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this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2025
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United States | News & Politics
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The fact that liberals refuse to read just 100 pages of State and Revolution while insisting that they are having new ideas or that the political environment has somehow changed is by far the most frustrating thing about Lemmy comment sections. I'm an anarchist, someone smeared by Lenin in that book but at least I read it and understand. My disagreement is with the vision and form of the dictatorship of the proletariat and how we can build a new commune, not the need for revolution or insisting that somehow, some way after 175 years of the same discussion voting for reform will work.
I swear Americans have never read a book that wasn't Harry Potter in their lives.
That's not true, they've also read 1984 and thought all "adult" books are gonna be this fucking dreadful and boring so they don't read anymore, they just pretend ~~idiocracy was a documentary~~ 1984 is like, so true, man
I gotta say, 1984 has a lot wrong with it. But it's pretty short and punchy as books go.
If you're looking for something that's endless, dreadful, and boring, you might want a copy of Atlas Shrugged.
It's short, but not punchy. It's a
hundred pages of diatribes, some misogyny, a story beat, another fifty pages raving about bureaucracy, a story beat, and 100 pages about brainwashing and how socialism fucking sucks. Then the most half-baked "how do I tie this bad essay together?" ending.
It's Atlas Shrugged for people who do take showers.
The joke of 1984 is that Orwell neatly described the modern capitalist British State virtually to a T. Hell, it wasn't all that far off from the contemporary British State, given the conditions of paranoia and economic decline the island suffered during the postwar aftermath.
In the era it was written, a lot of the diatribes about the nefarious villains of socialist politics felt like a guy throwing on a big spooky ghost custom with a light under the chin. But in the modern moment... fuck it if cops busting down my door because my elementary-school son was tricked into accusing me of ThoughtCrime during a mandatory Two-Minute Hate doesn't feel like a thing that could really happen.
The execution was a forced ending. But the psychology at the end - this desperate liberalist clinging to an individualized, compartmentalized psychic resistance - absolutely strikes a cord. I know plenty of people (hell, I regularly indict myself) over the reflexive meekness draped atop rebellious fantasy. This growling whipped-dog sentiment, where liberals will say everything in a loud whisper, but duck their heads in terror at the first whiff of authority or consequence... as we move further and further towards fascism. I see it everywhere.
Orwell very neatly diagnoses the failure of the liberal opposition in the personage of Winston Smith and his peers. And it is even further pronounced in the meta-textual narrative, as Orwell himself is an embodiment of Winston. A man who has rewritten history at the behest of his imperialist paymasters (after a career as a fucking Burmese cop and nark, ffs) goes to his grave subsuming the revulsion of his own country with a fear and antipathy towards a distant foreign land.
I do agree with your points. I think it's certainly an insightful book (just not in the way Orwell intended) but not a good book.
It's an early YA novel and propaganda piece. Very good at what it set out to accomplish. Obviously, not good for a material understanding of the world.