George Orwell: the last man in Europe ( 1984)
George Orwell: the last man in Europe (a documentary) Continue reading George Orwell: the last man in Europe ( 1984)
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Tag: Orwell
The plague of American authoritarianism
by Henry A. Giroux Authoritarianism in the American collective psyche and in what might be called traditional narratives of historical memory is always viewed as existing elsewhere. Viewed as an alien and demagogic political system, it is primarily understood as … Continue reading The plague of American authoritarianism
Orwell, Huxley and America’s plunge into Authoritarianism
by Henry A. Giroux In spite of their differing perceptions of the architecture of the totalitarian superstate and how it exercised power and control over its residents, George Orwell and Aldous Huxley shared a fundamental conviction. They both argued that … Continue reading Orwell, Huxley and America’s plunge into Authoritarianism
Bankspeak: the language of World Bank reports
by Franco Moretti and Dominique Pestre What can quantitative linguistic analysis tell us about the operations and outlook of the international financial institutions? At first glance, the words most frequently used in the World Bank’s Annual Reports give an impression … Continue reading Bankspeak: the language of World Bank reports
Totalitarian Paranoia in the Post-Orwellian Surveillance State
by Henry A. Giroux Surveillance, in any land where it is ubiquitous and inescapable, generates distrust and divisions among its citizens, curbs their readiness to speak freely to each other, and diminishes their willingness to even dare to think freely. — Ariel Dorfman The revelations of whistle-blowers such as Chelsea Manning, Jeremy Hammond and Edward Snowden about government lawlessness and corporate spying provide a new meaning if not a revitalized urgency and relevance to George Orwell’s dystopian fable 1984. Orwell offered his readers an image of the modern state that had become dystopian — one in which privacy as a civil … Continue reading Totalitarian Paranoia in the Post-Orwellian Surveillance State
Taking notes 21: The dangerous dreams of Slavoj Žižek
by Jerome Roos When George Orwell first sent in his celebrated dispatches from revolutionary Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War in the late 1930s, the British socialist magazine The New Statesman infamously refused to publish them for being too critical of the Stalinist crackdown on the Trotskyist and anarchist militias. As editor Kingsley Martin put it in a letter to Orwell, “it is an unfortunate fact that any hostile criticism of the present Russian regime is liable to be taken as propaganda against socialism.” Still, Orwell, who had been embedded in the Trotskyist POUM and had fought the fascists side-by-side … Continue reading Taking notes 21: The dangerous dreams of Slavoj Žižek
