Orwell Explained “Hope And Change”

Posted on April 8, 2015 by Tony Heller

“So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don’t even know that fire is hot.”

– George Orwell

About Tony Heller

Just having fun
This entry was posted in Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink.

39 Responses to Orwell Explained “Hope And Change”

  1. omanuel says:
    April 8, 2015 at 3:08 pm

    Thanks for quote from Orwell.

    He is right, most left wing advocates of politically correct thinking have no idea they are promoting totalitarian thought police of Stalin.

    Reply
  2. ren says:
    April 8, 2015 at 3:15 pm

    The chill expanded southward from New England, New York state and northern Pennsylvania on Tuesday and will reach across more of the mid-Atlantic Wednesday and Thursday. The push of chilly air will lead to a significant drop in temperature. Between 15 and 20 degrees Fahrenheit will separate highs from Tuesday to Wednesday in New York City, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C.
    http://vortex.accuweather.com/adc2004/pub/includes/columns/newsstory/2015/650x366_04061755_hd27.jpg

    Reply
  3. gator69 says:
    April 8, 2015 at 3:18 pm

    How do you tell a communist? Well, it’s someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It’s someone who understands Marx and Lenin.
    -Ronald Reagan

    Reply
  4. libsarenavelint says:
    April 8, 2015 at 3:44 pm

    “In our time a tyrant has come to mean a nasty ruler with a mustache who commits mass murder or genocide. We associate tyrants with atrocities. But that’s the trouble: We use words according to our mental pictures or associations rather than according to definitions.

    Aristotle defined a tyrant as a ruler who used his power for selfish ends, rather than for the common good; I believe St. Thomas adopts this definition too. In a democracy, even the majority can be tyrannical.

    We can’t identify tyranny unless we can define it in principle — for it is a matter of principle, not of occasional monsters of cruelty. A tyrant may actually be a very nice, good-humored, clean-shaven man; he just happens to exceed his authority. He may do it with spectacular violent crimes, or he may do it with subtle, step-by-step pilferings that most people never notice. In America the latter method is the rule. At any rate, he will regard constitutional limits as mere technical inconveniences, which in most cases may be safely ignored.

    It is naïve to expect tyranny to be terrifying. In most cases it goes out of its way to be bland, to follow custom, to avoid alarming the general population. Only the discerning will be alarmed at its first symptoms. The rest won’t recognize it as tyranny even when it becomes established. Today even “conservatives” accept Roosevelt as a model for other presidents to emulate. They may feel that the government has gone “too far” in some respects, but they have no idea why, or when the country started going wrong.

    In short, tyranny has become an American tradition. We take it so much for granted that we no longer think of it as tyranny.”

    Read the rest:

    http://sobran.com/wanderer/w2003/w030501.shtml

    Reply
    • omanuel says:
      April 8, 2015 at 3:49 pm

      It is difficult or impossible to end communist tyranny. For a short time, Poland threw off communist tyrants:

      http://www.rferl.mobi/a/Poland_Remains_Divided_Over_Legacy_Of_1989_Solidarity_Revolution/1746056.html

      Reply
    • Colorado Wellington says:
      April 8, 2015 at 4:30 pm

      I remember reading Sobran’s ‘unpopular’ essay back in 2003.

      The progress of tyranny in the United States can be measured not only by the accumulation of unconstitutional legislation, but by the growth of executive power.

      Reply
      • libsarenavelint says:
        April 8, 2015 at 4:39 pm

        Indeed. The Conservative Chronicle stopped printing Sobran’s columns. I sent them a strongly worded letter the essence of which was that, although I didn’t always agree with him, Sobran always made me THINK…. which was way more that I could say for the rest of the claptrap I read.

        They started printing his column again shortly thereafter. I assume that others took issue with the CC as well.

