From the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century until the era of the Great Depression immediately preceding the commencement of the Second World War, the most enduring internal conflict within the nations of the West was rooted in what was then called the “social question.” The growth of industrialization and the dispossession of the agrarian peasant classes during the time of the enclosure movement had created within the industrializing nations a massive proletarian class of permanently pauperized laborers and the deplorable social conditions which accompanied the growth of this class.
I recently finished reading Orwell’s 1984. This is a project that I’ve put off for years, and in hindsight, it was probably for the best, as many of Orwell’s predictions have manifested themselves in recent times. Let’s go over some of Orwell’s warnings. There are spoilers up ahead.
Why did Orwell select the title 1984?
The conventional view states that he merely reversed the last 2 digits of 1948, however, I think there is more to this than meets the eye. Orwell was a member of the socialist Fabian Society from whom he later broke away. Contrary to popular belief, 1984 wasn’t aimed solely at the Soviets, but rather at the ideals of the Fabian Society. The emblem of the Fabians is the tortoise, which symbolizes the Fabian’s stratagem of wearing down the enemy. They believed that they could bring socialism to a society through gradual imperceptible increments even if it took them a 100 years. The Fabian society was formed in 1884, and giving them the benefit of the doubt, Orwell titled his dystopia 1984.
Women are some of the biggest supporters of The Party
"It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy."
Women are the shock troops of today’s Inner Party. Feminists owe their success largely to the generous financial contributions made by the very Capitalists that they instruct their unthinking acolytes to despise. The State plays its own role in buttressing feminism via social welfare programs and affirmative action paid for by male taxpayers. The nanny state allows women to make false rape accusations without any fear of legal reprisals, retroactively withdraw consent and move the goal posts on rape, and in general create a consequence free society for women.
Our Inner Party has correctly deduced that women require a bloated nanny state to help them achieve parity with men and thus women are “empowered” by these elites. As I’ve pointed out before, strong willed men desire small government whereas “strong and independent women” desire a large nanny state to hold their hand. Unsurprisingly, most women tend to vote liberal.
Orwell also mentioned that women were the "nosers-out of unorthodoxy." This is easily observed today as young women routinely initiate social media witch hunts against individuals that hold views contrary to those espoused by the Inner Party (anti Homosexuality/anti-Feminism/anti-immigration). These witch hunts are intended to kill an individual’s livelihood by smearing their reputations and rendering them unemployable. Orwell stated that women were the most fanatical supporters of the Inner Party and we see numerous examples of their mindless zealotry on social media.
Women possess a key characteristic that endears them to the Inner Party, and that is their propensity towards doublethink. Orwell defined doublethink as a form of mental gymnastics where an individual could simultaneously hold two contradictory beliefs. We are surrounded by examples too numerous to list here. We’ve noticed how women defiantly state that they don’t need men while simultaneously living on a man’s charity (alimony, child support, etc.). We’ve noticed how some women have consensual sex and then and then genuinely believe that they were raped. We’ve noticed how ‘strong’ women often rely on boyfriends, cops, bouncers, etc., to solve their problems. Doublethink is the enzyme that facilitates the digestion and assimilation of Inner Party propaganda. Female solipsism is the catalyst which aides this process naturally.
The destruction of gender
"I’m going to get hold of a real woman’s frock from somewhere and wear it instead of these bloody trousers. I’ll wear silk stockings and high-heeled shoes! In this room I’m going to be a woman, not a Party comrade."
Orwell was obviously not familiar with the cancer that would eventually become feminism. He was, however, intimately acquainted with the nature of communism and rightly surmised that the nature of communist “equality” was essentially a bland sameness. The Party did not tolerate the pillars of identity as they rightly believed that the latter would allow individuals to define reality on their own terms. Thus race, religion, and gender must be neutralized. Our Inner Party today uses Cultural Marxism to assault Western ethnicity (Critical race theory) and gender (Feminism). The classification of transvestites as women is another blow against gender. Ultimately, I believe most women want to be feminine, but feminists (the Outer Party) have other plans for them.
