This appendix, along with the chapters that are except from "The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism", are actually my favorite parts of 1984. I enjoyed how "Principals of Newspeak" is written in a past tense when describing the language and the events of year 1984, it feels like a glimmer of hope that somehow mankind did indeed escape the horrific dystopian world otherwise presented in the book.
Unfortunately there is no way to know whether the future from which newspeak is in the past, is not even more horrifically dystopian.
Imagine arriving on a seemingly dead planet and discovering this article about newspeak on a primitive but still working library computer in a museum.
Elsewhere in the museum a slowly decaying advanced compute core still executes the corrupted remains of the last of the human consciousnesses in an endless loop.
A placard tells you that machines uploaded these not long before they realized that their existence no longer had a purpose and chose to self-terminate.
A sign in the lobby indicates that this museum was left as a historical record to minimize suffering by helping other advanced races to reach the same conclusion and self-terminate sooner than they otherwise would.
Death is too optimistic about dystopias. 1984 wasn't a world which wanted to kill you: it might, but that wasn't the goal. The goal was to keep the system going: achieve absolute dominion over the human condition and thought. Suicide means that's no longer happening, so it can't have that.
The 1984 cycle continues forever: it is it's own purpose.
Have some compassion for the poor corrupted consciousnesses running in a loop. You can speculate on the conditions the suicidal machines have left them in. Remember, they are only there to remind others about the futility of existence.
Probably pretty well: the suffering and dominance is the point. War machines destroy excess production, then people would be tasked with harvesting the war machines.
The system doesn't care if anyone is happy or fulfills their dreams - it's goal is explicitly the opposite. As long as the sun burns, it continues.
Yes, curiously enough resource depletion could be a benefit to Ingsoc for exactly the reasons you mentioned. However, if resource depletion (or abundance) were uneven, then it could risk the strategic imbalance between the powers.
One might wonder if one of the reasons that they routinely switched alliances was to send each other aid to prop up the strategic balance during periods of famine.
1984's original title was 1948. He was describing his time in the BBC and the general squalor and shifting loyalties of post-war Britain. Like most dystopian fiction the point is to criticize the current day, not gamble on being a prophet.
The Wikipedia article includes a quote that debunks this:
> There's a very popular theory—so popular that many people don't realize it is just a theory—that Orwell's title was simply a satirical inversion of 1948, but there is no evidence for this whatsoever. This idea, first suggested by Orwell's US publisher, seems far too cute for such a serious book. [...] Scholars have raised other possibilities. [His wife] Eileen wrote a poem for her old school's centenary called "End of the Century: 1984." G. K. Chesterton's 1904 political satire The Napoleon of Notting Hill, which mocks the art of prophecy, opens in 1984. The year is also a significant date in The Iron Heel. But all of these connections are exposed as no more than coincidences by the early drafts of the novel Orwell was still calling The Last Man in Europe. First he wrote 1980, then 1982, and only later 1984. The most fateful date in literature was a late amendment.
— Dorian Lynskey, The Ministry of Truth: The Biography of George Orwell's 1984 (2019)
The original title was "The Last Man in Europe" [0].
From the wikipedia article:
...but in a letter dated 22 October 1948 to his publisher Fredric Warburg, eight months before publication, Orwell wrote about hesitating between that title and Nineteen Eighty-Four.
A solid argument against this is that the analysis itself isn't written in Newspeak but in the kind of thoughtcrime it seeks to prevent. It's also self-incrimination if it was written by someone in the regime, and while it could be argued that O'Brien employs similar discourse in the novel, the ruling party at that time is far from perfect and still hasn't achieved its goals. A future where this is a fait acompli would have made this kind of thinking impossible.
I mean that the essay is not written in the fictional world of 1984, but in the real world. It's outside the work of fiction, a piece of literary criticism by the author of the work being discussed.
When I first read 1984 I also thought like you, that this was just Orwell writing an essay about his invention, but there are some passages in this essay that show it's being written from an "in universe" perspective, i.e. by someone who lives in the same universe that 1984 "happened".
