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submitted 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) by Pluto@hexbear.net to c/the_dunk_tank@hexbear.net

This is the epitome of "right-thinking" and "respectability."

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[-] coeliacmccarthy@hexbear.net 46 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

where's the lie, orwell was a piece of shit who, being british, would absolutely be a terf were he around today

[-] Pluto@hexbear.net 23 points 6 months ago

No lies detected here.

Beep boop

[-] RNAi@hexbear.net 44 points 6 months ago

Tbh, Orwell would absolutely had loved JKR

[-] Pluto@hexbear.net 23 points 6 months ago
[-] anonochronomus@hexbear.net 39 points 6 months ago

Both are enemies of working people everywhere, so yeah I don't see why not.

[-] Pluto@hexbear.net 20 points 6 months ago

And queerphobes.

[-] PKMKII@hexbear.net 35 points 6 months ago

Both JK Rowling and Malcolm X said things that made some people upset. Ergo, they’re very similar, the latter would’ve loved the former. I am very big brained.

[-] Pluto@hexbear.net 25 points 6 months ago

Aristotle owned slaves and would've loved the Founding Fathers.

Aristotle was smart so I guess this makes the Founding Fathers good.

think-about-it

[-] Tabitha@hexbear.net 11 points 6 months ago

You know that Starbucks is woke, and we have no records that indicate Thomas Jefferson has ever been to a Starbucks. It's not looking good for the Woke Left.

[-] Pluto@hexbear.net 10 points 6 months ago

XI!

IS!

FINISHED!

[-] Tommasi@hexbear.net 29 points 6 months ago

There's such a comical disconnect between pieces like this, where supporting trans people is some deep-grained orthodoxy no one ever dares to question, and the actual reality of living as a trans person, where most of us don't get adequate healthcare and "respectable" newspapers publishes opinion pieces on whether you should be allowed to partake in society or not on a regular basis.

[-] Pluto@hexbear.net 17 points 6 months ago

Don't even get me started on the NYT...

[-] GrouchyGrouse@hexbear.net 3 points 6 months ago

We joke that we are all online too much but all of these ghouls are even more online and they think online is for their entertainment. Like TV or something. So when 13 trans folk dog pile them for a shit take they conclude there must be gorillions of trans out there. So it's some kind of epidemic. Totally divorced from any reality and based in a callous selfish worldview. You interrupt their stupid entertainment. It's a weird theory I got.

[-] IMF_DOOM@hexbear.net 19 points 6 months ago
[-] Pluto@hexbear.net 16 points 6 months ago

He'd be like "The communist left is oppressing this poor woman!"

[-] Awoo@hexbear.net 18 points 6 months ago

Even George Orwell, a massive phenomenally brainwormed bastard that the left has rightly rejected, spent a portion of his life throwing grenades at the kinds of fascists that JK aligns herself with.

[-] echognomics@hexbear.net 14 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

I assume you're talking about his time in the Spanish Civil War. But even then some of his contemporaries saw him as essentially an unserious war tourist who was in Catalonia just to collect juicy material for his writing.

Orwell had no understanding of the world-wide significance of the struggle in Spain, he knew little of the national efforts of the Popular Front government to achieve a united front against fascism, he had never seen the Republican flag, he did not agree with the actions of the POUM — he took a rifle in the role of an outsider, a journalist looking for experiences to figure in a future book.” — Bill Alexander, commander of the British Battalion of the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War, in George Orwell and Spain (1984), p. 94.

Not to mention his supposedly negative review of Mein Kampf. Yeah, he shit talks it super vaguely here and there ("Then suddenly it turned out that Hitler was not respectable after all." I've heard of ironic understatement, but don't you think you're overdoing it just a little here George?), but then he somehow finds it possible to say that he doesn't personally dislike a literal genocidaire and spends so much time talking about Hitler's supposed supernatural "charisma":

But Hitler could not have succeeded against his many rivals if it had not been for the attraction of his own personality, which one can feel even in the clumsy writing of Mein Kampf, and which is no doubt overwhelming when one hears his speeches. I should like to put it on record that I have never been able to dislike Hitler. Ever since he came to power—till then, like nearly everyone, I had been deceived into thinking that he did not matter—I have reflected that I would certainly kill him if I could get within reach of him, but that I could feel no personal animosity. The fact is that there is something deeply appealing about him. One feels it again when one sees his photographs—and I recommend especially the photograph at the beginning of Hurst and Blackett's edition, which shows Hitler in his early Brownshirt days. It is a pathetic, dog-like face, the face of a man suffering under intolerable wrongs. In a rather more manly way it reproduces the expression of innumerable pictures of Christ crucified, and there is little doubt that that is how Hitler sees himself. The initial, personal cause of his grievance against the universe can only be guessed at; but at any rate the grievance is here. He is the martyr, the victim, Prometheus chained to the rock, the self-sacrificing hero who fights single-handed against impossible odds. If he were killing a mouse he would know how to make it seem like a dragon. One feels, as with Napoleon, that he is fighting against destiny, that he can't win, and yet that he somehow deserves to. The attraction of such a pose is of course enormous; half the films that one sees turn upon some such theme.

