As usual,

[Hannah Bell]

the face of Emmanuel Goldstein, the Enemy of the People, had flashed on to the screen. There were hisses here and there among the audience. The little sandy-haired woman gave a squeak of mingled fear and disgust. Goldstein was the renegade and backslider who once, long ago (how long ago, nobody quite remembered), had been one of the leading figures of the Party, almost on a level with Big Brother himself, and then had engaged in counter-revolutionary activities, had been condemned to death, and had mysteriously escaped and disappeared.

The programmes of the Two Minutes Hate varied from day to day, but there was none in which Goldstein was not the principal figure. He was the primal traitor, the earliest defiler of the Party's purity. All subsequent crimes against the Party, all treacheries, acts of sabotage, heresies, deviations, sprang directly out of his teaching. Somewhere or other he was still alive and hatching his conspiracies: perhaps somewhere beyond the sea, under the protection of his foreign paymasters, perhaps even -- so it was occasionally rumoured -- in some hiding-place in Oceania itself.

Before the Hate had proceeded for thirty seconds, uncontrollable exclamations of rage were breaking out from half the people in the room... But what was strange was that although Goldstein was hated and despised by everybody, although every day and a thousand times a day, on platforms, on the telescreen, in newspapers, in books, his theories were refuted, smashed, ridiculed, held up to the general gaze for the pitiful rubbish that they were in spite of all this, his influence never seemed to grow less.

http://www.mondopolitico.com/library/1984/1984_c1.htm

[Hannah Bell]

1. gee, where'd my rec go? democrats don't like orwell?

[cali]

2. I recced it. I like Orwell- particularly on writing

and I even grudgingly like you. sort of. well, maybe. OK, I respect you. sometimes.

[Hannah Bell]

3. gee cali, i never knew you had feelings for me. lol. (choke)

[H2O Man]

5. Okay. That does it.

I'll recommend it, too.

[Hannah Bell]

6. you love me! you really love me! i'd like to thank the academy...

[cali]

11. lol.

[babydollhead]

4. just reread 1984 as an adult

so scary. i couldn't even read it before going to sleep. I even had to turn the book over, not to look at the cover, which is plain white and simply says 1984.

[Capitalocracy]

8. Interesting. I read it in junior high, I believe

maybe high school, I don't know... but I should definitely read it again, being a little more familiar with just how close to the real world it is

[joshcryer]

7. I see you've been watching Gaddafi's "son's" funeral...

[Hannah Bell]

9. hey don't you have another paen to the rebels to compose?

[joshcryer]

12. Well I have to wonder what your post is about, and that's the only thing that comes to mind.

Most of the revelry from yesterday was over as soon as people got over their hangovers.

Gaddafi's propaganda is going on just today.

[Hannah Bell]

14. lol. look at this page, kiddo. obl is still #1.

[joshcryer]

15. Yes, OBL, someone who was barely mentioned in the press for years...

...and whom will vanish into obscurity within weeks.

[Hannah Bell]

17. times a wasting, josh. better get to work....

those screeds don't write themselves

[joshcryer]

20. Speaking of which...

[joshcryer]

10. George Orwell - Notes on Nationalism

http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/nationalism/english/e_nat">George Orwell - Notes on Nationalism
Trotskyism. This word is used so loosely as to include Anarchists, democratic Socialists and even Liberals. I use it here to mean a doctrinaire Marxist whose main motive is hostility to the Stalin regime. Trotskyism can be better studied in obscure pamphlets or in papers like the Socialist Appeal than in the works of Trotsky himself, who was by no means a man of one idea. petty fuerher of its own, its inspiration is essentially negative. The Trotskyist is against Stalin just as the Communist is for him, and, like the majority of Communists, he wants not so much to alter the external world as to feel that the battle for prestige is going in his own favour. In each case there is the same obsessive fixation on a single subject, the same inability to form a genuinely rational opinion based on probabilities. The fact that Trotskyists are everywhere a persecuted minority, and that the accusation usually made against them, i. e. of collaborating with the Fascists, is obviously false, creates an impression that Trotskyism is intellectually and morally superior to Communism; but it is doubtful whether there is much difference. The most typical Trotskyists, in any case, are ex-Communists, and no one arrives at Trotskyism except via one of the left-wing movements. No Communist, unless tethered to his party by years of habit, is secure against a sudden lapse into Trotskyism. The opposite process does not seem to happen equally often, though there is no clear reason why it should not.

Orwell was a fine man.

[Hannah Bell]

13. if that is supposed to be a dig at me, joshy baby, i'm not a trot.

now i think it's late for "libyan revolution, day 287," you'd better get started soon, those things must take hours to collate.

[joshcryer]

16. Ahh, it wasn't really. It merely shows that Orwell knew that this process...

...was not exclusive to fascists or capitalists. :hi:

(WSWS is a Trotskyist rag, if you weren't aware.)

[Hannah Bell]

18. i'm well aware dear heart. however, being a trot rag doesn't preclude purveying more truthful

reportage than the nyt & wp

or twitter-twat-tweets from unknown sources

[joshcryer]

19. When the language uses the same neo-Stalinist innuendos that Orwell is referring to...

...it most certainly does. :hi:

[Hannah Bell]

21. you find neo-stalinist innuendo in the orwell excerpt i posted? i have no clue what you're

babbling about now, joshy, but i suspect it is a personal attack rather than anything to do with the op or the subject of the op.

it's flattering how you follow me around, but i really wish you wouldn't. i leave your PR pieces pretty much alone (mostly because i find them boring and unreadable, an opinion i apparently share with a large number of duers, as the same three posters are generally the only ones who comment)

[joshcryer]

24. WSWS articles spout the same propaganda Orwell is referring to...

...mythical boogeymen who must be fought against, etc. Trotsky used the same methods when he crushed the democratic rebellions in the USSR, etc. His critique has always been sharply focused on leftists. I used to drink the koolaid a long time ago but I learned better.

And I'll happily not "follow you around," if you wish. I assumed you liked me bumping your posts since without my bumps they get few replies. :hi:

[Hannah Bell]

25. spin spin little spider

[midnight]

22. Some how this made me think of Ayn Rand and how she

so loved this type of joyless lifestyle crushing all expression of love and freedom....

[H2O Man]

23. "Only living things

bring living joy to the soul and must evevate the soul." -- Gandhi