Huxley vs Orwell who got it right? Comix

[MisterP]

83. it was an extension of his "anti-totalitarianism"--which of course is what McCarthyism

and 45 years of Cold War were all about, right? everyone from Norman Thomas to the New Left developed in reaction to the image of the USSR; this is the era of the anti-Stalinist left and Cold-War liberals feeding all the problems we decry today--this goes down even to Arendt and Popper

so Orwell (and Paul Nitze) see right off the bat that there's a new Hitler in town and he just decided he wanted all of Berlin and Korea--first Greece and China and the Dardanelles and Persia, and tomorrow Mexico and England; he sees his List as a way to *prevent* 1984, as a way to nip the O'Briens and BBs themselves in the bud--part of the same project, of the same warning; when he said that pacifists' main enemy was democracy he meant it, like how we see Capra's "Why We Fight" as another example of propaganda but he saw it as the complete opposite

on top of this Orwell shares the tremendous interwar worry about England no longer "being England"--"Before the war it was always summer"; Tolkien based Mordor on his hometown (drawing later lefties' ire that he was worried about a little *pollution*), CS Lewis created a pungent parody of the deranged BCP cosmist scientists like Bernal with "That Hideous Strength" (the only fictional thing there was the demon in a decapitated head--not the decapitated head itself); in the 50s-70s Amis would even panic about pizza undermining this "Englishness" and would depict England ravaged under Catholic or Soviet dictatorships (that Austin Powers rant about the Dutch? barely a parody of Ian Fleming's xenophobia)

now Orwell's seeing Englishness--a socialist, not a reactionary one--getting lost at its very source, under Creel's propaganda, Bernays' social engineering (and advertising), Boulanger and Maginot and Hitler's revanchism and regimentation of the country into a big garrison, leftists letting themselves think and breathe only in Moscow's terms (an echo of the treacherous secret Papists getting their orders from across the Channel), classified *everything*, informers and spycatchers and barb-wire compounds throughout "homefront" London, and a passel of newfangled American and Continental ways to find out where humans' pushable buttons are; after the war Attlee is completely remaking both the role and duties of the state and the shape of the left

lost in all this is how a dictatorship works--the achievements that you can wring even out of the Holodomor, that which the endless political prisoners are said to be threatening; he took Stalin and Hitler out of their contexts, out of their needs and desires, their stresses and motives; even a black hole in a human figure like Jim Jones needs to build a structure to control and kill people, and that structure "conditions" their power; there's never any such thing as pure power--even with Salvadoran rape-murder death squads