Posted by pancho from pool0190.cvx20-bradley.dialup.earthlink.net (209.179.250.190) on Sunday, December 08, 2002 at 5:00PM :
Hitchens is pushing Orwell...says the man was first to point out the day of the Fascists coming to a mall near you. He sees the Soviets, Korea, several other totalitarian tots all the way down to Saddam, as the things Orwell was warning about.
These versions were the first models...the prototypes. We've had strong arm rule before...what Orwell warned about was a state in which the people demand their own oppression...believe that tyranny is freedom...and if not that, then the next best thing.
There's no way you can convince North Koreans that their way is best...I don't care how many posters you plaster, how many loudspeakers blast the news...people know they're hungry and soon don't care why. But you can convince Americans they need a Bigger Brother...you can get them to sign onto an economic system that's chasing their tail ends from the day they get that first job, ready to chew, spit and eject them in turn.
Hitchens doesn't think the United States falls into that category... an Orwellian world where a Kim il Jong is too obvious and heavy handed to fool us, or come from among us. Bushcroft is more our style.
Hitchens seems to believe it's all them, and not us. The United States has the potential to beat those Eastern Bloc funny paper dictators hands down. We have the technology, the media, the enviable school system that couldn't be a better extension of the government if they funded it...oops.
Huxley got closer to our peculiar situation...his Brave New World sounds more fantastic...because it's a world filled with willing, eager and doped up believers...closer to us then what Orwell imagined.
Orwell predicted the Soviet style of tyranny with ill fitting suits, lies and paranoia. Huxley envisioned the American kind with tailored suits, total information, and security at any price.
You don't hear the gears working in our kind of Tyranny. Witness the theft, the legal theft, of the presidency. Saddam has his funny ways of winning elections...Bush had his. We are merely happier victims of a sunnier Tyranny...so long as they don't bust us.
-- pancho
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