The World We've Constructed Is Far Beyond George Orwell's Worst Nightmare{long read}

[xchrom]

http://www.alternet.org/culture/our-world-far-beyond-george-orwells-worst-nightmare




The other night, I saw George Orwells’s 1984 performed on the London stage. Although crying out for a contemporary interpretation, Orwell’s warning about the future was presented as a period piece: remote, unthreatening, almost reassuring. It was as if Edward Snowden had revealed nothing, Big Brother was not now a digital eavesdropper and Orwell himself had never said, “To be corrupted by totalitarianism, one does not have to live in a totalitarian country.”

Acclaimed by critics, the skilful production was a measure of our cultural and political times. When the lights came up, people were already on their way out. They seemed unmoved, or perhaps other distractions beckoned. “What a mindfuck,” said the young woman, lighting up her phone.

As advanced societies are de-politicised, the changes are both subtle and spectacular. In everyday discourse, political language is turned on its head, as Orwell prophesised in 1984. “Democracy” is now a rhetorical device. Peace is “perpetual war”. “Global” is imperial. The once hopeful concept of “reform” now means regression, even destruction. “Austerity” is the imposition of extreme capitalism on the poor and the gift of socialism for the rich: an ingenious system under which the majority service the debts of the few.

In the arts, hostility to political truth-telling is an article of bourgeois faith. “Picasso’s red period,” says an Observer headline, “and why politics don’t make good art.” Consider this in a newspaper that promoted the bloodbath in Iraq as a liberal crusade. Picasso’s lifelong opposition to fascism is a footnote, just as Orwell’s radicalism has faded from the prize that appropriated his name.

[cali]

1. I read 3 pages.... and then got bored. I don't agree with his interpretation

of where the arts are. Yes, there's a lot in art that's the equivalent of a self-portrait- just as there long has been. Yes, we live in an age of (over?) self-involvement, egged on by those who profit in some way from such. Yes, there's apathy, but just because Pilger saw a perhaps poor stage version of 1984, doesn't at all mean that the reality we live in is far worse than that which Blair envisioned. I recently reread 1984. It has lost none of its potency.

but then I'm not a Pilger fan. He hyperventilates far too much for my tastes.

[MisterP]

2. recorded nightmares, rat cages, and power for its own sake I found anticlimactic

even in 1948 we'd seen some really unreverberate abysses of intellectual horror: Borges, Ungern-Sternberg, Katsuhiro Otomo, or Fritz Lang have way more stuff that keeps me up at night than even Oceania

[Octafish]

3. Excellent read. Pilger is TOPS!

His closing...

In the 1970s, I met Leni Riefenstahl and asked her about her films that glorified the Nazis. Using revolutionary camera and lighting techniques, she produced a documentary form that mesmerised Germans; it was her Triumph of the Will that reputedly cast Hitler’s spell. I asked her about propaganda in societies that imagined themselves superior. She replied that the “messages” in her films were dependent not on “orders from above” but on a “submissive void” in the German population. “Did that include the liberal, educated bourgeoisie?” I asked. “Everyone,” she replied, “and of course the intelligentsia.”

[woo me with science]

4. kick

[Uncle Joe]

5. Kicked and recommended.

Thanks for the thread, xchrom.