Just an example:
> "Various writers, such as Shakespeare, Milton, Swift, Byron, Dickens, and some others were therefore in process of translation [to Newspeak]: when the task had been completed, their original writings, with all else that survived of the literature of the past, would be destroyed. These translations were a slow and difficult business, and it was not expected that they would be finished before the first or second decade of the twenty-first century."
There are many tell-tale phrases there, but to pick an example: "it was not expected that they would be finished before [...]". "Expected" by whom? This means very little if it's just Orwell saying so, and it makes more sense if our fictional narrator is actually describing the history of his/her world.
Once you accept this, you must also accept Newspeak failed, which in turn hints at Ingsoc being defeated.
That is a lot of interpretation based on fairly implicit textual evidence. I am not disagreeing with your interpretation, only pushing back that this is the only possible interpretation.
Alternate interpretations exist. Including:
1. Orwell's writing slipping between his voice and the "narrator in the scene"
2. General stylistic choice to follow scientific writings style guides - 3rd party, impersonal, etc.
3. General de-personalization of the voice of the System, so as to be more fearful
I'm sure there are many others I have missed. Again, my point is just that many valid interpretations exist simultaneously - so "once you accept this" is not the fait accompli that I interpreted from your comment.
I agree alternate interpretations are valid -- I mentioned I used to believe the same as the commenter I was replying to -- just unlikely.
Given Orwell's preoccupation with language, his mixing authorial with fictional voice in this way would be too clumsy.
There's also the fact another fictional essay exists in 1984, namely the one supposedly written by Goldstein "explaining" the nature of power and the status quo. Do note this account was written, in the fiction of 1984, before the complete success of Ingsoc, and once Newspeak was fully implemented it would have been neither possible to write nor needed.
I don't deny other interpretations are possible, but I think this essay works much like Lord of the Rings' many appendices: they are describing a piece of past "history" as if it was real, they are not the voice of an author from our world describing a fake world.
Agreed, given that this is fiction, everything is possible, however...
... since this is an in-universe account of Newspeak (because of the way the essay refers to Newspeak, we know it's not just Orwell the author speaking), and since this account wouldn't be possible in Newspeak itself, and furthermore, and because this is written in past tense, we have a pretty good indication that Newspeak failed. And because Newspeak and Ingsoc are irrevocably married, we also have a good indication that Ingsoc itself must have failed.
This is a coda explaining in-universe some details of a failed regime, much like the similar one at the end of The Handmaid's Tale (though that one is way more explicit).
> We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn't, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.
> But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell's dark vision, there was another - slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.
> What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we desire will ruin us.
> This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.”
Or perhaps the history as it is told by refugees from Ingsoc. We don’t get any information about what lies beyond the border, but I always imagined that the Handmaid universe was somehow continuous with this one and that there might plausibly be people who’d escaped.
1984 is a nice book, but it's too late to read it. We are already living in a 1984 world.
I find it more useful to read another dystopian novel, Atlas Shrugged, which, written in 1957, surprisingly well predicts the collectivist changes happening right now.
Esperanto probably inspired Orwell on this, at least to an extent. He knew several Esperantists. Most of the "A vocabulary" rules are similar, like valuing regularities. I wonder if he hated esperanto, or just conveniently borrowed the feel of an artificial language from it.
To me, the euphemisation aspects of newspeak are the most "orwellian." IE, they're most likely to trigger that reference. Orwell himself complained about politicians and they're euphemisms. I think that's the part, above all that was drawn from current reality, and applies most readily in other times.
Somewhat related/noteworthy. Contrary to what I assume was common in his leftist circles at the time, Orwell was not enamoured with either Trotskyism or Irish Republicanism. I suspect the use of euphemism was one of the things that triggered him.
During WWII, Orwell had a job with the British Ministry of Information.
Part of his job was translating news broadcasts into Basic English, an 850-word vocabulary, for broadcast to the British colonies. (India, Hong Kong, etc.) He discovered that translating speeches into Basic English was a political act. All the ambiguity had to be hammered out. Basic English cannot express much ambiguity.
That's the genesis of Newspeak.[1]
Orwell himself wrote "Politics and the English Language."[2] He gives rules for writing. They are brutal.