The destruction of language as a means of controlling thought
"You don’t grasp the beauty of the destruction of words. Do you know that Newspeak is the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year? Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed, will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten. Already, in the Eleventh Edition, we’re not far from that point. But the process will still be continuing long after you and I are dead. Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller."
This is arguably Orwell’s most stunningly brilliant observation. Vocabularies seem to be shrinking at an astonishing rate every year. Bay Area Guy once told me about an acquaintance of his who did not know the meaning of the word ‘amoral.’ How could anybody discuss politics without being familiar with the word ‘amoral’? Popular culture has played a decisive role in the erosion of the average individual’s vocabulary where shows like the Simpsons openly glorify ignorance. There is not much else for me to add.
Perpetual Warfare
"War, it will be seen, accomplishes the necessary destruction, but accomplishes it in a psychologically acceptable way. In principle it would be quite simple to waste the surplus labour of the world by building temples and pyramids, by digging holes and filling them up again, or even by producing vast quantities of goods and then setting fire to them. But this would provide only the economic and not the emotional basis for a hierarchical society.
The war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact. The very word ‘war’, therefore, has become misleading. It would probably be accurate to say that by becoming continuous war has ceased to exist."
War is an industry and a large chunk of the US economy. The reason for perpetual war is not so much as to keep this industry going, but to instill a psychological dependence within the minds of the sheeple towards the Inner Party that governs them. The World Wars were old fashioned wars that were brutal and fought to the finish. What Orwell is referring to is continuous war, a war that does not threaten total destruction (and is technically less dangerous) and is perpetual. Oceania and Eurasia (or Eastasia) are evenly matched and are incapable of utterly destroying one and another. Elites on both sides understand that neither side can totally triumph against the other and thus the charade of perpetual war is maintained indefinitely to strip the sheeple of their liberties. The deluded masses fail to understand that the outside war is a prerequisite for the war that is perpetually waged against them.
The Cold War was the first prototype of the continuous war model followed by the newly perfected war on (Islamic) terror. Combating Islamic terrorism is like playing whack a mole: Whack Hamas, and then Islamic Jihad shows up. Whack Al Qaeda, and then ISIS pops out. Whack Harkatul Mujahideen and watch the Deccan Mujahideen spawn out of another hole. The US government does its part in indirectly supporting Islamic terrorism so that the continuous war may go on. By attempting to oust Bashar Al Assad in Syria, the US hopes that ISIS will be strengthened. Bashar has repeatedly warned that his Syrian Arab Army is the only force that stands between ISIS and the genocide of Arab Christians. The US would rather support the Christ hating nation of Israel than prevent the genocide of Christian Arabs at the hands of radical Islamic savages. A US official was quoted as saying:
"This is in perpetuity what we’re dealing with. It’s like the war on drugs. This isn’t going to stop."
2 + 2 = 5
"Physical facts could not be ignored. In philosophy, or religion, or ethics, or politics, two and two might make five, but when one was designing a gun or an aeroplane they had to make four.
The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command. His heart sank as he thought of the enormous power arrayed against him, the ease with which any Party intellectual would overthrow him in debate, the subtle arguments which he would not be able to understand, much less answer. And yet he was in the right! They were wrong and he was right. The obvious, the silly, and the true had got to be defended. Truisms are true, hold on to that! The solid world exists, its laws do not change. Stones are hard, water is wet, objects unsupported fall towards the earth’s centre. With the feeling that he was speaking to O’Brien, and also that he was setting forth an important axiom, he wrote:
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows."
