Slop.

In the summary he writes at the end he explicitly states he believes that the world will go communist or civilisation will be destroyed.

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.

The only takeaway that's possible from this summary is that he's saying Orwell is fighting on the wrong side with this book and that fighting communism is in essence bringing about the eventual destruction of civilisation. It's very clear and I see no other way to interpret it.

It's a different quote and most people won't bother to read the whole thing anyway so it's still a good contribution

BNW is also written much better, remember the Mustapha Mond speech, it's one of the scariest moments i ever read in a fiction book, how rational it sounds.

He was really really good at understanding the fucked up parts of the capitalist society in which he lived and then just pointing at it and saying "that's socialism."

The issue with Homage to Catalonia is that, after reading it, you’re left with the sense that the Soviet role in the civil war was to crush the “true revolutionaries” when the reality is that the only power willing to support the republicans was the Soviets and the main reason the republicans lost was the British strong-arming the French into remaining neutral.

He turns the communists into the enemy when they were, in fact, the only ally.

It’s typical faux-leftism that only supports revolutionaries who have been defeated. And, in the case of Homage to Catalonia, the POUM were twice defeated and thus twice as deserving of romanticism and praise in the eyes of bourgeois leftist Orwell.

He was a British aristocrat on tour. He didn’t spend his time fighting. He says himself he spent most of his time drinking wine and was based in Aragon far from the front and he left before the war came close. His only impact in Spain was to spin Soviet support for the struggle against fascism into a criticism of the USSR.

He criticizes “leftist infighting” by supporting exactly one faction against the united front. See him for who was. An aristocratic propagandist and this poisons all his works, just as his racism, anti-semitism, misogyny, colonialism, and practice ofremoved women poisons his works as well.

Down & Out in Paris and London and Burma Days were very informative and taught me much.

Fear of the mob is a superstitious fear. It is based on the idea that there is some mysterious, fundamental difference between rich and poor, as though they were two different races, like Negroes and white men. But in reality there is no such difference. The mass of the rich and the poor are differentiated by their incomes and nothing else, and the average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit. Change places, and handy dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief? Everyone who has mixed on equal terms with the poor knows this quite well. But the trouble is that intelligent, cultivated people, the very people who might be expected to have liberal opinions, never do mix with the poor. For what do the majority of educated people know about poverty? In my copy of Villon's poems the editor has actually thought it necessary to explain the line ‘Ne pain ne voyent qu'aux fenestres’ by a footnote; so remote is even hunger from the educated man's experience.

From this ignorance a superstitious fear of the mob results quite naturally. The educated man pictures a horde of submen, wanting only a day's liberty to loot his house, burn his books, and set him to work minding a machine or sweeping out a lavatory. ‘Anything,’ he thinks, 'any injustice, sooner than let that mob loose.’ He does not see that since there is no difference between the mass of rich and poor, there is no question of setting the mob loose. The mob is in fact loose now, and — in the shape of rich men — is using its power to set up enormous treadmills of boredom, such as ‘smart’ hotels.

To sum up. A plongeur is a slave, and a wasted slave, doing stupid and largely unnecessary work. He is kept at work, ultimately, because of a vague feeling that he would be dangerous if he had leisure. And educated people, who should be on his side, acquiesce in the process, because they know nothing about him and consequently are afraid of him. I say this of the plongeur because it is his case I have been considering; it would apply equally to numberless other types of worker. These are only my own ideas about the basic facts of a plongeur's life, made without reference to immediate economic questions, and no doubt largely platitudes. I present them as a sample of the thoughts that are put into one's head by working in an hotel. Orwell did what we would today call poverty tourism, by voluntarily entering the working class and working in a hotel as a laborer, plongeur. Then he went to London and stayed in the houses of the poor, in which you were only allowed to stay one night. Thus they had to tramp to the next one. Following a path around England, constantly on the move.

I think I saw something this morning saying it's been unbanned.

four and that's just counting Jefferson (reelected) and Trump (noncontiguous terms)

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.