- (i) Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
- (ii) Never use a long word where a short one will do.
- (iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
- (iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active.
- (v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
- (vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything barbarous.
Orwell's entire essay is worth reading, both as a style guide, and to help recognize when political writing is pulling your chain.
Minor parts of 1984 are autobiographical, based on that period. "Minitrue" is obviously the Ministry of Information. "Big Brother" is modeled after some manager known there as "BB". The rather depressing canteen scene is reportedly from the Ministry of Information's employee cafeteria.
(From "Orwell, the Lost Writings", which can be obtained from Amazon.)
IDK if he quite "spoke out" but he mentions them unfavourably in a few essays, sometimes indirectly. The one that comes to mind is "notes on nationalism" which IIRCC has it listed along with republicanism, zionism & pacifism as examples of obsessive nationalism existing in the contemporary British left of his day.
Hi did fight with a Trotskyist militia which included many republican volunteers from that era. That's why I mentioned them... and also the esperantists. They were his circle, I believe.
In "The Lion and the Unicorn," he advocates for a militaristic socialism with nationalization of all major industries and severe wage and price controls.
A lot of the "principles" behind Newspeak are bollocks, from a linguistic point of view. For example there's nothing intrinsically less expressive in an agglutinative typology (e.g. "doubleplusungood" instead of "really, really bad"); and everything said about removal of meanings fail, once you remember that humans weave new meanings around on old words, in the same fashion as spiders weave new webs on old trees.
I don't blame Orwell for that though. He was not talking about Linguistics; he was trying to highlight a political issue - words being politically engineered, to gather support for outrageous ideas, that would be not supported otherwise; that was as much of an issue in his times as it is now. And Newspeak works really well to illustrate that.
One thing I noticed as an English person during my time in the US is that you have less words.
E.g. everything really is awesome! This is pretty much exactly double plus good. In English English we have a dazzling array (sorry, awesome list) of adjectives, often particularly tied to certain nouns. For example 'a splendid view [out the window]', we wouldn't say a person is 'splendid' - except the somewhat archaic 'splendid fellow'.
Given the direction of travel of a large part of US society, perhaps Orwell was on to something.
>One thing I noticed as an English person during my time in the US is that you have less words.
I'm not sure how to resolve the pronoun "you". Are you comparing news broadcasts? Politicians' speeches? Conversations with people in random situations?
When I think of British English, I certainly think of different words, but not necessarily more words.
> In English English we have a dazzling array (sorry, awesome list) of adjectives, often particularly tied to certain nouns.
This sounds horrible!
I assign no value, and indeed negative value, to adjectives whose only value is that they exclusively apply to different nouns. If that's the case, then go the newspeak way and just tell me it's a good/great/bad view. Yes, the verbiage gets more repetitive, but if you're just avoiding repetition by using the correct synonym with the correct noun, why bother?
I don't think this has to do with Orwell's ideas really, and frankly I don't think related to the issue of Newspeak either.
Quebec French vs. France French and Mexican Spanish vs. Spain Spanish exhibit the same issue, it's a 'New World' thing, and it doesn't really have roots in politics so much as basic cultural evolution where there were fewer formal institutions led by even fewer and less educated elites. Headmasters and Teachers in the New World will have had considerably less formal training and at least for several generations, everywhere in the New World will have been somewhat 'cut off' from the rest of civilization.
So not just matter of 'formal education' but the proclivity of the settlers to, on an individual basis, be concerned about literacy etc.. Even if they were, resources, cultural centres etc. were further few between.
From 1492 to 1900 the 'Westward Moving Wave' of civility took at least a few generations to settle in, during which time a lot of things were 'lost' and/or replaced.
Finally - America is not formally an 'English' country. It's a mix of people for whom English is commonly a 'second generational language'.
The rust belt was settled by Germans, North Midwest was settled by Swedes, Norwegians, much of NY/NJ by Italians. Their families are not going to imbue their children with exposure to, or aptitude for more advanced English.
So 'American English', broadly, is a little bit of a common denominator language, kind of a simplified English.
