Tag: Books

Name: Nineteen Eighty-Four, by George Orwell

Type: Book

Written in: 1949

Set in: ...1984.

Why it's a dystopia: The world is broken up into three super-dictatorships, two of which are always at war with the third; everybody is spying on everybody else, everybody lives in more or less abject poverty, and eventually the secret police comes, takes you away, tortures you until you break, and then shoots you.  Also, you can't turn off your television set.  Everything in that first sentence may or may not be true, by the way, even in the context of the book.

Why it's significant: You probably read this book in high school.  Also, every politically-motivated online idiot on the Left will eventually reference this book while whining about whatever the Right's done, or thought to have done, or is incorrectly alleged to have done this week (don't smirk; there's a similar problem on the Right with regard to Atlas Shrugged).  Nineteen Eighty-Four has also more or less interjected itself into our popular culture, and to a certain extent our language.  All in all, it's probably the most mainstream piece of masochism porn in Western literature.

What happened? Well, two things, really. 

First off, as is usual for this type of fiction the author has too low an opinion of human beings, particularly Americans.  Again, don't smirk: lots of people have this problem, and some of them probably share your political views.  In this particular case, Orwell assumed that the postwar West would participate in its own self-immolation... including the parts that weren't actually wrecked in the war itself.  It is never adequately explained how and why the comfortable, optimistic, and confident middle class that runs the USA would voluntarily transform itself into the starving subjects of a multi-continental dictatorship; mostly because there actually isn't a valid reason*.

Which leads to the second point: Nineteen Eighty-Four is actually masochism pornography.  Quite well done masochism porn, at that: the book is almost surgical in the way that it cuts away the extraneous fleshy bits and gets right to the stuff about power imbalances.  Oceania is, for some people, the ultimate dream world: everybody wants power over you, conditions are miserable, and you're given just enough control to delude yourself before the brutality and the pain starts.  There are people pay serious money in the real world for this kind of scenario; I'm moderately surprised that there isn't a specialized theme resort along Oceania's lines. 

Or possibly there is, and I'm just too vanilla to hear about it.

Moe Lane

*A very useful corrective is Charlie Stross's "Big Brother Iron," which can be found in the story collection Toast.  The story updates Nineteen Eighty-Four as things would have happened in that world, absent the author's need to control the plot: I won't give sp0ilers, but if you're familiar with the daily life of Soviet elites in the Brezhnev era and afterward then you can probably guess them anyway.

Name: Nineteen Eighty-Four, by George Orwell

Type: Book

Written in: 1949

Set in: ...1984.

Why it's a dystopia: The world is broken up into three super-dictatorships, two of which are always at war with the third; everybody is spying on everybody else, everybody lives in more or less abject poverty, and eventually the secret police comes, takes you away, tortures you until you break, and then shoots you.  Also, you can't turn off your television set.  Everything in that first sentence may or may not be true, by the way, even in the context of the book.

Why it's significant: You probably read this book in high school.  Also, every politically-motivated online idiot on the Left will eventually reference this book while whining about whatever the Right's done, or thought to have done, or is incorrectly alleged to have done this week (don't smirk; there's a similar problem on the Right with regard to Atlas Shrugged).  Nineteen Eighty-Four has also more or less interjected itself into our popular culture, and to a certain extent our language.  All in all, it's probably the most mainstream piece of masochism porn in Western literature.

What happened? Well, two things, really. 

First off, as is usual for this type of fiction the author has too low an opinion of human beings, particularly Americans.  Again, don't smirk: lots of people have this problem, and some of them probably share your political views.  In this particular case, Orwell assumed that the postwar West would participate in its own self-immolation... including the parts that weren't actually wrecked in the war itself.  It is never adequately explained how and why the comfortable, optimistic, and confident middle class that runs the USA would voluntarily transform itself into the starving subjects of a multi-continental dictatorship; mostly because there actually isn't a valid reason*.

