Huxley vs Orwell who got it right? Comix

[MisterP]

62. one thing I do is collect dystopias, so I can get into the "genealogy" of both

Huxley derived his hells from Zamyatin and post-1899 HG Wells; much of what we associate with the USSR was taken straight from Wells and the US--the kolkhozes were created to turn Ukraine into Iowa and Magnitogorsk and Ozyorsk built to copy Detroit and Richland; the World State and One State are a mockery of American-style technocracy, of Ford and Taylor; in the 10s and 20s Europe greatly feared becoming "Americanized," of losing its "integral" and spiritual aspects to the gum-popping dollar-chasing guys who turned even God into a penny sideshow; Nietzsche said God was dead of physics (and that that was false anyway), Wells assumed He only had 15 years to go: Huxley said everything holy would perish before a wave of carpet swatches and improved versions of the pub and the dance-hall (that was the big worry in America just before the fundie resurgence)

Orwell is directed more at 30s-40s Continental totalitarianism--the many aspects that Hitler and Stalin shared, plus a little "fantasy Catholicism" thrown in, now jumping the Channel and taking England; his own Catalan and MoI experiences (Hitler was in fact jealous of Britain's propaganda) reinforcing the idea of three strict, starved, identical, machinelike hyperpowers in a perpetual war; his main source was Burnham and Koestler, concentrating on a rule by baton from an outsider's perspective, a rule only by hunger and disappearance with no motive, with no way to build legitimacy

O'Brien wants to just smash your face (and soul) in to show that he can; Mond is dangerous because he *cares*; the Proles are quite ignored by the narrative (there's a leaky pipe and someone hanging laundry), while Huxley manages to answer the interwar question of "why no Revolution?"--the World State's economy has been rationalized and socialized to provide the goods that all too many think is socialism's end-goal, without any more striving or spiritual life: like the real Stalin, Mond quiets rebellion with vacation time and consumer goods (though without the real USSR's "submerged class" trapped, exploited, and starved outside the city walls)

Orwell was a perpetually-uncomfortable "lower upper middle class" reporter while Huxley was a freewheeling highbrow philosopher and a "legacy"; Orwell died as a "CIA socialist" while Huxley died in LA under heavy hallucinogenic doses on the same day as CS Lewis and JFK; both of them drew crucial and necessary pictures of the trends that shaped the entire century