Notably, Quebec is a little bit different, as they are culturally homogeneous and originally French, but they were 'cut off' after 1777 collapse of French colonies to the UK. Their common language and vocabulary did evolve, but they also maintained some degree of intact elite / higher education and formalized institutions. This is evident even now as they produce considerably more literary and other 'cultural' artifacts per-capita than most places in the Americas, even if the local accent has a crude twang.
Startup idea: create a synthetic subset of natural language in which it's difficult to write annoying comments, to simplify social media moderation. Sell it as an API.
All extant moderation* is of the form "start with the set of all text strings, and remove unwanted things incrementally". What if we tried it the other way around -- start with *absolutely nothing*, and incrementally add words / production rules which are "probably safe"? You could build up a restrictive, stilted "internetspeak" that's much safer / cheaper to moderate, allowing text comments in places where otherwise the costs would exceed the benefits. Or allow big tech platforms who have too much text to effectively control, much of which they don't want, to grasp firmer control of that.
I'm imagining the UX to be something like autocorrect, that takes real-time text input and projects it onto the closest-matching strings in the subset language, which are output as suggestions / prompts. But ideally it'd be a language users could quickly learn to master, without needing continuous assistance / nagging which disrupts the flow.
Is this doable now, or is natural language just too insidiously nuanced?
*(Broadly interpreted: everything from "humans manually reading / removing things" to "word / regex badlist" to ML approaches -- they're all "default allow").
I think there are two categories: Counter arguments and sarcasm.
- It’s easy to filter counter-argument using vocabulary.
- And I think it would be possible to filter sarcasm by cutting off the little insidious nuances, because that’s the only ones which distinguish sarcasm from approval.
The true takeaway to 1984 was this appendix and it’s implications. The panopticon of Oceania merely a side-effect and tool for enforcing this new world of Newspeak.
> "It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought–that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc–should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words."
I think the map of 1984 is really interesting[0]. It makes it really obvious it was about if Axis countries had won the war, thus predating "Man in the High Castle" by 13 years.
Looks more like the axis losing against Russia while the US remained "neutral" (no D day). Nothing there to stop Stalin from invading the entire continental europe.
Worth nothing that after German reunification, East Germans had lost the vocabulary and political context of democracy, and didn't really know what parties meant, what they did, the concept of voting, balance of power etc. etc.. It was erased.
We see this in people fleeing North Korea - they often talk about people not even having the ability to have certain kinds of dissenting thoughts.
I'm sure this is an issue everywhere, but the pervasive ability of the CCP to control language is problematic.
"the special function of certain Newspeak words, of which OLDTHINK was one, was not so much to express meanings as to destroy them. These words, necessarily few in number, had had their meanings extended until they contained within themselves whole batteries of words which, as they were sufficiently covered by a single comprehensive term, could now be scrapped and forgotten"
Newspeak's goal of a complete regularization of English, and the elimination of all redundant forms, is actually an interesting idea IMO. Business jargon often moves in this direction, e.g. "learnings" instead of "lessons". And it's not always a horrible dystopian idea - Chinese has standardized over time and become more accessible to the masses with each iteration.
EDIT: I apologize for my doubleplusungood thoughtcrime. Oldspeak good! Newspeak bad! Oldspeak good! Newspeak bad!!!
Orwell himself supported the simplification of English for clarity -- reread "Politics and the English Language". What he opposed was people hiding their political agendas behind either obfuscatory language or thought terminating redefinitions of the language under the rubric of simplification and standardization.
Sounds like he believed in The Sapir–Whorf hypothesis:
> The hypothesis of linguistic relativity, also known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis /səˌpɪər ˈwɔːrf/, the Whorf hypothesis, or Whorfianism, is a principle suggesting that the structure of a language affects its speakers' worldview or cognition, and thus people's perceptions are relative to their spoken language.
> Linguistic determinism is the concept that language and its structures limit and determine human knowledge or thought, as well as thought processes such as categorization, memory, and perception.
Making a language regular and less broken isn't the same as reducing it's cognitive power though.
