Orwell Diaries 1938-1942

https://orwelldiaries.wordpress.com/page/2/

by bookofjoe • 1 year ago

133 66 1 year ago

orwelldiaries.wordpress.com

vodou• 1 year ago

I remember this blog! It was posting diary entries 70 years after they were written. This was a good time in the history of Internet and the diary/blog ended at the dawn of the golden era of the "blogosphere".

George/Eric paid a lot of attention to how many eggs his hens laid. It almost became somewhat of a joke in the comments. But good content!

https://orwelldiaries.wordpress.com/2008/12/01/11238/

Lots of great quotes (quite a few hen related):

This morning a disaster. One hen dead, another evidently dying.

I am pretty sure he wrote more about hens and other birds than the ongoing world war.

IAmBroom• 1 year ago

My neighbor, who raises chickens for eggs, and has lost many to predation, has expressed grief over losing some of them.

She does not spend her time grieving the dead in various conflicts currently ongoing, although we both are saddened by them.

Proximity amplifies emotion.

kleiba• 1 year ago

The combination of reverse chronological order and infinite scroll is a little silly, no?

(Note that there's also an index on the right-hand side.)

martin-t• 1 year ago

This seems to be a Wordpress thing and I hate it.

We have supercomputers in our packets and websites can't even do a thing as basic as showing a list of posts, all the posts, on one page.

empiricus• 1 year ago

lists have become a lost technology. youtube, spotify are not able to implement a list correctly.

perihelions• 1 year ago

I guess this is the key biographic context,

"In August 1941, Orwell finally obtained "war work" when he was taken on full-time by the BBC's Eastern Service.[111] He supervised cultural broadcasts [sic] to India, to counter propaganda from Nazi Germany designed to undermine imperial links.[112] "

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Orwell#Second_World_War...

There's quite a visible gap between his nominal role as a propagandist for Britain in India, and his private views expressed here. I mean: "quite truly the way the British Government is now behaving upsets me more than a military defeat"—wow!

(Meta: the part where Wikipedia's obviously very not-neutral editors inserted that exemplar of newspeak, "cultural broadcasts" for "propaganda", into the biography of Orwell himself is just... doubleplus).

lukan3• 1 year ago

In 1984, the office rooms for the ministry of lies were directly inspired from his work for the BBC ..

robocat• 1 year ago

ministry of lies

Winston worked in the Ministry of Truth.

By doublethink, internally you know there are two meanings although you can never actually do the crimethink of believing or saying any ungood connotations. Edit - added quote:

Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. ... To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, [and remember it if necessary]. To deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies.

bloak• 1 year ago

Eileen's work at the "Ministry of Information" could also be an influence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ministry_of_Information_(Unite...

bee_rider• 1 year ago

I wonder how he’d feel about current trends. There’s a certain honesty to just blaring out propaganda that’s kinda missing in this era of influence operations.

mulmen2• 1 year ago

The winning strategy in the previous US presidential election was to scream obvious lies blaming the immigrants, minorities, or opposition for any perceived slight.

I think Orwell would find this all very familiar.

clarionbell• 1 year ago

His main gripe was that government wasn't doing enough, that it was too passive. He had problems with lot of their other policies, but as most people, he understood that defeating Nazis is worth compromises.

submeta• 1 year ago

Reminder to myself: My journal entries on my computer in Obsidian won‘t survive even a year after I die. My child probably won’t look into the thousands of files to find my journal entries. Whereas my paper diaries from 30years ago will be perfectly fine in a few decades from now.

Aperocky• 1 year ago

print and staple it.

diego898• 1 year ago

startup idea? upload an obsidian vault, receive a printed, bound notebook(s)

drfuchs• 1 year ago

But will your grandchild be able to read handwriting?

Retric• 1 year ago

I’ve already used a computer to interpret old handwriting.

e404• 1 year ago

This is why I use markdown. I figure that will be easily viewable for as long as the files are around.

jjice2• 1 year ago

Obsidian is all markdown. I assume OP was referring to no one keeping that data preserved post death.

asciimov• 1 year ago

And why I still use paper. Hard drives die, and I don't expect any one to be going through them when I'm gone.

Paper on the other hand they at least will pick it up to throw away, likely flipping through it just to look for anything of monetary value.

eviks• 1 year ago

"Publish or perish"

regularization• 1 year ago

About seven years before he was sending letters to the British Foreign Office of who to blackball during the UK's version of the Red Scare - people like Charlie Chaplin.

