Monday, June 28, 2004

Moore's Coda...

...is an excerpt from George Orwell's 1984, describing the division of the world into three totalitarian superstates, Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia, who remain in a constant state of war with one another, in order to maintain perpetual and total control over their populations, to the point of controlling historical memory. If this analogy is supposed to be apposite of anything, then Moore is suggesting that the USA, Iraq, and al-Qaeda are morally equivalent, and also the USA is already a totalitarianism or on its way to becoming one. These ideas belie themselves, so I won't comment on them any further.

I will say, however, that this use of Orwell is preposterous. That portion of 1984 is specifically not Orwell's own voice; it is first presented as the work of the dissident leader Emmanuel Goldstein (a stand-in for Trotsky), and later turns out to be a forgery composed by Oceania's Inner Party. At the end of the book, it's anyone's guess whether the world is as it's presented in those pages; in any case, The Book is a crude Trotskyist tract, containing none of the nuance that Orwell required in his own political writing. If Moore had read a bit more, he might have noticed that Orwell's main opponents were Western leftists who before WWII favored neutrality with fascism (as if such a thing were possible) and later contorted themselves to excuse the atrocities of Soviet communism. Notice that Orwell despised pacifism, because he suspected that outside certain small religious communities, it harbored a desire for the defeat of Western liberalism. If by chance Moore is aware of this, then his conscription of Orwell is a transparently cynical abuse of the man's legacy.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home

Vitals
  • E-mail me: Dan Koffler
  • My YDN Column: Smashing Idols
  • The Reasonsphere
  • Hit & Run
  • Matt Welch
  • Julian Sanchez
  • Jesse Walker
  • Virginia Postrel
  • Tim Cavanaugh
  • Ringers
  • Andrew Sullivan
  • Josh Marshall
  • Crooked Timber
  • Matthew Yglesias
  • Kevin Drum
  • John Cole
  • Leiter Reports
  • Pharyngula
  • Gregory Djerjian
  • Atrios
  • Mickey Kaus
  • Jim Henley
  • Radley Balko
  • TNR's Plank
  • Balkinization
  • Glenn Greenwald
  • Thomas Knapp
  • Justin Logan
  • Laura Rozen
  • Mark Kleiman
  • Print Culture
  • Arthur Silber
  • Tom Tomorrow
  • James Wolcott
  • OxBlog
  • Eric Muller
  • Majikthise
  • Pandagon
  • The American Scene
  • Daniel Drezner
  • Will Wilkinson
  • The Volokh Conspiracy
  • Intel Dump
  • Prequels
  • Johan Ugander
  • Dan Munz
  • Josh Eidelson
  • Future Less Vivid
  • Sequels
  • (not)Delino Deshields
  • Actual God
  • Hidden Hand
  • I am justice
  • Death/Media Incarnate
  • (not)Marquis Grissom
  • Yanqui At Cambridge
  • Beneficent Allah
  • Mr. Wrongway
  • The Hippolytic
  • Discourse Decision
  • Tight Toy Night
  • Mulatto Jesus
  • Sago Boulevard
  • Immortalized Stillicide
  • Nick's Corner
  • Dead Trees
  • Reason
  • Dissent
  • The New Republic
  • The New Yorker
  • The Atlantic Monthly
  • The American Prospect
  • Arts & Letters Daily
  • The Economist
  • The Nation
  • Yale Daily News
  • Virtual Reality
  • Wikipedia
  • Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
  • Symbolic Logic into HTML
  • Slate
  • Salon
  • The Huffington Post
  • Crooks and Liars
  • The Smoking Gun
  • The Smoking Gun: Bill O'Reilly
  • Romenesko
  • The Christopher Hitchens Web
  • Draft Russ
  • Rotten.com's Library
  • Urban Dictionary
  • Homestar Runner
  • Planet Rugby
  • Flex Online
  • Card Player Magazine
  • Gawker & Such
  • News
  • Politics
  • Gambling
  • Gossip (NY edition)
  • Gossip (LA edition)
  • Cool Shit
  • Cars
  • Video Games
  • Photoshop Fun &c.
  • Travel
  • MacGuyver Yourself
  • Porn
  • Prepare For The Worst
  • Bull Moose Blog
  • The Corner
  • Instapundit
  • Reel Blogs
  • BathTubYoga
  • More TK
  • R.I.P.
  • Jamie Kirchick
  • That Girl