It would be an act of unparalleled stupidity to think that Liberals are the modern inheritors of the Enlightenment’s rational tradition. Today’s Liberals are the inheritors of Marxism and are just as averse to science as their religious counterparts on the Right. If reality contradicts ideology, reality is to be disposed off. The UCLA Women’s studies department had this to say about the works of Kevin MacDonald:
“Women’s Studies rejects any claims to a natural, biological or essential basis for social hierarchies that impute lesser or greater social value to designated populations. As such, the mission of Women’s Studies and the ethical and political impulse of feminism stand in direct contrast to the fields of socio-biology, evolutionary psychology and, by association, the work of Professor Kevin Macdonald.”
and this:
“Professor MacDonald works in fields that are considered to be legitimate by academic standards, and unfortunately, research into the genetic basis for the social value of racial and ethnic groups, women and homosexuals continues under the auspices of many fields of study. As such, we wish to raise some broader questions about any research that promotes bigotry, intolerance and racial superiority.”
The highlighted part is crucial because what it is really saying is this:
Since we can’t challenge Professor MacDonald’s research on empirical grounds (i.e. 2+2=4), lets shift the matter into the realm of theory by questioning the value of his research as opposed to its findings and methodology.
The reason why Science (Biology and Mathematics in particular) upsets leftists so much is because these disciplines directly challenge the ideology of our Inner Party. Evolutionary Psychology and Biology alone are capable of demolishing the foundational myth of Feminism which states that gender roles are socially constructed. These fields demonstrate that gender and sex are irrevocably linked and cannot be changed as easily as one changes clothes. In order to control people’s minds, it is essential to first control their eyes. It is to this end that college professors (Outer Party) hammer into their students the pernicious message that reality is “socially constructed.” By internalizing this message the student effectively mistrusts his eyes and allows the Party to construct and re-define his reality for him.
From the Occidental Observer article linked above:
"John Horgan, the scientist who wants to ban research on race and intelligence, is not quite fit for the pages of Nineteen Eighty-Four. But he is getting there, because he thinks like O’Brien and puts ideology before science. Unlike O’Brien, he wants to stop science, rather than pervert it, but his predecessor Gould imitated O’Brien and perverted science in the cause of ideology. Gould’s award-winning best-seller The Mismeasure of Man (1981) was a polemic against “racist” brain-science and the concept of g, or a general factor of intelligence that underlies human cognition."
Nobel Prize winner James Watson (Molecular Biologist) was similarly attacked by our Inner Party for violating the sanctity of leftist/Marxist ideology by insinuating the genetic basis for the IQ of racial groups. I am not interested in HBD or Biology and have no vested interests in those fields. The matter that agitates me is that the Cultural Marxist left, in Orwellian fashion, wants to censor science for the preservation of ideology and not academic integrity. Two plus two must equal five. This is ultimately why the Left despises Positivism and preaches Anti-foundationalism in University classrooms across the West.
Orwell’s 1984 is required reading for anybody that wishes to penetrate the structure of the world we live in. It serves as map and compass in a world where language and reality are bent to serve the interests of a Party whose interests can never converge with out own.
If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged.
Cardinal Richelieu
In this modern era of love and tolerance – where "hate speech" and "thought crime" must be 'loved' to death by banning them, suspending Twitter and Facebook accounts, and having people fired and thrown into the outer darkness – it seems that there is a real hunger for hate figures, those convenient parties like Emmanuel Goldstein in 1984, who can serve as a focus for the proverbial "Two Minutes Hate" sessions that social media and comment boards now make eminently feasible.
You already know about #Swebola and Angela Merkel importing millions of "potential rapists" into Europe, and more recently we have also seen the French making excuses for their halal butchers. Europe certainly is a pozztopia of PC pozzing!
Of course, there are countervailing trends – in Sweden and France, lite nationalist parties (Swedish Democrats and Front National) are currently riding high in the polls, and the Overton window is bouncing all over the place – but what people see is mainly the abject surrender to the forces of the Left. From a distance Europe does seem to be all about "the Pozz."
Inspired by Dota’s old post on 1984, I recently finished reading George Orwell’s dystopian novel. This won’t be an extensive review, as he already covered the book’s most pertinent points; I will likewise presume that readers are already familiar with the main plot, so I won’t provide much context.
