you attribute to him.
:dubious: Hypocritical?
Mwah now? You’re saying I Pit him because he had a nonsensical political system which has been out of bounds of sense for decades, and even then was unusually narrow in its appeal (to a specific portion of the intellectual class of Englishmen).
But Conservatives of the day (at elast in England and probably France) were also twits. Don’t even get me started on how control freak they were, and often seemingly proud of ignorance and even brutality (cough colonialism cough) They fell a long way from Edmund Burke, who, while not without faults, was proud of being intellectual and valued tradition at the same time.
In the Politics and English language, he uses every damned one of the things he says are awful. And he uses them so much I used to think he did on purpose. I now believe he was simply incapable of seeing all those planks in his eye.
More directly, as a man who argued and argued against corrupt powerful governments, he was incapable of comprehending that his program would create exactly that. Like an awful lot of people (including some on this board) he simply kept on believing that f they just got the right people in charge (people like Orwell, even if he himself didn’t want it), everything would be just fine. And he himself was capable of railing against the current idiots in hcareg without ever realizing that he himself was part of the problem - just another idiot who wanted power.
Additionally, while he is correct that an economy under totalitarian management can devote a greater percentage of resources to warfare than a free economy based on individual interest, the latter eventually outstrips the former to the point where that greater percentage is still inferior in absolute terms.
The catch is that this takes time (e.g. the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union while straining to keep up with the United States is a classic example), and we have the advantage over Orwell of a half-century of additional perspective.
The belief that programs such as an enforced 10:1 maximum income ratio could be implemented without totalitarian methods was one of Orwell’s big honking blind spots.
Not at all. It would be in its essential mechanics no different than an income-tax system. (Which I realize is totalitarian in and of itself in the eyes of some, less said of them the better.) Why, even FDR once said there should be an upper limit to personal incomes and wealth in America.
Orwell had absolutely no illusions about the totalitarian potential of socialism. His two most famous books are about nothing else. Yet he never lost faith in democratic socialism as a goal. Again, from TLATU:
A heavy state, he envisions – but not one whit heavier than the one under which he grew up.
Let’s take an honest look at these, one by one.
No good writer of prose does this. Not a single one. They do quite often avoid threadbare expressions in favor of more expressive and original formulations, but they also use common expressions when their chief goal is to communicate clearly. Expressions become common precisely because they are useful, and good writers know when to use them and when not to.
This is simply a matter of taste. For some compositions, it is good advice. For others, it isn’t.
This might be the most ridiculous of the rules because Orwell can’t help but pompously contradict himself at the same time that he’s giving the rule. He could have written: “If it is possible to a cut a word [del]out[/del], always cut it [del]out[/del].”
My revision here isn’t necessarily better, but that’s precisely the point. It was possible to cut a word from his rule, and yet he didn’t.
The very first sentence of his essay contains a passive, and he uses more passives than the average newspaper. Again, his own writing style contradicts this rule. If you think “Politics and the English Language” is a well written essay, then you must recognize that passives are an incredibly useful part of our language that are not to be avoided.
Again, a matter of taste. There are utterly brilliant writers whose prose looks like the lexical equivalent of strong man competition: they’re always flexing their vocabulary. And yet they are incredibly well respected.
“Barbarous” has no meaning here outside of Orwell’s own personal preferences. Orwell is simply upset when other people don’t write the way he wants them to write. He leaves no room for people’s writing tastes to differ.
cricetus claims that this essay is “a useful tool for young writers”. Maybe that’s true. But considering the downright laziness of the piece, non-professional writers like me have a right to ask why this poorly thought out piece of shit can be so useful. A common claim about bad writing is that it reflects bad thinking. Well, okay, but that still doesn’t account for this essay. What do say when we have a piece of good writing that reflects obviously bad thinking?
The thrust of my post on the matter is that it was advice from a different era, and that rules like that have become dogma. FTR, I am actually kind of anti-rule when it comes to writing… I sigh in exasperation whenever they are trotted out in crit groups or discussion forums.
I do admire Orwell in general, and that essay is good for discussion if nothing else. I generally find literary discussions a bit more compelling when the participants resist the urge to say whether something “sucks” or not.
Unless they’re talking about Ayn Rand, in which case the suckiness is so unbelievably sucky that there’s really nothing else to talk about. 
I’m very passionate. That’s part of why I think literature debates are dull. People get all upset about important things like politics, but when was the last time anyone went and blew up a grammar school? Politics is too improtant to freak out over. If you are going to get emotional about something, it ought to be something unimportant, even trivial, in the grand scheme of things!
She also sucks! (Ok, I haven’t read anything of hers, though I get her general gist).
Actually, from what I heard she and Orwell had an lot in common.