A Critical Read of Animal Farm
Towards a Critique of Totalitarianism
Some fun reading if you like people dunking on Orwell and Arendt.
For posting all the anonymous reactionary bullshit that you can't post anywhere else.
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A Critical Read of Animal Farm
Towards a Critique of Totalitarianism
Some fun reading if you like people dunking on Orwell and Arendt.
The Asimov critique is probably my favorite thing to send to libs who bring up anything "Orweillian". That and Ursula K. Le Guin's critique of Harry Potter
Yep! Easily shuts them down with another "hero" of theirs with much better takes.
Plus Asimov comes across as pretty socialist/communist sympathetic. he's not really fully bought into red scare shit and seems to be pretty nuanced in his takes
it's kind of refreshing. although i would probably consider Asimov a utopian socialist. he liked central planning, he just wanted AI to do it
Yea, he was always comrade-adjacent and didn't buy into the anti-communism of the time.
i love telling people about one of the short stories in I, Robot where economic AI supercomputers just slowly take over the global economy and create communism and nobody cares because humanity's material conditions keep getting better
the secret is they redistribute wealth shhhh
One of the funniest god damn things in the animatrix is the shorts that explain how the human v ai conflict began, and its basically just rabid reactionary humans doing a genocide, which leads the ai to form its own robo-communist country where they outproduce everyone (and are seemingly willing to work with humans to the benefit of all), only for the humans to go and nuke them because they can't have that.
No Fascism and Big Business by Daniel Guerin, no The Corporate State in Action: Italy under Fascism by Carl T. Schmidt, not even The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William L. Shirer. Mm, mm, mm. Typical.
Why is this list so heavily biased in favor of fiction? There was hardly anything ‘boring’ about actually existing fascism. Is somebody afraid that reading history books would make the links between fascism and capitalism too obvious?
They would rather you stick to your highschool history book that purposely leaves these connections as obfuscated as possible
Anti-fascist books:
-Fiction
-Fiction
-Fiction
-Fiction
-Fiction
Not that fiction is bad per se, but my god, how about we recommend some reading about actual fascism?
Also, why the literal monopoly capitalist caricature as inviting the reader?
I’ll give them this. Brave New World may be a bit of a cliche but the fact that we have a decadent elite claiming divine right to their decadence on account of being “alpha”…yeah Huxley called it.
Do people even read books anymore? half of these can't be classified anti-fascist
I am desperately clawing back the voracious reading I had as a kiddo
Yay. I used to read a fuckton of books as a teenager. Then like basically nothing in my twenties. These days I started to get back into reading crappy (but fun) fiction books.
Lot of people listen to audio books
Not sure V for Vendetta translates so well to audio though
The concept of "totalitarianism" was popularized by Hannah Arendt in her book The Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951 right at the start of the heated phase of the Cold War.
Inside it, you can see her contradict herself within the bounds of her own concepts, but the main issue is: it attempted to create a false parallel between what she calls "Stalinism" (supposedly the ideology of the Soviet Union at the time) and Nazism, as if they're two sides of the same coin. When, of course, they aren't. This is what we call "making up a concept, pointing to two things in the world, and saying those are the same."
The book also says that totalitarianism is novel in that it attempts to terrorise whole populations instead of only political adversaries, so as to whip the people into shape, when in material terms, we know that isn't what happened in the Soviet Union, and neither in Nazi Germany honestly.
Supposedly, totalitarian movements would attempt to control every single aspect of the life of their subject, and this would be why Hitler and Stalin were totalitarians and Mussolini isn't, because Mussolini would 'just be an autocrat' who wants to subjugate their political opposition.
Many people would mention that she forgets a spooky thing called slavery, that did the same thing. Capitalism could be argued to do it too, colonialism also, etc.
All that aside, a lot of people criticised her for just not understanding certain events correctly. For instance, she mentions that the Nazis weren't really interested in murdering all Jews; instead, those were simply a convenient proxy— a 2-minute hate, if you will— to whip up your population. Therefore it'd be comparable to any famine from the USSR, since intent would be similar, according to her. This fundamentally misunderstands the Nazi project in a futile attempt to draw a line between two different things for political purposes, and ignores historical documentation of intent like the Wannsee conference and Generalplan Ost.