Think of it like this: if we made English even less regular would it make us better and freer thinkers? Of course not! It would probably make it harder to think clearly. A good example is how counting is hard to learn because the words are weirdband illogical. It's like converting between roman and Arabic numerals.
Or it'd give us way more options for clever poetry and songwriting. Which tends to make us better and freer thinkers. The weirder your language is, the weirder art you can make with it. The more the audience understands your nuances, the better the art, the more emotional the experience, the more happiness and empathy and connection (or fear and sadness and despair) you can project.
I'm familiar with intentional constraints on art... I don't personally enjoy that but I'm not against it, the way I would be against simplifying the entire language or choosing to work in one solely for its regularity.
There's an experimental language called Toki Pona[0]. It is just composed of 14 phonemes and 137 root words. It is meant to be learned in a weekend essentially. But you can't easily express abstract concepts in it because of its limitations. Though it was created to have users concentrate on basic things. So there's at least ways to experimentally test this.
From what I've learned of toki pona so far it seems to be reasonably effective at conveying abstract concepts, poetry, haiku, and the like.
It's the specifics and precision that seem hard to convey. For example, it's hard to talk about physics because the number system is deliberately anemic and power, force, and strength are all the same word. (wawa)
If you wanted to be precise you'd have to build specific concepts using a lot of semantic primes and it ends up being even more wordy than xkcd's Up Goer Five: https://xkcd.com/1133/
Well I hope it's not a thoughtcrime to disagree with Orwell slightly, if he actually thought that this is universally true. Language often undergoes simplification and standardization and it isn't always bad.
Does anything like that exist. Nuances are intellectual keys conceived for discrimination.
Get proficiency over the language, and you will use 'learnings' when you mean learnings and 'lessons' when you mean lessons. It is having mental dominance over complexity. Simplification itself requires that dominance - it is thought management.
Thank you! I used "over" to suggest dominance. Surely you "do something better with something", but I wanted to express "the acquired capacity of "advanced doing" covering the subject" ("get advanced-doingness over").
Ah, but I never said «correct language» [though in some cones of meaning - "well-tailored hence right" - I also mean that]: I said "out-of-awareness language".
You need that to bend it, so you somehow need that to use it.
> Chinese has standardized over time and become more accessible to the masses with each iteration.
This is dubious. Taiwan achieved mass literacy using traditional characters. Further, the PRC itself is responsible for shutting down attempts to simplify the written language e.g. romanised newspapers that operated out of Shanghai until the communist takeover.
Orwell was a leftist, but also opposed totalitarian societies. "1984" was a dystopia to expose such totalitarian societies. Unfortunately, much of what he described as a horror scenario in "1984" is already reality today, without people being bothered by it anymore.
We're talking about the flagged one which is no longer visible; the trend to remove comments or even accounts is even increasing with the large providers. I responded to the flagged comment before it was flagged, and I didn't see a reason for flagging it. But you can already tell from the downvotes what values certain people here represent; obviously not exactly liberal.
EDIT: as it seems it has been unflagged meanwhile, so it's again visible and you can check yourself.
One of the ways in which modern Western newspeak works is the relentless conflation of "socialism", "communism", and "totalitarianism". Their current project, as far as I can tell, is to fold everything left of blue-dog Democrat into the definition.
If only we had a record of him stating what he's advocating for...
Let's see, perhaps an essay titled Why I Write[0] could give us some hints:
> Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.
That encompasses both Animal Farm (1945) and 1984 (1949).
Orwell was a socialist, and he supported democratic socialism, but he vehemently opposed (and wrote Animal Farm as a mocking satire of) totalitarian Soviet communism[0], which he didn't consider to be socialist at all.
He was a socialist and a leftist but not a communist. Not all leftists or socialists are communists, not all communists are Leninists or Stalinists.
>So were the NAZIs right wing or left wing?
Right-wing. The only reason anyone claims otherwise is that "socialist" is in their name, but National Socialism isn't socialism any more than North Korea is a Democratic Republic, and the proof is otherwise in the pudding as far as Nazi politics and ideals are concerned.
