The argument of Orwellian propaganda depicting news coming from the alleged Left Media is a statement often dropped during the D&D threads, but to my knowledge a statement that hasn’t been tackled head on yet. So, hold on because this is going to be a bumpy ride. A lot of you will not like this thread but this is a discussion that we need to have at some point, debating the roots of what is now known as ‘alternative facts’ and what that means for our societies. Everyone is of course welcome in this thread and the more debate we can have, the better for all of us. I would please request that, since this is a sensitive subject for many people, you will debate with an open head.
To begin with, how did Orwell came to be co-opted so many years after his death by the right-wing crusaders, bringing back his final warnings as an accusation to what the right-wingers consider ‘leftist propaganda’ and ‘thought policing’? The story begins with Orwell’s condemnation of the Soviet Unions’ actions in Barcelona in 1936…
The Ministry of Truth: The Biography of George Orwell’s 1984, by the British music critic Dorian Lynskey, makes a rich and compelling case for the novel as the summation of Orwell’s entire body of work and a master key to understanding the modern world. The book was published in 1949, when Orwell was dying of tuberculosis, but Lynskey dates its biographical sources back more than a decade to Orwell’s months in Spain as a volunteer on the republican side of the country’s civil war. His introduction to totalitarianism came in Barcelona, when agents of the Soviet Union created an elaborate lie to discredit Trotskyists in the Spanish government as fascist spies.
Left-wing journalists readily accepted the fabrication, useful as it was to the cause of communism. Orwell didn’t, exposing the lie with eyewitness testimony in journalism that preceded his classic book Homage to Catalonia—and that made him a heretic on the left. He was stoical about the boredom and discomforts of trench warfare—he was shot in the neck and barely escaped Spain with his life—but he took the erasure of truth hard. It threatened his sense of what makes us sane, and life worth living. “History stopped in 1936,” he later told his friend Arthur Koestler, who knew exactly what Orwell meant. After Spain, just about everything he wrote and read led to the creation of his final masterpiece. “History stopped,” Lynskey writes, “and Nineteen Eighty-Four began.”
Lynskey traces the literary genesis of 1984 to the utopian fictions of the optimistic 19th century—Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888); the sci-fi novels of H. G. Wells, which Orwell read as a boy—and their dystopian successors in the 20th, including the Russian Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1924) and Huxley’s Brave New World (1932). The most interesting pages in The Ministry of Truth are Lynskey’s account of the novel’s afterlife. The struggle to claim 1984 began immediately upon publication, with a battle over its political meaning. Conservative American reviewers concluded that Orwell’s main target wasn’t just the Soviet Union but the left generally. Orwell, fading fast, waded in with a statement explaining that the novel was not an attack on any particular government but a satire of the totalitarian tendencies in Western society and intellectuals: “The moral to be drawn from this dangerous nightmare situation is a simple one: Don’t let it happen. It depends on you.” But every work of art escapes the artist’s control—the more popular and complex, the greater the misunderstandings.
Of course Orwell meant with his condemnation more than to paint a picture of communism as the woe of all freedoms but taken with Orwell’s satirical novel The Animal Farm alone, the picture can be skewed to favor the right-wing narrative. In fact, he stated very clearly that
If publishers and editors exert themselves to keep certain topics out of print, it is not because they are frightened of prosecution but because they are frightened of public opinion. In this country intellectual cowardice is the worst enemy a writer or journalist has to face, and that fact does not seem to me to have had the discussion it deserves.
What does that mean? According to this article, Orwell’s position was more in line with the war-time UK’s voluntary self-censorship than the condemnation to communism that we generally believe it meant
The “discomfort” of intellectual honesty, Orwell writes, meant that even during wartime, with the Ministry of Information’s often ham-fisted attempts at press censorship, “the sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary.” Self-censorship came down to matters of decorum, Orwell argues—or as we would put it today, “civility.” Obedience to “an orthodoxy” meant that while “it is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other… it is ‘not done’ to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was ‘not done’ to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness," not by government agents, but by a critical backlash aimed at preserving a sense of “normalcy” at all costs.
At stake for Orwell is no less than the fundamental liberal principle of free speech, in defense of which he invokes the famous quote from Voltaire as well as Rosa Luxembourg’s definition of freedom as “freedom for the other fellow.” “Liberty of speech and of the press,” he writes, does not demand “absolute liberty”—though he stops short of defining its limits. But it does demand the courage to tell uncomfortable truths, even such truths as are, perhaps, politically inexpedient or detrimental to the prospects of a lucrative career. “If liberty means anything at all,” Orwell concludes, "it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
But what makes something Orwellian? In the book 1984, Winston writes in his diary that
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two equals four.
Which means the ability of an individual to challenge any state imposed narrative that comes in conflict with their fundamental experiences of life. Simply put
So too, in the real world, when state leaders and spokespersons can invent crimes and massacres, denounce the media for departing even slightly from the official party line, and entirely dismiss scientific findings, citizens have to decide whether they will likewise engage in doublethink-- if they will learn the “newspeak” and concede that two plus two is whatever they're told it is.
Which brings me to this very important article published in 2014. I’ll quote its abstract below
This article offers an academic critique of new media culture, as viewed comparatively with George Orwell's "1984." The author makes the argument that a number of plot elements of "1984" are reflected within contemporary Western societies. The assertion is made that these parallels have developed as a consequence of new media technologies. An over-arching position is taken that real-world governments have utilised new media technologies in ways that make themselves comparable to Orwell's fictional "Big Brother". The author begins by describing the socio-political landscape at the time Orwell wrote the novel. The next section addresses recent examples of ways in which government agencies have used new media technologies as a surveillance tool. The author posits that the US government uses new media technology as a propaganda tool. Through use of new media, the USA attempts to limit the ability of people to reject its narratives. In the final section, the author details the ways in which new media technologies are contributing to the destruction of language and knowledge. The author's concluding argument is that the negative effects of new media technology can only be ameliorated through critical thought.
I would like to see how you feel about the argument of liberal orwellian networks right about now so I’m going to stop my argumentation here momentarily. Please give your two cents before we begin.
Sources: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 |
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Originally Posted by Himster