He even wrote a book a year before this (1984) denouncing societies that had people denouncing each other for political heresy. Psychological projection. What a htpocrite.

rhcom22• 1 year ago

Pretty interesting, I had no idea about this:

The George Orwell Paradox: From Spy Target to Informant https://spyscape.com/article/surveillance-state-how-british-...

skinnymuch7• 1 year ago

Yeah. Western hegemony has an interest in presenting the Animal Farm guy a certain way.

mathiaspoint• 1 year ago

I think most people stop at 1984 or animal farm and have no idea what Orwell really thought about society and politics.

skinnymuch7• 1 year ago

Yes very much so. Thankfully someone in this thread (even if only you) saying the correct context.

thomassmith653• 1 year ago

  The Germans announce over the wireless that as the inhabitants of a Czech village called Lidice [...] were guilty of harbouring the assassins of Heydrich, they have shot all the males in the village, sent all the women to concentration camps, sent all the children to be “re-educated”, razed the whole village to the ground and changed its name.
  [...]
  It does not particularly surprise me that people do this kind of thing, nor even that they announce that they are doing them. What does impress me, however, is that other people’s reaction to such happenings is governed solely by the political fashion of the moment. [...] In a little while you will be jeered at if you suggest that the story of Lidice could possibly be true. And yet there the facts are, announced by the Germans themselves and recorded on gramophone discs

In our age of social media, that phenomenon is no longer surprising.

gleenn• 1 year ago

Screwing the other side is far easier to sell than having things be good for the average person. Some pretty gross displays of greed and hypocrisy.

mc32• 1 year ago

Sometimes it’s just ideology ploughing through as in the cases that happened in Ukraine before WWII but after Lenin died.

thomassmith653• 1 year ago

This entry piqued my curiosity, and I did a cursory search for the original broadcast; what wording does a government use to position an announcement like this? I didn't find a recording, but I did find a related article from June 12, 1942

https://nytimes.com/1942/06/12/archives/nazis-kill-34-more-i...

...and a newsreel statement from Czechoslovakian President-in-exile Beneš from June 29, 1942

https://youtu.be/QFMJYhJNmeQ

n4r9• 1 year ago

I was also curious as I haven't heard of this before. There's a Wikipedia page about the massacre: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lidice_massacre

It links to a Wikimedia page including photos of written announcements of the massacre in German: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Lidice_massacre#...

Wikipedia also links to Nurembourg Trial proceedings where apparently footage of the anihilation was presented. See sections 120-121 of https://archive.is/http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/02-22-46.a...

And footage of the immediate aftermath, kept in a secret German archive: https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn556023/

ivape• 1 year ago

I was actually looking into reading some of his other candid works:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_and_Out_in_Paris_and_Lond...

Semi-autobiographical about when he was nearly homeless and living in poverty in Europe. He also went after how hospitals mistreat patients and poor people in Paris.

specproc• 1 year ago

I picked a book of his diaries up recently, it's been great to pick at. The copy I have has _a lot_ about his garden and the countryside around him, which has been fun to read whilst working on mine.

Lots of very terse household entries like, "July 11: 12 eggs".

jongjong• 1 year ago

It's strange why Orwell gets so much more attention than Aldous Huxley. I feel like modern reality is a lot closer to 'Brave New World' than '1984'.

Brave New World describes a world saturated with endless streams of information and entertainment and yet almost everyone basically acts the same way; everyone chooses to engage in the same kinds of 'pleasure seeking' activities; they all think the same and they all want to watch and experience the same things, despite the fact that many alternatives exist.

Ironically, it might be partly because BNW is becoming real that those in charge are drawing attention towards 1984; this form of subtle attention manipulation is very BNW-like.

Another thing though is that as the world becomes more like BNW, the book itself becomes less interesting to read for younger people. For example, I remember being surprised when characters in the book asked each other if they had watched a 'Feelie' (a Movie with sensory experience) about 'Swimming with whales'.

I remember thinking that the way the characters kept asking each other about their opinions on the same boring things and expecting them to answer in the same predictable way as some kind of status symbol was weird... But nowadays it's basically the reality; people praise each other for compliance. Basically for being boring and having predictable boring thoughts.

I suspect young people reading BNW wouldn't pick up on that... It would go right over their heads that things were once different and expressing compliance with the mainstream ideology didn't earn you any social status (at least not in the west). It was kind of the opposite.

leoh3• 1 year ago

There’s a lot more in 1984 than the high-level ideas which are held in contrast to Huxley (risks of oppression versus risks of opulence). Both are certainly at play.