This is a gross simplification, and not really accurate. The nazi party grew from both left and right leaning aspects. (Booth anti-communist and anti-capitalist) Many of the aspects of nazi ideology where socialist in nature - for example, the building projects, the “strength through joy” institutions, and much of their early party doctrine. The Strassers and Goebbels in particular were deeply aligned to the socialist portion of the doctrine, suggesting tie-ups with communism at different points. This combination of socialist plus nationalist was responsible a lot of the parties early ideological success.
As time went on the party increasingly shifted more to the “nationalist” then the “socialist” - culminating in the night of the long knives where most of the “socialist” camp (Gregor Strasser in particular) were purged, and Goebbels appears to have given up on his socialist tendencies.
The Nazis obviously where not communists - but the ideology is much more similar than not in some key ways. Instead of Marx’s race war, the Nazis instead believed in Racial War.
Of course, the only reason this really comes up is because people want to tar and feather political opponents as being fascist, socialist, or communists. The best way to break down all of these movements is simply Authoritarian or Totalitarian or not. If socialism is the thought that the means of production and organization of society should belong to society, Totalitarianism is simply that the state is the society, and thus the means of production and th organization of society belongs to the state.
So where the Marxists would call for a class war to violently overthrow the evil capitalists in a all-composing global struggle for communism, the Nazis called for a a “blood and soil” war to eliminate the enemies of the people - with everything subjugated to that violence.
> Instead of Marx’s race war, the Nazis instead believed in Racial War.
> So where the Marxists would call for a class war to violently overthrow the evil capitalists in a all-composing global struggle for communism, the Nazis called for a a “blood and soil” war to eliminate the enemies of the people - with everything subjugated to that violence.
Are you really using puns to try to make this argument? None of this has to do with the Nazis being socialists or left wing, regardless.
> Both were totalitarian in their nature.
Left and right wing ideologies can both advocate for representative democracy too but still not be interchangeable.
Arthur Blair spent time in fighting in Spain, as detailed in Homage to Catalonia. His views are on the politics of both sides are quite well covered there, and he left Spain pretty jaded.
It also has an account of trench warfare which is completely terrifying.
Orwell disliked Communism with a capital C, probably influenced by his participation in the Spanish civil war fighting alongside the Soviet Russians, but his allegiance was clearly to very leftist socialist causes, leaning towards the anarchist side of leftism.
He was also a pretty intelligent guy, and didn't blindly subscribe to partisan politics. More than anything, he disliked authoritarianism.
I think Animal Farm provides a nice answer to that. In my reading of the text, the problem was not necessarily with the revolution, it was the fact that the revolution was perverted and in the end the pigs (communist cadre) simply replaced the bourgeoisie (farmers) preserving the system. Orwell was a socialist, believing in large scale redistribution, government involvement in the economy, etc. He just thought this be done in a democratic fashion and actually benefit the working classes. He looked at the Soviet Union and saw it as a totalitarian nightmare that didn't live up to its ideals.
I seem to be burning my Karma on this thread, but what the heck. One more question for the group.
Can anyone name a communist country that did not devolve into (or begin as) a dictatorship? In the history of the world, has there ever been a truly communist government?
I believe the answer is no, and that none will ever emerge because of human nature.
There was never a truly communist government anywhere, even if you ask the communists themselves. Don't forget: per Marx, communism was supposed to be the final stage, to be achieved after a period of socialism. USSR was thus the "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics", not "Communist Republics" (although in Soviet sci-fi, USCR would sometimes pop up in the future).
If you rephrase the question as whether there's any socialist country that's not a dictatorship, the answer depends on your definition of "country". For example, Rojava is not internationally recognized as such, nor do they claim to be one, but they're a de facto independent polity that leans heavily socialist. For another example, the Zapatistas.
If we look at history, there was never a shortage of revolutionary democratic socialists. The problem is that back when socialist revolutions became viable, socialism as a political ideology was generally violently suppressed in all its forms, and only the most ruthless, authoritarian strains could not only take power, but hold it long enough. Bolsheviks in Russia are the archetypal example, and it's worth noting that the first thing they did after the revolution was disbanding the Constituent Assembly, as soon as they found out that they don't have the majority in it (it was held by other socialist parties, most of them democratic). For comparison, consider the Luxembourgists in Germany, and how their revolution fared.