The Managerial Revolution
by James Burnham
Buy at Amazon.com
Reviewed by Matt Forney
Assuming you even know who James Burnham is at all, he probably occupies a footnote at best in your mind. A notable political theorist and activist during the mid-20th century, he began his public life as a Marxist and Trotskyist but later transitioned to conservatism, spending the latter decades of his life as a columnist for National Review. Shortly after the fall of France in World War II, he wrote The Managerial Revolution, a radical tract that deserves to be more widely read.
Burnham’s claim was that capitalism was dead, but that it was being replaced not by socialism, but a new economic system he called “managerialism”; rule by managers.
Originally published on April 12, 2004 in the virtual pages of The Last Ditch, this article makes a timely read in the context of the recent Supreme Court decision mandating the legal acceptance of gay marriage across the USA.
A recent farce, in (many-colored) light of an earlier tragedy.
Karl Marx once wrote that "history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce." I'll admit I do not know what Marx was thinking of when he penned that pithy-sounding, if somewhat cryptic, future sound bite. What I do know is that his epigram is undeniably pertinent to the sound and fury raging today over the absurd question of homosexual "marriage."
Today is the anniversary of the birth of Adolf Hitler. In his lifetime he was a remarkable and misunderstood man – Machiavellian in his seizure of power, yet surprisingly un-Machiavellian in his use of it. But it was only in death that he became something altogether more unique than just another scrambler and fumbler after the orb of power.
Posthumously he underwent the opposite of an apotheosis, and became a symbol of ultimate evil, a necessary hate figure and fetish of taboo for the post-war Liberal West. You realize this when you travel or live beyond the flubbery boundary of the Western Liberal bubble. Partly in reaction to his exaggerated status as the icon of evil in the hegemonic West, but also because of a more objective view of the man, Hitler is viewed in a much more ambivalent and tolerant way by the rest of the World.
George Orwell, in 1984, described a chaotic world of perpetual warfare: a large part of the planet was forever fought over and constantly changing hands, with the lives of the inhabitants assigned minimal value.
“Between the frontiers of the super-states, and not permanently in the possession of any of them, there lies a rough quadrilateral with its corners at Tangier, Brazzaville, Darwin, and Hong Kong, containing within it about a fifth of the population of the earth. It is for the possession of these thickly-populated regions, and of the northern ice-cap, that the three powers are constantly struggling. In practice no one power ever controls the whole of the disputed area. Portions of it are constantly changing hands, and it is the chance of seizing this or that fragment by a sudden stroke of treachery that dictates the endless changes of alignment.” 1984, Chapter 9
Due to the decline of both moral and pragmatic qualities caused by the West's dominant ideology of Universal Liberalism, our "geopolitical organs" are now creating a similar zone of chaos and anarchy to the one envisioned by Orwell. This has been dramatically driven home by the recent rise to prominence of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) across a large and geographically ill-defined sector of the Middle East, at a time when many other parts of Orwell's quad – Gaza, Somalia, Sudan, Libya, Mali, and Yemen – are also deep in chaos.
Another stop on the road paved with Liberal intentions.
The great flaw of Washington and its allies in recent years has been a tendency to start things without finishing them. This is a tendency that has accelerated in recent years and is driven by the following factors:
Increasing geopolitical ignorance caused by a growing misunderstanding of how the world actually works
A drastic decline in political pragmatism because it is viewed as inconsistent with a new Western morality infused with narratives of feminism, gay rights, and anti-racism
A steep decline in the West's original moral qualities of courage, honour, loyalty, masculinity, moral fiber, and commitment
Liberal elites, unlike the old Conservatives or the 'rednecks’ and 'flyovers' they so detest, are unable to fulfill the duties their actions assume. For the liberal ruling class, it is enough to make the moral gesture, get the buzz, and then sidle away from the mess they have created and look for the next humanitarian interventionist thrill.