        Reply
    • gator69 says:
      April 8, 2015 at 5:07 pm

      I have always appreciated CS Lewis’ perspective on tyranny…

      “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may
      be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than
      under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes
      sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for
      our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of
      their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same
      time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with
      intolerable insult. To be “cured” against one’s will and cured of states which
      we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet
      reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants,
      imbeciles, and domestic animals.”
      – C.S. Lewis

      Reply
  5. Colorado Wellington says:
    April 8, 2015 at 4:20 pm

    One of my favorite Orwell essays:

    Inside The Whale, 1940

    … To people of that kind such things as purges, secret police, summary executions, imprisonment without trial etc., etc., are too remote to be terrifying. They can swallow totalitarianism because they have no experience of anything except liberalism. Look, for instance, at this extract from Mr Auden’s poem ‘Spain’ (incidentally this poem is one of the few decent things that have been written about the Spanish war):

    To-morrow for the young, the poets exploding like bombs,
    The walks by the lake, the weeks of perfect communion;
    To-morrow the bicycle races
    Through the suburbs on summer evenings. But to-day the struggle.

    To-day the deliberate increase in the chances of death,
    The conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder;
    To-day the expending of powers
    On the flat ephemeral pamphlet and the boring meeting.

    The second stanza is intended as a sort of thumb-nail sketch of a day in the life of a ‘good party man’. In the morning a couple of political murders, a ten-minutes’ interlude to stifle ‘bourgeois’ remorse, and then a hurried luncheon and a busy afternoon and evening chalking walls and distributing leaflets. All very edifying. But notice the phrase ‘necessary murder’. It could only be written by a person to whom murder is at most a word. Personally I would not speak so lightly of murder. It so happens that I have seen the bodies of numbers of murdered men — I don’t mean killed in battle, I mean murdered. Therefore I have some conception of what murder means — the terror, the hatred, the howling relatives, the post-mortems, the blood, the smells. To me, murder is something to be avoided. So it is to any ordinary person. The Hitlers and Stalins find murder necessary, but they don’t advertise their callousness, and they don’t speak of it as murder; it is ‘liquidation’, ‘elimination’, or some other soothing phrase. Mr Auden’s brand of amoralism is only possible, if you are the kind of person who is always somewhere else when the trigger is pulled. So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don’t even know that fire is hot. …

    By the way, pay attention to Orwell’s understanding of “liberalism”. Something to consider in our discussions of “liberalism”, “progressivism”, etc. The debate is not new and my “liberal” university town is full of people who think like Orwell’s “good party men”, whatever they call themselves these days. And for those who never experienced it, no need to travel to Boulder. A short visit to a place like Democratic Underground will give you such a dose of leftist intellectualism you will want to douse yourself with Lysol.
    ———-
    http://george-orwell.org/Inside_The_Whale/0.html

    Better formatting here:
    http://www.ourcivilisation.com/smartboard/shop/orwellg/whale2.htm

    Reply
    • libsarenavelint says:
      April 8, 2015 at 4:47 pm

      “What I like to call the Hive — the informal socialist apparat that uses “liberal” rhetoric — differs from the classic Left in its avoidance of naming its ultimate goals. Today the old socialists and Communists of yore seem quaintly naive in their ingenuously open espousals of revolution.

      In the old days The New Republic could say: “In order to have socialism, we must have a new Constitution.” Socialists recognized frankly that socialism would be impossible under the Constitution, and they didn’t pretend otherwise. The Old Left proclaimed its creed boldly, hoping to galvanize “the masses.”

      That changed when the “progressives” saw that honesty, for their purposes, was not necessarily the best policy. Even the “working classes” feared and hated socialism, so there was no prospect of socialism’s winning through either bullets or ballots.

      At this point the progressives adopted a subtle strategy: they chose evolution over revolution. Instead of abolishing the Constitution, they would control its interpretation. It would become a “living document,” of fluid and adaptable meanings. If you can’t win by the rules, change the rules! And do it in such a way that most people hardly notice you’re doing it.

      Except for its Communist minority, the Hive has never been directed by commands from above. Instead it uses peer pressure, verbal signals, and the amorphous power of “public opinion.” It accustoms the general public to accepting its definitions of discrete “issues,” couched in reformist, seemingly “pragmatic” language, so that the bees — the agents of the Hive — range from conscious ideologues to passive dupes.

      The Hive is so powerful in controlling public opinion that it has transmuted its ideology into etiquette. “Politically correct” language, extending even to pronouns, is largely Hive-imposed. “Everyone” is no longer “he,” but “he or she”; homosexuals are “gays”; unborn children are antiseptic “fetuses,” and those who kill them are no longer abortionists, but “abortion providers.”