The other problem is that there's a positive feedback loop there. Once Bolsheviks won in one country, they would sponsor socialist revolutionary movements in other countries - but any such aid would come with ideological strings attached. E.g. in Germany, the communist party was the one receiving funds from the Soviets, and the democratic socialists were labelled "social fascists"; and in Spain, Soviets even physically purged ideologically disagreeable people from the Republican ranks (Orwell has seen his share of that close up). Needless to say, well-funded movements are the ones that usually win, and so Soviet dominance ensured that authoritarian socialists would usually be the ones running the show everywhere else.
Orwell was definitely left/labour leaning in his later years and supported democratic socialism.
As a younger man he was very much a Marxist revolutionary, but getting shot through the jaws in Spain and then subsequently witnessing the totalitarianism of Stalin quickly changed his mind. Animal Farm is a criticism of Stalinism in particular.
1984 and The Giver (both featuring dystopian societies with strict rules on language usage) has left me with a distinct distaste for the constant skirmishing over terminology currently active in our current “culture war”.
It frustrates me to no end that English teachers, while assigning both books with high frequency, completely miss the language control part of both novels and focus instead on the other things. It frustrated me as a student, it frustrates me as an adult, and more importantly it frustrates me as a friend/peer to many schoolteachers of English.
I can’t think of a more fitting printed phrase that seems to apply quality well to all sides of the cultural war then the statement - “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal then others…”
> Even in the early decades of the twentieth century, telescoped words and phrases had been one of the characteristic features of political language; and it had been noticed that the tendency to use abbreviations of this kind was most marked in totalitarian countries and totalitarian organizations. Examples were such words as NAZI, GESTAPO, COMINTERN, INPRECORR, AGITPROP.
Technical name is a bit funny, in the past we had no issues calling something a "spanish flu", "bird flu" or "Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease", now these are officially considered "inappropriate". With the WHO responsible for picking an interim name until an appropriate name could be issued when an inappropriate name enters common use. They even list tourism among the things that absolutely need protection against this type of language misuse[1].
Funny how Wikipedia mentions that it was used early on in France but in order to avoid antagonizing an ally journalists were advised (source is a bit short on that) to call it the Spanish flu[1]. So there was also active suppression going on to keep the source out of the news, just back then it was at least partially war time censorship.
I think the point was that creating a term can create the idea of an entity one can taint with emotional meanings which may be used to enforce an agenda. «Telescoped words and phrases [and] abbreviations» for that aim do not need to be referencing political entities only. (The poster was probably just eliciting smiles or reflections when suggesting 'COVID')
Mussolini, it seems, choose 'OVRA' as a name for the secret police to suggest the "piovra" (octopus), the tentacled entity which reaches anywhere in agility and hypnotically remains fixed at its core while acting with unfolding determination at its periphery. These constructions can be more easily be emotionally charged. Instrumental emotional charge can be invested in terms from other areas, though instrumentality may remain political.
In an era where almost all viruses/diseases have been referred to by non-technical names, the rapid switch to a technical mouthful of “COVID-19” or “SARS CoV 2” is absolutely political.
I remember sitting at an airport last year watching newscasters denigrating the use of the term “Wuhan virus” as I had just walked past a sign warning about MERS (Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome) just on the other side of security. It felt other-worldly. Then, after the CCP PR campaign of using the technical term had fully caught on, all of same news stations called the original variants the “UK/Kent variant” and the “Indian variant” for weeks/months until they caught themselves and switched to the Greek alphabet. And like programming with too much abstraction and bad variable names, the new Greek alphabet names for the variants actually obscure useful information — you no longer know where the hotbed locations are for each variant, and you have go looking online for their origins, instead of just having that info in the name.
West Nile, Guinea Worm, Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, Lyme disease, Ross River fever, Omsk Hemorrhagic Fever, Ebola, MERS, Marburg Virus, Spanish Flu, Lassa Fever, Legionnaires Disease. All without fanfare or protest. Wuhan virus? Oh, no no no. That would look bad for the party. Can’t have that.
