TBH it got down voted to 0.
Also from that thread:
Imagine thinking Stalin was a Marxist
:stalin-stressed:
Okay, but in this case, didn't Marx vehemently reject the idea of there being a "Marxism"?
You see that story told a lot, but the closest Marx said was, "If this [views espoused by some of his early followers] is Marxism, then I'm not a Marxist." ~ Not against the idea itself, but against one expression of it.
I thought communism was cool and would get me free things I want like a nintendo and basketball shoes. Then I listened to 280 hours of Jordan Peterson lectures and was inspired to read a history book. These animals lived on a farm and they did communism so they'd get basketball shoes too. Then the pigs, Stalin, said they were more equal than the other animals. It was so crazy like they were the same 10 pages ago and now they're different. How can you even debate that once you've read about it in-person?
Extremely Spicy Take: When read as a simple polemic against the perils of transitional revolutionary government, Animal Farm is fine. You could apply it as easily to the American Revolution or the French Revolution or the Iranian Revolution as to the Soviets. And the warnings of the hazards associated with mass media, monopolization of military powers, and disaster exploitation are as valuable to leftists coming from Orwell as anyone.
There are much better authors than Orwell, but Animal Farm is one of his least terrible works.
You could apply it as easily to the American Revolution or the French Revolution or the Iranian Revolution as to the Soviets.
Not really. In fact that’s why he had trouble getting it published, because it was very clearly about the Soviets specifically, and really doesn’t carry any sort of generalized message. And he was trying to publish this specifically anti-Soviet work during WW2 while the Soviets were saving the world from fascism.
The publisher wrote to Orwell, saying:[51]
If the fable were addressed generally to dictators and dictatorships at large then publication would be all right, but the fable does follow, as I see now, so completely the progress of the Russian Soviets and their two dictators [Lenin and Stalin], that it can apply only to Russia, to the exclusion of the other dictatorships.
Another thing: it would be less offensive if the predominant caste in the fable were not pigs. I think the choice of pigs as the ruling caste will no doubt give offence to many people, and particularly to anyone who is a bit touchy, as undoubtedly the Russians are.
In fact that’s why he had trouble getting it published, because it was very clearly about the Soviets specifically, and really doesn’t carry any sort of generalized message.
I can't speak to why people who turned him down to publish rejected his copy, but there was no shortage of Churchill-friendly anti-com publishers in England in the 1940s. And as to it being "clearly about the Soviets", the main character was explicitly named "Napoleon". You don't get much more allegorical to the French Revolution than that. What's more, "Napoleon" had become a stand-in figure for virtually every demagogue of the late-19th and early-20th century. A latter-day Hitler, in his evocation. This wasn't particular to Orwell.
If you get a bit further in the wiki you reference, you'll even run into one such cartoonist - Sir David Alexander Cecil Low - who enjoyed significant prestige and held no qualms about trashing any of Europe's leading WW2 combatants. Orwell being a liberal snitch and Americans pivoting into a full Red Scare during the 50s helped establish the book as an anti-Communist polemic. But the major themes of the novel are hardly critical of Marxist-Leninist ideology. Nor are the events depicted somehow unique to the Russian Revolution. In fact, one might find special irony in the CIA attempting to distribute copies east of the Iron Curtain during the 1950s if one were to hold up the story relative to the rise of the modern American police and surveillance "Deep State".
Napoleon is very clearly Joseph Stalin, and only Joseph Stalin, literally everything that happens in the book is a 1:1 parallel (highly editorialized to be anti-whatever the Soviets did) to some event that took place in the Soviet Union specifically, so no, you can absolutely not “just as easily” read it as the French or American or any other revolution, it is only about the USSR. I think you really need to read it again if you actually believe what you’re saying.
Napoleon is very clearly Joseph Stalin, and only Joseph Stalin, literally everything that happens in the book is a 1:1 parallel
That's definitely the Americanized spin on it, yes. The book is basically introduced as "Russian History 101", and you'll fail the class if you don't regurgitate this line just like all the other sheep in the classroom.
you can absolutely not “just as easily” read it as the French or American or any other revolution
Not when the curriculum is being written up by the CIA, no. But the comparison of the revolution to failures in France and Spain are easy enough to make. As someone who watched the Spanish Civil War rapidly deteriorate into factionalist conflicts between Stalinists and Trotskyists, only for the rebellion to be quashed by a fascist dictatorship, Orwell had a front line view of leftist infighting and betrayal to inform his worldview.
Of course, the American government wasn't in the business of stirring up antipathy towards Franco's Spain. So you'll never get a tight 1:1 reading in an effort to denounce fascism in Western Europe that's offered up by a Reagan-Era school teacher.