      Read the rest:

      http://www.sobran.com/hive/growth.shtml

      Reply
      • gator69 says:
        April 8, 2015 at 5:09 pm

        At this point the progressives adopted a subtle strategy: they chose evolution over revolution. Instead of abolishing the Constitution, they would control its interpretation.

        He who controls the language, controls thought.

        BTW – This is why leftists/progressives want to claim Orwell as one of their own, to change the message.

        Reply
      • bleakhouses says:
        April 8, 2015 at 5:17 pm

        “Access” to anything is a euphemism for of insufficient means.
        I am literally ready to scream out loud every time it is uttered; it has become so transparently manipulative I dont understand those who cant see it.

        Reply
      • kentclizbe says:
        April 8, 2015 at 6:58 pm

        LIbsare,

        “…the Hive has never been directed by commands from above. Instead it uses peer pressure, verbal signals, and the amorphous power of “public opinion.” It accustoms the general public to accepting its definitions of discrete “issues,” couched in reformist, seemingly “pragmatic” language, so that the bees — the agents of the Hive — range from conscious ideologues to passive dupes.”

        Sobran was sensing the reality, but still only saw what was outside the curtain.

        For a complete understanding of the origin and exact explication of our opponents’ belief system, strategy and tactics, it may be worthwhile to read my book: Willing Accomplices.

        http://www.willingaccomplices.com

        The belief system did NOT just biogenerate from the mud of American culture. The tenets of the belief system (“America is a racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, imperialist, capitalist hell-hole, and it must be changed.”) were the carefully planned payload of Willi Muenzenberg’s ingenious operation.

        It is important of us to understand these origins, and their strategies and tactics, which PC-Progs inherited, and use to this day.

        Willing Accomplices are not aware of their beliefs’ origins, and there is (generally) no school for passing on their strategies and tactics. That was the sheer genius of Muenzenberg–he laid the foundations of the “issue organizations” that, to this day, continue to carry out his operation.

        Reply
    • gator69 says:
      April 8, 2015 at 5:21 pm

      Karl Rove should have quit while he was ahead.

      On Friday, Rove appeared on The O’Reilly Factor and mocked Glenn Beck’s announcement earlier in the week that he was leaving the Republican Party.

      “The Republican Party is largely united on its philosophy,” Rove told O’Reilly, an assertion with which many conservatives vehemently disagree.

      “[Glenn Beck] says he’s not going to give a dime to the Republican Party. I went to Open Secrets.com, which keeps a data base of people who contribute to federal candidates and federal committees. I entered the name Glenn Beck… There is no Glenn Beck who worked for Fox or now works for the Blaze who is a political contributor. With all due respect, he’s been saying this [that the GOP establishment is flawed] for years. It’s had an impact. His followers will follow him,” Rove concluded.

      Beck responded by unleashing a jeremiad of epic proportion against Rove in an open letter posted on Facebook Saturday morning.

      “You want to rumble Rove? Come on to my show and let’s have it out,” Beck challenged Rove.

      “Bring it on. I would love to take you on WITH YOUR RECORD AND THE RECORD OF THE GOP,” Beck shouted in capital letters.

      “You hung yourself on O’Reilly. By using my words to mock me, the audience heard my words. I would bet a good portion agreed with me,” Beck punched back.

      Then Beck got very personal.

      “You guys have the spine of a worm, the ethics of whores, and the integrity of pirates,” Beck said of the Republican establishment and consultant class.

      He did, however, include a qualifier to his condemnation. “My apologies,” he added, “to worms, whores and pirates.”

      http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/03/22/conservatives-side-with-glenn-beck-in-his-counter-attack-on-karl-rove/

      I quit the Republican party after seeing what W did to us. I am now a Libertarian, and likely always have been, but just did not know it. Cruz is a good candidate for POTUS, and I would be happy to see Rand Paul as POTUS, or Cruz’s VP.

      Reply
      • Eric Simpson says:
        April 8, 2015 at 6:29 pm

        Agreed. It’s not about attracting the left, it’s about keeping conservatives on board. As well as getting everyone fired up.

