Thoughtcrime? Conservatives lack thought quoting George Orwell

 Give conservatives a notion they like, and they stick with it in a big way. How many times have you seen one of their hilarious jokes about identifying as a pumpkin, colander or free thinker? Hilarious. They claim to hate socialism, but they're all perfectly happy to share one joke. 

Speaking of socialism, lately they've all been rushing to fill social media with quotes from George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty Four. Two in particular:

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” 

and

“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”

Their line of thinking is that Black Lives Matter protesters, wanting to have an open discussion of how historical narratives have been framed by white supremacy and maybe if it's not too much trouble get rid of statues of white men who raped, enslaved and murdered people of colour, are analogous to The Party in Nineteen Eighty Four. 

Or perhaps they would make that argument if any of them had actually read the fucking book.

The Party in Nineteen Eighty Four control everything. The government, the media, every aspect of everyone's lives. Guess what? Black Lives Matter protesters don't run the country. There's another guy running things in America, and you can find quotes in 1984 which could apply to him:

“Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power."

Getting back to the matter of tearing down statues, it's worth remembering who put those statues and monuments up. The people who erected them were the ones who falsified history, creating such narratives as Black people only being equal to 3/5 of White people, and terra nullius. They destroyed existing monuments - the Black Hills are sacred to the Native Sioux (Lakota) people,  but some numpty decided to blast away at it, turning it into a monument to Presidents the world now knows as Mount Rushmore. White colonisers destroyed history, culture, religious tradition and lives, and taking down a few statues is nothing in comparison.

While we're taking book quotes out of context to support our ideological beliefs, how about this one:

“The masses never revolt of their own accord, and they never revolt merely because they are oppressed. Indeed, so long as they are not permitted to have standards of comparison, they never even become aware that they are oppressed.”

Are "the masses", and alas most people aren't out protesting in the streets for a better system, aware that they're being oppressed by a merciless capitalist system that will work them until they drop dead with no care whatsoever? Of course not, because they're not allowed to know it doesn't have to be this way; any discussion of alternatives to the decaying free market capitalist system is crushed by the mass media keen to preserve power for themselves and their billionaire friends, criticism of the system denigrated as socialism (Venezuela, again - another of those lines conservatives like to unthinkingly parrot) and class warfare. 

Here's the thing with conservatives quoting Nineteen Eighty Four. George Orwell was a socialist. And he was serious about it. He went to Spain and joined the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification to fight against Franco's fascists in the Spanish Civil War. He hated the Soviet Union, recognising that it was a totalitarian regime, far from the socialist workers' paradise it was supposed to be (and was dismayed by Britons' praise of Stalin when the UK allied with the Soviet Union during World War Two. And when you read quotes from Orwell, speaking for himself and not through his fiction, like "when I see an actual flesh-and-blood worker in conflict with his natural enemy, the policeman, I do not have to ask myself which side I am on", it's not hard to see what side he'd be on in the current protests.

It was his hatred for Stalin, and in the wake of Nazism, that drove him to write Nineteen Eighty Four. Orwell was issuing a bleak and terrifying warning on totalitarian regimes, which had nothing to do with socialism as he knew it.

I'm not arguing that Orwell was a perfect, or even good, person - he was a flaming homophobe, for one thing - but he was indisputably a socialist, and conservatives should understand that he didn't write Nineteen Eighty Four or Animal Farm to warn of the dangers of political correctness. 

If they can understand anything at all, per this recent exchange on Twitter:

Well, Bill and Kenny, as the saying goes, I can explain it for you, but I can't understand it for you. So I'm not even going to try.