10 Comments
User's avatar
⭠ Return to thread
Ivo Gatzinski's avatar

The description of the pows to be executed publicly is pretty racist…

Expand full comment
Noah Berlatsky's avatar

I'm not sure I remember that passage specifically; could you quote? or provide more detail?

Expand full comment
Ivo Gatzinski's avatar

Yes, I agree that the US appropriation of 1984 is “color-blind” as it is part of the right-wing (who also appropriate Arendt) as well as in everything else in our “both sides” education system and general culture.

Expand full comment
Noah Berlatsky's avatar

Yeah; someone on notes was just using Orwell to justify transphobia. It’s pretty disheartening

Expand full comment
Ivo Gatzinski's avatar

“ A long line of trucks, with wooden-faced guards armed with sub-machine guns standing upright in each corner, was passing slowly down the street. In the trucks little yellow men in shabby greenish uniforms were squatting, jammed close together. Their sad, Mongolian faces gazed out over the sides of the trucks utterly incurious.” Elsewhere they are described as expressionless, and as menacing stupendous and huge. Orwell is indeed focused on the relationship with Julia and the idea is no one in the crowd cares about the prisoners, as they have been thoroughly dehumanized otherized and villainized… I would have loved more from Orwell on the role of racism, and I guess his use of it is fairly standard and generic for his environment of English intellectuals whom he is criticizing.

Expand full comment
Ivo Gatzinski's avatar

Also “Goldstein” seems like a reference to “The Jew”

Expand full comment
Noah Berlatsky's avatar

Yea; I think I say that you do see racial difference in the margins, as in these passages. It’s not really a focus or something Orwell links to authoritarianism very clearly ( in contrast to more didactic passages)

Expand full comment
DR Darke's avatar

Well, "Goldstein" was a direct reference to Trotsky, who Stalin really hated, and the feeling was mutual—Trotsky could see the Fascist that was barely hidden by Stalin's mouthing of Marxist phrases! Despite Trotsky originally being exiled to Kazakhstan and later deported to Turkey, Stalin considered him an eternal thorn in his side— so he let it be known that if Trotsky was assassinated, it would be a powerful blow for Stalinism—er, "global Communism".

Although Stalin was also antisemitic, come right down to it....

Expand full comment
Noah Berlatsky's avatar

I don’t think I knew that! And yes stalin is as very antisemitic…though probably not as antisemitic as hitler? Not many ppl have been as antisemitic as hitler…

Expand full comment
DR Darke's avatar

I...don't know for sure if he was as antisemitic as Hitler? I thought I had heard that TWELVE Million Jews had died in the U.S.S.R. under Stalin, but I can't find anything online that backs that number up, so it might have been some pro-Israeli/anti-Communist propaganda I'd heard....

For all the Soviet Union made a public issue of supporting ALL people as equal including Blacks and Gays, behind the scenes matters were much more starkly bigoted.

Expand full comment