(Side note: really suspicious that when I googled for Orwell's review, the versions in the top results always seem cut out the part where Orwell says he never was able to dislike Hitler.... brow)

And his ending paragraph, ostensibly meant as to criticise the fascist false promise of providing with meaningful struggle in a nihilistic world, actually spends more time puching at "hedonistic" Socialism (Socialists want peace and sustainable material improvements for the lives of the working class? Oh horror!) and while also doing false equivalency between Stalinism and Nazism:

Also he has grasped the falsity of the hedonistic attitude to life. Nearly all western thought since the last war, certainly all "progressive" thought, has assumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security and avoidance of pain. In such a view of life there is no room, for instance, for patriotism and the military virtues. The Socialist who finds his children playing with soldiers is usually upset, but he is never able to think of a substitute for the tin soldiers; tin pacifists somehow won't do. Hitler, because in his own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don't only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty-parades. However they may be as economic theories, Fascism and Nazism are psychologically far sounder than any hedonistic conception of life. The same is probably true of Stalin's militarised version of Socialism. All three of the great dictators have enhanced their power by imposing intolerable burdens on their peoples. Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a more grudging way, have said to people "I offer you a good time," Hitler has said to them "I offer you struggle, danger and death," and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet. Perhaps later on they will get sick of it and change their minds, as at the end of the last war. After a few years of slaughter and starvation "Greatest happiness of the greatest number" is a good slogan, but at this moment "Better an end with horror than a horror without end" is a winner. Now that we are fighting against the man who coined it, we ought not to underrate its emotional appeal.

Orwell's not a commited anti-fascist. His worst condemnation of fascism is merely of its aesthetics, and his tepid opposition to Nazi Germany is just another opportunity for him to posture and smear leftists that are more serious than he is in defeating fascism.

[-] FriendBesto@lemmy.ml 1 points 6 months ago

Fascist? Mind naming a couple? Honestly asking.

[-] GenderIsOpSec@hexbear.net 11 points 6 months ago
[-] HexReplyBot@hexbear.net 1 points 6 months ago

I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:

[-] Goatithro@hexbear.net 16 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

They both are charlatans so it’s not wrong. (Obligatory Issac Asimov takedown of Orwell: REVIEW OF 1984 )

[-] Pluto@hexbear.net 2 points 6 months ago

Thanks for the link.

[-] EmmaGoldman@hexbear.net 16 points 6 months ago

Yeah, sure fine, probably. The framing of both of them as good and based for being bigoted pieces of shit is ridiculous. Whomever Michael Deacon is, he's a douchenozzle

[-] Pluto@hexbear.net 9 points 6 months ago

He's a rebel, alright.

And he'd be in a rebellion for slavery, probably.

[-] keepcarrot@hexbear.net 16 points 6 months ago

The two authors have one crucial thing in common: they dare to resist the ‘prevailing orthodoxy’ of ‘right-thinking people’

It is interesting that the people in power who print magazines and set school curriculums (among other related things) think they're an edgy minority voice fighting against orthodoxy rather than just reproducing the conditions for capitalism and nationalism. I read 1984 like... 3 times for school and animal farm at least once.

[-] Pluto@hexbear.net 3 points 6 months ago

They're a minority alright... We outnumber them...

[-] GenderIsOpSec@hexbear.net 12 points 6 months ago

Sure, they're both awful people who like to talk shit about things they have no knowledge of

[-] Pluto@hexbear.net 2 points 6 months ago
[-] Crowtee_Robot@hexbear.net 11 points 6 months ago

Hacks of a feather think together.

[-] Pluto@hexbear.net 8 points 6 months ago

They're hacks, alright.

[-] AnarchoSnowPlow@midwest.social 3 points 6 months ago

Orwell got shot in the neck fighting fascists. But sure, he'd love the lady spouting fashy lines.

[-] comrade_pibb@hexbear.net 12 points 6 months ago

Probably the only good thing he ever accomplished

[-] combat_brandonism@hexbear.net 10 points 6 months ago

there's a quote from some shit he wrote about his time in spain that really shows how much of a bourgeois war tourist he was there that gets posted here from time to time, lemme see if I can find it

[-] corgiwithalaptop@hexbear.net 10 points 6 months ago

I mean, Orwell and those fascists were just having a bit of infighting. He definitely would love Rowling, but not for the reasons this article presents.

this post was submitted on 06 Apr 2024
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