I’m Running Out of Ways to Explain How Bad This Is | What’s happening in America today is something darker than a misinformation crisis.
I’m Running Out of Ways to Explain How Bad This Is | What’s happening in America today is something darker than a misinformation crisis.
What’s happening in America today is something darker than a misinformation crisis.
You're viewing a single thread.
Is anyone else starting to wonder whether Orwell was a time traveler trying to warn us?
It couldn't possibly be that Trump and his handlers are using it (edit: 1984) as a road map and his followers are stupid enough not to notice.
Orwell wrote that book based on his personal observations from how the government already worked decades prior. All he did was 1+1=2 and he was visionary because of it. Same with Marx. Or Verne.
There's a reason dystopian fiction has reigned supreme for over a decade now. We're obsessed with our inevitable fate.
It's more that Trump read a book:
Ivana Trump told her lawyer Michael Kennedy that from time to time her husband reads a book of Hitler's collected speeches, My New Order, which he keeps in a cabinet by his bed. Kennedy now guards a copy of My New Order in a closet at his office, as if it were a grenade. Hitler's speeches, from his earliest days up through the Phony War of 1939, reveal his extraordinary ability as a master propagandist.
"Did your cousin John give you the Hitler speeches?" I asked Trump.
Trump hesitated. "Who told you that?"
"I don't remember," I said.
"Actually, it was my friend Marty Davis from Paramount who gave me a copy of Mein Kampf, and he's a Jew." ("I did give him a book about Hitler," Marty Davis said. "But it was My New Order, Hitler's speeches, not Mein Kampf. I thought he would find it interesting. I am his friend, but I'm not Jewish.")
No time travel, it is just that Orwell and the Repubs are both basing their content partially on observations about Nazi Germany.
Orwell's writings were inspired by what he had experienced in Burma and Spain. The issue isn't that he was particularly prescient, it's that nothing has changed.
Besides, of the two dystopian novels, we're much closer to Brave New World.
Orwell was writing specifically paranoid delusions about the USSR and it's really funny to me how his work actually more accurately describes capitalist countries today.