Bottom line: Hannah Arendt created Cold War propaganda to try and equate the old enemy (Nazi Germany) with the new one that was finding itself in the Korean War (Soviet Union). Liberals gobbled this up because they're scared of big words like "authoritarianism", and therefore she had a ton of success. Her theories ignore the political violence of the state and of capitalism because, in her liberal mindset, these weren't actual violence, but instead just the way the world works. This flies in the face of everything the Third World ever tries to accomplish, because our revolutionary violence wouldn't be justified.
It's almost like a "big-tent" propaganda, you can take a million conclusions out of this, and it's been deeply influential.
As a final note, Hannah Arendt was extremely racist in defense of colonialism.
credit to u/Logan_Maddox
erm, where's atlas shrugged? that's my favourite woke book
It's woke because a girl boss wrote it
Animal Farm is a joke. A book for brainwashing children. I feel like you have to have not read many books in your life to think its something worth reading to learn about anti-communism (which is funny because this is an anti-fascist list). I guess the allegory is simple enough to understand that it makes these manchildren feel smart.
Orwell is peddled to kids/teens because its much more digestible at those ages. Its sad that people can read/reread 1984 as an adult and believe its actually pithy rather than being simple, weird (god the fucking sex stuff), and largely not compatible with the reality we live in. It takes on an insane amount of irony when one realizes the kind of work Orwell was doing for the British government, or the fact that the UK has already adopted a level of surveillance that is honestly more legitimately capable than whats even described in 1984!
When I tried and failed to read 1984 I was shocked at how little it was interested in the politics of the setting, and instead really really wanted to tell you about this dudes torrid fling with his manic pixie dream girl. Given how much people reference it about fascism I was expecting something much different.
Nobody seems to find it odd that so many state-funded schools encourage students to read his two most famous works. If Orwell only wanted to warn future generations of ‘big government’, no dictatorship of the bourgeoisie would ever promote his books.
The most scathing indictment of Orwell that I could ever make is that he betrayed whatever Anarchist/Leftist ideology he supposedly believed in. Obviously if he had written books that were actually Anarchist in nature I don't think liberal governments would peddle them as propaganda pieces. Certainly nothing I could say about it would match the thoroughness with which Asimov lays it out.
I swear to god people are allergic to anything written by someone non-white.
Oh yeah, they read like 20 books total across their lives and most of them are assigned reading at school
The rest are usually Harry Potter
Blackshirts and Reds is notably absent from this list
Considering the calibre of some of this list, I think Harry Potter is more likely to show up than anything by Parenti.
Yeah snitching on your friends to the CIA is hardcore antifascism
Finally, a genre of writing that is inherently anti-fascist: military history...
My favorite anti-fascists, George “gave lists of Jews and Gays to MI6” Orwell and Hannah Ardent Antisemite
Hannah Arendt was anti-Jewish? I know that she had a low opinion of Africans, but this is the first time that I heard of her having a low opinion of other Jews.
Liberals are allergic to reading anything that would actually inform their own ideology, even the stuff that completely affirms what they already believe. What we have instead is just this vibes based bullshit, because thats what the education system instills in them instead of a critical exploration of the system we live in. I cannot even have a decent conversation with super libbed friends because they have never even tried to read anything to explain what the purpose of, say, the state is. Instead they start from the idea that the state just "kinda has to exist or something", the actual purpose is entirely nebulous. They would never let kids read Lenin, but I can only imagine the consequences of students reading just State and Revolution.
JORJOR WELL
"check out military history" fucking hell not even normal history you gotta read the chud school for some reason
"The Long Walk Home by Stephen King"
Lmao I love reading
If you can read french I recommend this about Arendt https://archive.org/details/arendtetheidegge0000faye
So anticommunist fiction largely written by fascist sympathizers.
Check out military history for anti-fascist reading??????
love to check out military history