George Orwell and the Truth
"I keep finding excuses not to read the Orwell Essays. But what is the truth of which speak? Does it hold a solution?" - Vickie Hausmann Angus
The "truth" is truth itself. Though a socialist, Orwell criticized both the right and left with equal voracity.
My discovering what he was really about came at the time I was confronting leftist-progressive bigots on Baltimore’s Artmobile forum. These people would often, in reference to conservatives, say that they were “Orwellian.” My curiosity piqued, I decided to check him out for myself.
And what a revelation that was. In essay after essay, Orwell not only described the very situations I was experiencing on Artmobile, it was what was happening in this nation’s politics. The generic term was “Intellectual Dishonesty,” which covered a host of things like lies, propaganda, hate, intolerance, evasion of facts, half-truths, distortions, and more.
1984 wasn’t about George W. Bush, it was about Michael Moore and similar types.
Orwell valued reporting facts accurately more then anything else. The only way to even begin to solve society’s problems was to see the world “clearly,” a virtual impossibility with all the propaganda being flung around by both “sides.”
The latest essay I read is “Notes on Nationalism.” What was of immediate interest is the way he distanced Patriotism from Nationalism. Patriotism, the love of one’s country, is perfectly normal and acceptable. On the other hand, Nationalism is inseparable from the desire for power. It causes people to disregard common sense and become more ignorant towards factuality. Nationalism is not only defined as alignment to a political entity; it can also encompass a religion, race, ideology or any other abstract idea, like Communism, pacifism, and Anti-Semitism .
The reason I mention this, is that progressive-types habitually confuse Patriotism with Nationalism. Paranoid to begin with, they see all these “evils” that really aren’t there to begin with, and in their typical ignorance about Orwell’s writings, don’t understand that he was writing about them.
gfs / Facebook - June 19, 2015
The "truth" is truth itself. Though a socialist, Orwell criticized both the right and left with equal voracity.
My discovering what he was really about came at the time I was confronting leftist-progressive bigots on Baltimore’s Artmobile forum. These people would often, in reference to conservatives, say that they were “Orwellian.” My curiosity piqued, I decided to check him out for myself.
And what a revelation that was. In essay after essay, Orwell not only described the very situations I was experiencing on Artmobile, it was what was happening in this nation’s politics. The generic term was “Intellectual Dishonesty,” which covered a host of things like lies, propaganda, hate, intolerance, evasion of facts, half-truths, distortions, and more.
1984 wasn’t about George W. Bush, it was about Michael Moore and similar types.
Orwell valued reporting facts accurately more then anything else. The only way to even begin to solve society’s problems was to see the world “clearly,” a virtual impossibility with all the propaganda being flung around by both “sides.”
The latest essay I read is “Notes on Nationalism.” What was of immediate interest is the way he distanced Patriotism from Nationalism. Patriotism, the love of one’s country, is perfectly normal and acceptable. On the other hand, Nationalism is inseparable from the desire for power. It causes people to disregard common sense and become more ignorant towards factuality. Nationalism is not only defined as alignment to a political entity; it can also encompass a religion, race, ideology or any other abstract idea, like Communism, pacifism, and Anti-Semitism .
The reason I mention this, is that progressive-types habitually confuse Patriotism with Nationalism. Paranoid to begin with, they see all these “evils” that really aren’t there to begin with, and in their typical ignorance about Orwell’s writings, don’t understand that he was writing about them.
gfs / Facebook - June 19, 2015