A few of the things from 1984 that I’ve noticed or have been told about and often reflect upon:

* 1984 is a book that is concerned with the physical body and the deprivations experienced in Oceania — ie Winston’s gastric distress is articulated on the first page; many of us experience meaningful bodily distress on account of our food systems, stress, disconnection, and other issues

* 1984 is largely about alienation — many of us prioritize our work and other fears over connection in the same ways that Winston and Julia do (engaging in sex is taboo in Oceania); although engaging in sex is not forbidden in our culture, taking the time to really connect with others when so many of us feel so much constant pressure to work can feel “wrong”

* stirring up hatred among the populace in 1984 is a common theme; in our culture, on both the right and the left, an insistence on hating others, other political parties, other countries, and injustice (ie as opposed to cultivating love and compassion for those suffering) form the basis of profound issues we face today

hulitu• 1 year ago

Also the doublespeak, the "War is peace": we need soldiers, we need more guns; the surveillance, everyday terrorism, etc.

willvarfar2• 1 year ago

Orwell suffered and died from tuberculosis. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/george-orwell-wrot... talks about the parallels with Winston's experiences in the book.

Xmd5a• 1 year ago

Orwell tried to anticipate the reception of his own book by projecting it into fiction as Immanuel Goldstein’s Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, but it ultimately became fully integrated into our society, which leans more toward Brave New World. Ironically, Goldstein’s book is ideologically closer to Brave New World than to 1984.

Another interesting example of a meta-reflexive dystopia is the British series Utopia. Its plot revolves around a fictional comic book of the same name, which is believed to predict a conspiracy to cause population reduction through forced vaccination following an engineered pandemic. There is something fascinating about these narratives; intentionally or not, they seem to call fiction into reality. It’s as if Orwell genuinely tried to create a transcendent critique to out-compete the very system whose rise he was witnessing. Ultimately, he may have failed, not because the system is inherently stronger, but because our thoughts are never entirely our own to begin with.

Edit: what I'm talking about is no stranger to what is called "predictive programming", and whichever meaning you attach to this phrase, I believe the poster I'm replying to is sensing its effects.

The question then becomes: to what extent are we merely engaging in hindsight bias or reacting to engineered shifts in attention? Furthermore, is it possible to analyze these mass manipulation techniques, even just for one's own clarity, without the guarantee that your own line of thinking won't become a mental trap?

After all, if I were one of "them" – subtly pulling the strings in an open society where consent is manufactured rather than coerced, where events are influenced rather than dictated – the social stigma against "conspiracy theorists" would be a far more efficient and durable tool than any of the impossibly risky plots those theorists imagine. In fact, it would be the only tool I would dare to use.

So perhaps the safest way to run a conspiracy is to first astroturf a community of conspiracy theorists.

Yet even this thinking keeps us trapped, circling the idea of 'them.' The crucial idea I must utter is this: it's not about their existence or non-existence. It is that at the genesis of these roles, there is an infinitely nested psychological bedrock. Isn't thi common ground from which the mind of the conspirator, who seeks to impose a hidden order, and the mind of the theorist, who seeks to reveal one, both arise ?

bpshaver• 1 year ago

I'm a little tired of this comparison and this point. Its fine if you like Brave New World more than 1984. But does this need to be mentioned every time Orwell is mentioned? Orwell wrote a lot more than 1984 and Animal Farm.

I mean, this article doesn't mention 1984 at all.

solumunus• 1 year ago

everyone chooses to engage in the same kinds of 'pleasure seeking' activities; they all think the same and they all want to watch and experience the same things, despite the fact that many alternatives exist.

This seems contrary to reality. Shared culture is becoming more disparate and people are living in alternative realities according to their own individual algorithms.

willvarfar2• 1 year ago

I think the polarisation we see in society may be because everyone seems to end up getting to the same handful of places rather than to individual bubbles.

southernplaces7• 1 year ago

In the typical childish hive-mind logic of comments on this site, yours get downvoted for no discernible reason other than, apparently, politely adding a slightly different point of view and mentioning the interesting contrast with another book. Upvote from me, at the very least to counter such idiocies.

Maybe this resonates a bit too uncomfortably here:

I remember thinking that the way the characters kept asking each other about their opinions on the same boring things and expecting them to answer in the same predictable way as some kind of status symbol was weird..

I too thought that Brave New World gets nowhere near enough attention despite being much closer to the mark on describing our present world, though i'd say we live more in something of our own unique creation, with elements from both novels: BNW closer to the mark in describing our social world and 1984 somewhat resonating with creeping tendencies in mass politics. However, I'd say we live in a reality much more fragmented and complex than the simplistic and very era-bound one described by 1984.

HAMSHAMA• 1 year ago

I really loved “Down and out in Paris and London” and “Homage to Catalonia”.

Orwell Diaries 1938-1942

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