No, that’s not an Americanized spin, that’s just how the book is written. You’d be throwing your back out with all the reaching you’d have to do to relate the events in the book to other revolutions, because it was specifically written to be anti-Stalin. Who is Snowball if you’re talking about the American or French Revolutions? Who’s Frederick, what’s the windmill and the collapse of the windmill representative of?
IMO Orwell meant to criticize the USSR, but the result is allegorical/general enough that it stands as its own story, better in fact than it works a criticism of the USSR.
It's also not an anti-Marxist book, because it criticizes the betrayal of the revolution, not the revolution itself, which is a triumph over the exploiters. Gorbachyov/the Communist Party revisionists are the pigs who started to walk on two feet, not Stalin.
It got me thinking about the psychosocial dynamics of revolution but the historical context of the novel and way it's primarily used as red scare propaganda by people whose only exposure to socialism is that book (and maybe 1984) are both things I'll always loathe about it. It's our Harry Potter if Harry Potter was about how shitty wizards are.
the historical context of the novel and way it’s primarily used as red scare propaganda by people whose only exposure to socialism is that book (and maybe 1984) are both things I’ll always loathe about it
You can launder just about anything through the American propaganda machine and spit out something critical of our foreign rivals. I grew up in the Reagan Era, and I got to watch everything from the Civil Rights Movement to Environmentalism to NAFTA spun as anti-Communist. The fact that the CIA was pushing Orwell and crack on young people with equal abandon carries its own flavor of literary irony, particularly if you consider the history of right-wing demagoguery relative to the Animal Farm story arc.
It’s our Harry Potter if Harry Potter was about how shitty wizards are.
JK Rowling is far more in line with Roald Dahl than George Orwell.
"Haha Tacoma is weepin-"
BONK
You have been bopped with a big funny clown hammer. You are going to the posting gulag for your crimes."Lol he said the n-word in a stream and-"
BONK
You have been bopped with a big funny clown hammer. You are going to the posting gulag for your crimes."lmao remember when he defended pedophilia by saying it wasn't any more exploitative than making laptops-"
BONK
You have been bopped with a big funny clown hammer. You are going to the posting gulag for your crimes.Making a post demanding others stop Vaushposting, and then realizing that you yourself have now Vaushposted
BONK
You have been bopped with a big funny clown hammer. You are going to the posting gulag for your crimes.oh. christ.
edit: wait i'm a mod I should probably remove this
It may be factually false, but narratively true.
I really don’t like this line
None of these dispense facts. The Onion describes a reality that has more to do with the real world than what you'd find in the NYT, but none of the things they describe are true in a factual sense. They're plausible, or symptomatic of our time, or typical or whatever you want to call it, but they're not true.
I think @carbohydra is bringing up the question "what is truth". There's more than just a single one-size-defines-all kind.
I think he's said the gamer word in the past? Idk I have no idea who vaush is outside of chapo comments.
He did, to "prove to my interlocutors that it has no power over me" or some stupid shit like that
I can't remember if it was him or the other opportunistic lib beardo who condoned fascist militias gunning down BLM protestors
Honestly I’m meeting more and more people who say they’re on the spectrum. I’m getting to the point I think either like half of humanity is on it to some degree or a shit ton of people are mis-diagnosing themselves.
Apparently I am but I’m beginning to think my mom was so convinced I was that she just kept shopping around for a childhood psychologist who would say I was. I pretty much exhibit 0 symptoms past age 27.
I’m getting to the point I think either like half of humanity is on it to some degree or a shit ton of people are mis-diagnosing themselves.
If it's a spectrum, we're all technically on the spectrum
Okay good point. But I assume most people know what I mean when I say “on the spectrum”
yeah I was just joshing you
:doggo-matapacos:
But one of my ex's mum said that to me when talking about a learning disability and I thought it was just the dumbest shit
:banana-duck:
The spectacle may have eaten the whole world, but you can't destroy it (and we need to) by completely accepting its premise. Truth (in relation to the real world and experiences, to material reality) may be absent or obscured in the spectacle (the new york times, etc..), or may sometimes appear temporarily as a momentary burst of partial truth within falseness (the onion, etc..), but to accept either as actual truth (material reality, real social relations, real experience) is to surrender to the spectacle and be re-appropriated by it in some way, and also means you end up cut-off from material reality completely.
...
Yes i've started reading Society of the Spectacle how can you tell?
First Russia, then Serbia. The Russian treatment didn't work because it takes a Yugoslav to treat a wound inflicted by a Yugoslav.
Has anyone ever actually seen Vash and JBP in the same room together?
Really makes you think.
gonna be honest I don't know the difference between this voosh v character and that shitty misogynist roosh v
edit: I see now that @infuziSporg made almost exactly the same comment three hours before me, if you're going to upbear this upbear their comment instead
Is VooshV actually a different person from RaushV? I can't be sure