        Reply
      • libsarenavelint says:
        April 8, 2015 at 7:48 pm

        gator69

        You’re not the only one who quit the Republican party. I think you’ll enjoy this:

        “Well, here I am, much sadder but somewhat wiser, living under a government that kept expanding without limit during and after Reagan, while running up a national debt that would have made Jefferson — or for that matter, Franklin Roosevelt — ask whether he heard you right; and of course the moral and cultural garbage we live amidst seems to be getting irreversibly worse.

        I can’t even call myself a conservative anymore. I don’t see much left to conserve. Most of today’s conservatives are to the left of yesterday’s liberals. They quote John Kennedy and Martin Luther King and they have plans to save Social Security and Medicare. They think a minor tax cut would cure the country’s ills.

        It’s hard for me to get very interested in today’s political squabbles. I don’t have a dog in these fights; my dog died a long time ago. You know you’re politically homeless when you go to a John Birch Society dinner and you feel you’re surrounded by well-meaning liberals.

        Am I a libertarian? Sort of. An anarchist? Anarchy might be great, if only it could be enforced.”

        Confessions of a Reactionary Utopian

        http://www.sobran.com/columns/1999-2001/010327.shtml

        Reply
        • gofer says:
          April 8, 2015 at 8:44 pm

          The problem with Republicans is, instead of rejecting the leftists programs, they just think they can do them better. They try to play nice against people that do not know what nice means and don’t care. Example, they folded on immigration. They seem to be afraid somebody will be offended, when the left could not care less.

        • gator69 says:
          April 8, 2015 at 8:52 pm

          We have a two party system.

          Progressive

          Or…

          Progressive Light.

          Both taste like sh*t, and are unfulfilling.

        • Eric Simpson says:
          April 9, 2015 at 1:28 am

          Like the severely conservative progressive Romney.

          He made a big deal earlier this year about saying he was probably going to run again, and that this time he would run on a program of “ending poverty and climate change.” What a joker:
          https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pu0zQRUCDlM

  7. gofer says:
    April 8, 2015 at 6:11 pm

    The “fundamental change” continues……

    “….the government has gotten into the business of RECRUITING AND FINANCING those who would have been illegal immigrants, saving them the trouble and expense of crossing the border themselves.

    Details of the program published by the State Department give NO NUMERICAL LIMIT to those who can come. It seems likely to me that a good deal of the total Central American population might eventually find a way to get themselves to the U.S. through this program, fully funded by the taxpayers.

    You see, it’s not only children and spouses who can come now, but also people who are thought to form a “financial unit” of that family. In other words, cousins, aunts, uncles, friends, practically anyone.”——NumbersUSA

    Its surreal that they are flying these people in courtesy of taxpayers. The laws governing immigration have been tossed aside. They all should be in jail, by the law, for “aiding, abetting, and encouraging illegal aliens to stay.”

    Reply
  8. sfx2020 says:
    April 8, 2015 at 7:05 pm

    I’m re-reading 1984 once more, and I keep thinking about climate change and newspeak, and how it fits so many things Orwell pointed out.

    Reply
  9. libsarenavelint says:
    April 8, 2015 at 7:19 pm

    “As the state relieves us of responsibility to our parents and children, it increases our responsibilities to itself. You may divorce your spouse, desert (or abort) your children, and abandon your parents, but your duty to pay taxes is absolute. There is no divorce or separation from the welfare state, till death do you part (and even then, inheritance taxes will eat up most of your legacy).
    Maybe you don’t have to support the children you’ve begotten, but you’re going to support other people’s children and pay their way through college, from coast to coast. The natural ratio of responsibility is askew.”

    BINGO!!! I remember the first time I read this. It put into words the very thoughts in my brain. I felt I’d been struck by lighting.

    Read the rest:
    http://www.fgfbooks.com/Sobran-Joe/2014/Sobran140926.html

    Reply
  10. rah says:
    April 10, 2015 at 10:32 pm

    This one is a keeper. The Admiral spells it out: http://www.liveleak.com/ll_embed?f=51fe948515b4

    Reply
    • gator69 says:
      April 10, 2015 at 10:49 pm

      God bless Admiral Lyons.

      There comes a time in a man’s life when career and political enemies are no longer feared, and truth is all that matters.

      Note the correct terminology of ‘Islamic Fundamentalism’ and the quote ‘Islam is Islam’. Mohammad is quite clear in his teachings.

      Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *