A Mocked and Paid Litany

rah rah rah, it’s Orwell’s birthday today.

I saw a woman at Pitt St. Mall today who was reading 1984 and looked incredibly bored. Bitch.

Writing to an audience that may not actually have existed, the strength of his words was possibly enough to contribute to the creation of that audience. It seems like there’s nothing nobler.

A little something for all the Castroists who post quiet revisionist analyses about how Orwell was really a Tory more-or-less solely responsible for the decline of the socialist project, and also McCarthyism and World War Two:

Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.

I don’t know how the man got into the English syllabus, amongst all the mediocrity, but it’s something to be happy about. There’s a school of thought holding that 1984 and Animal Farm are only in there to instill a fear of revolutionary ideals and a drab political conformity amongst students. This is bollocks. No one who understands either of said books could describe them as conservative (or “ruling-class propaganda”, thanks Links, see below). I pretty reckon that young people reading books that argue against Stalinism, statism, censorship, euphemism and one-party leadership is a Pretty Good Thing.

A pearl of wisdom from the relativists at the Links International Journal of We Love Hugo Chavez:

It is worth noting in passing that Marx himself, despite being an infinitely better writer and thinker than Orwell, had an entirely different attitude towards ordinary people

Gosh. Despite being a better writer and thinker, he had different attitudes? Step back everyone, profundity has entered the room.