Well, I can see how summarizing 1984 as ‘useless’ is a slight overreaction. If nothing else, 1984 at least serves as a model for how neoliberals misunderstand, oversimplify, or caricature almost all illiberal societies.

Nevertheless, what makes Animal Farm and 1984 so frustrating is the overwhelming number of adults who treat them as acceptable substitutes for actually studying history. George Orwell was neither a historian nor a political scientist, and he never even visited the U.S.S.R. As far as I know, he based his misunderstanding of the U.S.S.R. on the capitalist media’s newspapers, so his caricature thereof in 1984 is garbage in, garbage out. No-one should use his fiction as a means of understanding any society, but this is exactly what neoliberals and social democrats recommend.

Being an anarchist, I can’t recommend ‘banning’ any books, but eventually we shall live in a society that has no need to promote Animal Farm and 1984 to death, and institutions shall be promoting books that are more relevant and more useful for ordinary people; we would be better off if Orwell’s fiction were relegated to the bin of fringe literature rather than the mass-produced and widely recommended works that they are today.

Banning books is the act of sniveling fascists and if you support that or are indifferent to it, I have some bad news for you.

We’ve got a regular Kyle Broflovski on our hands, don’t we? What an insight. You don’t have to read much history to understand that while the Fascists did ban many books, book-banning is a phenomenon that occurred centuries before Benito Mussolini & alii were even born. Logically, this would also imply that those who prohibit Fascist literature are theirselves ‘sniveling fascists’, which is patent nonsense (even if I can agree that banning any literature is misguided at best).

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[–] Awoo@hexbear.net 11 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

Most of them haven't actually read it. They have no information to work from to form any coherent statements so they have to fall back to the default popular knowledge.

Isaac Asimov wrote a review of 1984 and tore Orwell apart. Even that review is probably too long to get these liberals to read though, thankfully he wrote a summary at the end:

To summarise, then: George Orwell in 1984 was, in my opinion, engaging in a private feud with Stalinism, rather that attempting to forecast the future. He did not have the science fictional knack of foreseeing a plausible future and, in actual fact, in almost all cases, the world of 1984 bears no relation to the real world of the 1980s.

The world may go communist, if not by 1984, then by some not very much later date; or it may see civilisation destroyed. If this happens, however, it will happen in a fashion quite different from that depicted in 1984 and if we try to prevent either eventuality by imagining that 1984 is accurate, then we will be defending ourselves against assaults from the wrong direction and we will lose.

Asimov believed the world would either go communist or destroy civilisation, and therefore by feuding with it in the poor way Orwell's imagines he is just contributing to the destruction of civilisation.

[–] Damarcusart@hexbear.net 5 points 2 weeks ago

Most of them haven't actually read it.

Just like a lot of religious texts. People are told what to think and what to believe and are discouraged from actually analysing the sacred texts or making up their own mind about them.

And that review is great, glad to see a lot of people sharing it hear. Really dissects Orwell in a way most people who were raised to worship his work have never even thought of.