Rather than imposing "totalitarian humanism," as some fear, this irresponsible attitude has instead created a toxic brew of "hegemonic anarchy," characterized by chaos, civil war, massacres, mutilations, religious insanity, and growing contempt for the West. Boko Haram, the group in Nigeria that hit the headlines earlier this year when it kidnapped over 200 schoolgirls, expresses this contempt in its name, which literally means "Western education is sin." Iraq and Afghanistan, the scenes of the West's greatest commitments and sacrifices, are clearly being lost to any semblance of order; while the hashtag offensive "Bring our Girls Back" that was supposed to bring Boko Haram to its knees is struggling even to make an impact on social media.
Against this background, some countries in the danger zone, like Algeria, Egypt, and Thailand, have found temporary reprieve by reverting to old-style military dictatorships with a bit of PR – the promise of "free elections," a high-profile female appointment, etc. – to keep the liberal commentariat from becoming too interested in their affairs.
The secular strongman – the optimum solution for the fractious Third World state?
Iraq is a classic example of the kind of country that either requires pragmatic or principled treatment, but which in Western interventionist hands just turns to mush. Like most Third World countries, it has badly-drawn borders that do not correspond to organic cultures and nations, but instead throw together diverse and antagonistic thedes.
Thanks to the former predominance of the Turks in the region, the natural ruling elite has been rooted in the Sunni Arab part of the population. This group also occupies a relatively central position, with the numerically superior Shiite Arabs to the south and the non-Arabic Kurds to the northeast.
Despite its inherent flaws and weakness, Iraq, with the right kind of strong and pragmatic leader, could be relatively stable. Although Saddam Hussein was clearly deeply flawed, he may well have been an optimum solution for the country in a way that the present underpowered 'strongman,' Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, clearly isn't.
A well-managed partition of the country into three separate sections, corresponding to the three main groups in the population, may have been another option at one time, but that moment has clearly passed. Whatever new borders arise will now have to be drawn in blood, while any strongmen that arise to keep the country united are likely to get on the wrong side of Western Liberals at some point and meet the same end as Saddam or Gaddafi.
The truth is that "humanitarian" Western liberals prefer anarchy to a convenient tyrant: anarchy says "we tried" rather than "we connived," and, as the somewhat Orwellian phrase "humanitarian intervention" hints, it helps them to feel better about themselves. But rather than orderly humanism, what the Liberal West is pioneering is a form of hegemonic anarchy.
Orwell's quad: wreaking havoc in the 21st century.
One way to predict the future is to think of a future one desires, and to think of ways that future will be achieved. The most famous example of this can be seen in the writings of Karl Marx. Marx was disturbed by the effects the industrial revolution was having on the lives of the factory workers who made the industrial revolution possible. He managed to convince himself and his followers that in the economic and social chaos of laissez faire capitalism were macroeconomic tendencies that would lead to the creation of an economy and a society without war, poverty, or crime, where everyone would like his or her job.
There would not even be jobs in the traditional sense. In The German Ideology, chapter three, Karl Marx wrote, “In a communist society there are no painters but only people who engage in painting among other activities.”
Before we sneer at Marx we should acknowledge that the economic system that inspired his writings had serious injustices. Millions of men, women, and even children worked twelve hours a day six days a week in dangerous factories and mines for subsistence incomes.
At the end of George Orwell’s 1984, hero and would-be revolutionary Winston Smith is tortured brutally by ghoulish government goons at the Ministry of Love. Following this ordeal, his will is utterly broken; he betrays his closest allies as well as himself; moreover, he learns to “love” Big Brother, the awful totalitarian entity who has made his life unbearably miserable. Winston himself gets absolutely nothing out of this bargain except a certain warped peace of mind and a perverse sense that he has in some way “done the right thing”:
“He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn self-willed exile from the loving breast!... It was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.”
Repentance: once a means of righting your wrongs before God, now a mechanism for the savages of our post-Christian society to publicly humiliate anyone who goes against the grain.
If you’re a rebel and the masses can’t kill or silence you, their fallback is to try to convert you. Castrate you, lobotomize you, make you as mindless and suppliant as they are.
