Wednesday, August 25, 2021

Parody in George Orwell's 1984

Although George Orwell was a Socialist, 1984 and the concepts it includes have been used to frighten people away from Socialist ideas.

In fact, 1984 contains a number of parodies based on experience of life in Great Britain.

Here are three of them. There are many more.

1) The Ministry of Truth is a parody of the BBC World Service. During the war the BBC projected a consistently positive attitude summed up as "my country right or wrong". The slogan is an unacknowledged borrowing from the British Union of Fascists.
If the past was inconvenient it was "reinterpreted". Of course the outright falsification of the Ministry of Truth would be above and beyond BBC practice. That is the point of parody.

b) The Junior Anti-Sex League was a parody of the Scouts and Guides. Julia was an example of the ineffectiveness of their message of clean living. She was employed for a while in the production of the vilest pornography for the more degenerate elements of the working class, "the proles".

c) Newspeak was based on a trend in language. The Communist International became the "Comintern" while the "Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei" was regularly shortened to "Nazi". In the process, Orwell believed, ideas were excluded from the labels.

Syme, in 1984, believed that dissent would eventually be made impossible by "Newspeak" because the language for different opinions would no longer exist.

It is an interesting idea but as I said above, it is a parody.

You can find many other parodies in 1984.




Monday, August 09, 2021

Money money money

Now that Richie Rishi is talking about making pensioners pay for the pandemic, it is worth recalling the real wealth distribution in society.

The 2020 Credit Suisse Global Wealth report makes for interesting reading.

Released at the end of October last year, it revealed that the top one percent of households globally own 43 percent of all personal wealth, while the bottom 50 percent own only one percent.

Successive governments have done nothing to alter this state of affairs.