Saturday, Jan 17, 2009
Putting things into perspective.
Telegraph: What George Orwell would make of our financial 'apocalypse'
As we stagger helplessly into the swallowing fog of financial apocalypse , allow me to float an idea. It's not a solution so much as a palliative. Every one of us, man, woman and child across the land, should read or re-read The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell. Urgently. Let us rise as one and buy our copies today. (If we actually go to a shop, rather than ordering it online, we might even save a couple of high street chains in the process.)
Posted by flintster1994 @ 09:55 AM (536 views) Add Comment
8 Comments
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1. inflation is eating my savings said...
Do they want canonisation for Thatcher or something?
She who filled out life with social disintegration and material trash?
2. drewster said...
"The Road to Wigan Pier was published 72 years ago. For a fair number of our readers, no doubt, that's within living memory."
That's definitely the Telegraph!
Fair point being made. To paraphrase Michael Winner, "Calm down dear, it's only a credit crunch".
3. troy said...
"Calm down dear, it's only a credit crunch".
some describe it differently ~~~
"The upcoming Financial Stimulus package courtesy of the new Economic dream team has left numerous economists and analysts quaking in their boots.
We are seeing predictions of hyperinflation, the destruction of the dollar, the flight of U.S. creditors, the prospect of widespread civil unrest and a descent in to a Greater Depression." Andrew Hughes
4. troy said...
or as Aldous Huxley said in 'revisited'
In Brave New World non-stop distractions of the most fascinating nature (the feelies, orgy-porgy, centrifugal bumble-puppy) are deliberately used as instruments of policy, for the purpose of preventing people from paying too much attention to the realities of the social and political situation. ~~~
~~~ Only the vigilant can maintain their liberties, and only those who are constantly and intelligently on the spot can hope to govern themselves effectively by democratic procedures. A society, most of whose members spend a great part of their time, not on the spot, not here and now and in the calculable future, but somewhere else, in the irrelevant other worlds of sport and soap opera, of mythology and metaphysical fantasy, will find it hard to resist the encroachments of those who would manipulate and control it.
In their propaganda today's dictators rely for the most part on repetition, suppression and rationalization -- the repetition of catchwords which they wish to be accepted as true, the suppression of facts which they wish to be ignored, the arousal and rationalization of passions which may be used in the interests of the Party or the State.
As the art and science of manipulation come to be better understood, the dictators of the future will doubtless learn to combine these techniques with the non-stop distractions which, in the West, are now threatening to drown in a sea of irrelevance the rational propaganda essential to the maintenance of individual liberty and the survival of democratic institutions. AH 1958
5. inflation is eating my savings said...
Huxley wasn't even original- BNW was ripped off from a Russian novel called "we".
The rest of his family had some brains however.
6. drewster said...
troy @ 3,
That quote is just opinion, and it's from an article full of more opinion. The Torygraph is right, people aren't starving and they certainly aren't dying in the streets (in Britain at least).
7. troy said...
drewster ~~~ Torygraph is right, people aren't starving and they certainly aren't dying in the streets (in Britain at least)
agreed ~~~ they're just taking to crime ~~~ more often.
oops, better check quick to see if that's just someone's opinion.
8. Tyke said...
Oh dear, we're all showing our socialist tendencies tonight aren't we?