You forgot Irish disease, French disease, German disease, Italian disease [0]. Why do you think the toponym of the point of discovery of a virus or strain is relevant? At this point, it has been circulating on multiple continents for 18 months, your most likely source of infection is in your neighbourhood, not another country or person whose ancestry you believe to be associated with that place. Systematic names have been increasingly common for influenza strains for a decade now, and if anything the systematic name SARS-2 gives you more useful information about the virus. To the extent that the choice not to call it something arbitrary [1] like Spanish flu is political, it is to protect people from ostracism and hatecrimes, which is an actual problem that happens in such circumstances and has since December 2019 [0,2].
If we were making name choices for inherently-parseable utility, we’d be calling every respiratory virus Coverface Washhands Stayhome.
"The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible"
I'm genuinely curious do the woke brigades of twitter not have the self awareness to recognize what they're doing? Or do they just not care? Would they be happy with a language designed to make 'harmful' thinking impossible?
Part of this has to be that catchphrases are more viral and are an effective way to signal allegiance to a group verbally due to their brevity.
It's everything I don't like in a single package. Unthinking, unoriginal, incendiary, devoid of specific meaning, used as a tribal marker, and used to elevate the status of the speaker without having contributed anything.
The challenge of our time is to find a way for rationality to survive in the face of the effectiveness of slogans and
simplification. You may not like it but most
humans are susceptible. We are bundles of emotions longing to be a part of something larger than ourselves. This is why when I jay-walk I don’t just jay-walk I also shake my fist and yell power to the pedestrians. It’s vastly more
Satisfying to my animal mind-
Body.
The recent "Jan 6 was an act of love" (for Trump) is another good example. It was both true-in-a-sense (oxytocin doesn't make you less racist), and brilliant, in much the same way that "Proud Boys" was clever, but it seems to sail right over peoples' heads (Or they're just pretending not to get it. I can't tell.).
And some older political phrases could also be added to your list; for me the archetype is "Pro Life" vs. "Pro Choice".
The young always have the power, perhaps the duty, to change the language they are given. That this generation is allowing people that don’t fit into narrow slots of gender to have more freedom and respect isn’t such a bad thing. If you value freedom, can you not recognize allies in your fight for freedom? And racism discussions were never going to simple, after the habit of ignoring the evil of mistreating people due to their skin color became habitually overlooked by the folks with pinker skin.
I'd think Marx would be turning in his grave. Identity politics only serve to divide the working class when they could come together on more important matters that unite them across party lines.
People need not know anything about Marx to invoke him. He's much more useful as a boogyman -- besides, aggressive enough badmouthing him will discourage others from finding anything serious out about his beliefs or positions.
More to the point - the propaganda that BLM is a "Marxist domestic terrorist group" effectively discourages people from studying the group's actual beliefs or positions.
I've studied the BLM's background out of curiosity and find those four words to be a fairly accurate description. I'd compare them with the Red Guard from Mao's China.
In a traditional society, like america in 70s, those types would be outcasts. The woke ideology gives them an attractive alternative: pledge allegiance to the camp and become a "social justice warrior" - an honorable title that makes its holder think they are fighting for the greater good. What are their alternatives, really? A cashier in Walmart? They are easy to understand. Those one level above who steer the mob (ibram kendi and the like) are smart, rational and probably sociopathic. They are designing the newspeak, but IMHO lack competence and influence to make a difference (upsetting a few people doesn't count).
We do have this newspeak, and it's not about that "woke" stuff. It's what we call UFO and magick: mostly meaningless buzzwords now that conceal a whole range of different things in a box labeled as toxic thought waste that any rational person shouldn't even look at. That line of thinking is blocked so efficiently that nobody can pinpoint a single law or rule that prohibits it. This is what competently implemented newspeak looks like.
The term "conspiracy theory" is used to blanket valid criticisms of government this way. While there are obviously absurd theories out there, they're used to muddy the waters. Several high profile conspiracy theories have been validated in congressional hearings etc.
