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).

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] red_giant@hexbear.net 8 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Orwell served as a British colonial officer in Burma and then wrote Burmese Days, a book mostly about a British colonial officer in Burma repeatedlyremoved and sexually exploiting Burmese women.

Orwell worked as a propagandist for the BBC and then wrote a book about a British propagandist in a dystopian Britain.

Orwell sold out communists and homosexuals to the British government and then wrote Homage to Catalonia criticizing communists in Spain for selling out other communists.