You don’t even have to read this. You already know what it says.
But I had to leave this comment:
Oh, dear. How old are you? Trump is my fourth “Hitler.” Heard the same thing about Nixon, Reagan and W. (Goldwater, too, but he didn’t win…)
If you think 2017 is “scary,” I was actually alive in 1984, and Reagan was president! BOOO!
Oh, the bad art; the dumb jokes; the awful punk music; the corny pop anthems; the unfunny “Spitting Image” “satire”; the mediocre, earnest movies!! (Including… “1984”…)
There was going to be a nuclear war right after the great global cooling, and the population bomb would render life on earth unlivable anyhow.
Obviously, NONE of that happened.
Instead, Reagan, Thatcher and the Pope helped destroy European communism, which really HAD killed a hundred million people. Jobs and Gates led a computer revolution, many diseases were vanquished, tens of millions were lifted out of poverty — to the point where one sure sign that you were “poor” in America wasn’t that you were thin, it was that you were fat.
Now Ansari goes on SNL and says:
“I’m sitting here wistfully watching old George W. Bush speeches?” Just sitting there like, “What a leader he was!” Sixteen years ago, I was certain this dude was a dildo. Now, I’m sitting there like, “He guided us with his eloquence!””
Yeah, well, we tried to tell you that.
And contra Ansari, Bush was wrong about Islam — it means “submission” not “peace;” it’s a horrible “religion;” and nation building was dumb after all, because not everyone yearns for freedom (see “Islam,” above.)
We said all this at the time.
BUT: some of us also knew Bush wasn’t Hitler, let alone “Bushitlermonkeyface” etc., and that it was an insult to the millions Hitler killed to make the comparison, and we tried to tell you, but we got called — by people like Ansari, and YOU…
“Stupid Nazi racists.”
So…
We just got back at you. Finally.
I feel like I can breathe for the first time in ten years.
Please treasure your paranoia. Play with it like a toy or a scab. That’s how who knows how many bitter losers and failures spent the 1980s.
I know. I was one of them briefly.
Then I grew up.
Grown up is better.
Anyhow, Colby Cosh manfully treats the same mentality here:
Nineteen Eighty-Four is a critique of totalitarianism; it is full of unmistakable, specific references to the Communist world of Orwell’s time—references that won it an admiring audience for four decades behind the Iron Curtain because of the fine details Orwell had inferred without ever travelling in the Soviet bloc. I am not sure how anyone can miss the point so widely, or be so ignorant of the book’s allusions, as to think that it is somehow the tale of a bad person called Big Brother. (…)
Orwell wrote so much about the art of political lying that it is abominable and upsetting to see him reduced to one book—a text one cannot possibly decode without understanding, or at least mentioning, the history and practice of the Soviet Union. Handing Nineteen Eighty-Four to persons born after the fall of the Berlin Wall almost seems like a form of malpractice. (Is there some way to force them to read Koestler’s Darkness at Noon first?)
Indeed. Putting that book on the high school curriculum a few generations ago would have prevented so much nonsense…