“Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.”
— George Orwell
this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2025
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Yeah, Orwell, the man who went to spain to fight fascism alongside the anarchists and the socialists was not writing a warning about socialism.
It's revisionist history to pretend Orwell was talking about socialism.
It's ignorance to pretend socialism has anything to do with fascism.
"BuT nAzIs CaLlEd ThEmSeLvEs SoCiAlIsTs!"
The ignorant cling hard to simple labels, it's how they interact with the world.
Everyone that has read the book understand that it is attacking fascism.
Didn’t watch the video but isn’t it just authoritarianism in general?
Yes. Orwell favoured democratic socialism himself.
The book attacked authoritarian socialism (“IngSoc” being a bit of a clue) to some degree but it didn’t really focus on the socialist elements - it was all about methods of control, which could be employed under any economic system.
Animal Farm was a much more direct attack on Stalinism.
To be fair, the book came out on the heels of WW2 wrapping up, and the Nazis literally called themselves "National Socialists," so I'm not sure we're meant to take "IngSoc" at face value.
It's been literal decades so I may be misremembering, but I'm pretty sure he even addresses this?
"Didn't watch the video" seems to be a popular sentiment, considering the content of some of these replies.
Too many people trying to answer the question of the title, instead of actually watching the video and seeing what he has to say about it.
Maybe he should write an article instead of a video. I'm much more likely to engage with those. Or I guess I could run his video through an LLM to get a text summary.
What he has to say about it is bullshit, because he's reframing totalitarianism as global oligarchy (which is a little too close for comfort to "the globalists") and ending on the libertarian fever idea that capitalism of all things will destroy oligarchy.
The people who think Orwell was on the right are the same people who think Hitler was on the left. This is not a serious debate.
Authoritarianism
I mean… asking the question betrays a pretty deep lack of understanding of both the book and the author.