Which leads to the second point: Nineteen Eighty-Four is actually masochism pornography.  Quite well done masochism porn, at that: the book is almost surgical in the way that it cuts away the extraneous fleshy bits and gets right to the stuff about power imbalances.  Oceania is, for some people, the ultimate dream world: everybody wants power over you, conditions are miserable, and you're given just enough control to delude yourself before the brutality and the pain starts.  There are people pay serious money in the real world for this kind of scenario; I'm moderately surprised that there isn't a specialized theme resort along Oceania's lines. 

Or possibly there is, and I'm just too vanilla to hear about it.

Moe Lane

*A very useful corrective is Charlie Stross's "Big Brother Iron," which can be found in the story collection Toast.  The story updates Nineteen Eighty-Four as things would have happened in that world, absent the author's need to control the plot: I won't give sp0ilers, but if you're familiar with the daily life of Soviet elites in the Brezhnev era and afterward then you can probably guess them anyway.

Name: It Can't Happen Here, by Sinclair Lewis.

Type: Book.

Written in: 1935

Set in: 1936

Why it's a dystopia: Near-bloodless Fascist (Italian-style, not German-style) takeover of the United States of America, followed by a remarkably orderly transition to a totalitarian state.

Why it's significant: Given that it was essentially an agitprop piece reluctantly begging that the American people not reject the New Deal in favor of Huey Long, this book has been surprisingly durable.  In fact, I think that it's second only to 1984 in the field of Overwrought We're All Gonna Get Got By The Man references by the American Left.  Also: Lewis was a good writer (which is an advantage that a lot of these absurd prognostications of DOOM have going for them, by the way).

What happened? Essentially, the American bourgeoisie.

To understand this book, ignore the superficial politics - actually, no, let's address them very quickly.  Sinclair Lewis wasn't exactly a Roosevelt fan; Wikipedia (yeah, I know) suggests that he wrote this book mostly because he was worried about Huey Long going all populist on the New Dealers in the 1936 elections (and whether or not Long was an actual danger to the Republic is beyond the scope of this post).  This book is also very much set in an era where anti-war isolationism was not seen as being completely incompatible with general progressivism, which is why the eventual leader of the American resistance was 1936 Republican nominee Walt Trowbridge, backed up by the LaFolette clan and various and sundry others.  This will no doubt come as a surprise to American Leftists who actually read the book, although probably not as much as the parts where Lewis has his fascist regime be pretty just much as friendly to the Soviet Union as it was to Nazi Germany.

But the real issue here is Lewis's disdain for the aforementioned bourgeoisie, which he more or less simply assumed would look placidly on as a populist movement replicated in six months (and considerably less violence) the success that the Nazis managed only after thirteen years.  To give you an idea of the utter improbability of this scenario: Lewis postulates that it would only take weeks for a country with a functional and stable democratic system to be converted into a police state that would shrug as:

• Congress was put in jail;
• The Constitution shredded, unambigiously;
• Home-grown stormtroopers would be armed and organized from scratch;
• And Enemies to the regime would be lined up and shot.

...instead of, say, picking up the nearest firearms and start shooting fascists until the local governor could call up their National Guard contingents, who would be able to handle things until the actual military could arrive to take the new President away for his "rest cure.*"  Because that's something that Lewis (and his later, Leftist admirers) never quite got about this country: our successful revolutions spring from middle class sensibilities.  Which is why the various anti-war movements never got anywhere meaningful (it took Watergate to give the progressives the opportunity to murder the South Vietnamese), and the Tea Party did (and does); the former were radicals, and thus unable to inherently tap into the true revolutionary spirit that informed the latter.  Which is, you know, good and everything.  Certainly less violent.

So, basically, it actually can't happen here.  At least, not the way that we had the country organized back then.  Or today, come to think of it.

Moe Lane

*You may safely assume that I am not impressed by Lewis's handwaving away of those details.