[amiga386]

Nineteen Eighty-Four is a further rumination on how Joseph Stalin held power. It was meant to inform Orwell's fellow English socialists, who still dreamed of their own revolution, what the practical upshot of that would be. Stalin did not rule by people ceding their freedoms in exchange for comfort; they suffered intense hardship! Their land was taken from them, dwellings and vehicles allotted based on party loyalty and forced labour regardless of wage. But Stalin ruled through fear, within his party and without. His secret police looked everywhere for dissent and punished it severely. They bugged people, followed people, cultivated informers, asked children to inform on their parents, tried to instill loyalty to the state over and above their own family... they "disappeared" people (either shooting them or sending them to gulags), sometimes entire families. To send a message to any other potential rebels. And unsurprisingly, people wanted out. It was already illegal to leave the USSR without permission, the Berlin Wall was just the most prominent part of that. One of the reasons people stayed in the USSR was because even if they had a chance to escape, they knew the party would punish their family. This is the real world that Orwell amped up. The "memory hole" is code for Soviet censorship, which was rife - see the NKVD commissar vanish here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_images_in_the_So...

You're extremely naive about China. Do you think they wanted the Great Leap Forward and the Eliminate Sparrows campaign? One man's ill-informed policies caused a famine resulting in 15-55 million deaths. The One Child Policy? The state response to Tiananmen Square protests? The Great Firewall? The Social Credit system? Why does Foxconn have anti-suicide nets? You think industry tycoons being in bed with government is bad? It is! Now note that the theory of the Three Represents is part of the Chinese Constitution. Ask yourself why notionally independent Hong Kong imprisoned a large number of pro-democracy campaigners. These are not signs of a benevolent dictatorship. It's a totalitarian state maintaining its dominance over the masses and its elites revelling in the spoils. Why do you think there is such a push by rich Chinese to get their capital out of the country?

Perhaps you should read Brave New World instead?

[juleiie]

I don’t know what to think about China. I think I was brainwashed already. I spend too much time on Reddit where it seems they like China a lot and want to become China. (Is this AI generated sentiment?) Though none of them seems to be moving to China now that I think about it.

Look, it’s extremely hard to remain some kind of objective nowadays on the internet. I no longer know what is true and what is false.

Truth has lost all meaning and was replaced by politics.

Even history books written by scientists are routinely under attack.

In my country of Poland a Nobel prize winner, someone that my teachers said was a hero, suddenly became the villain. I never got my head around it. It still puzzles me. Like a some thorn in my side. He was a national hero? Now he is the bad guy? Why? It’s strange and unsettling how fast narrative changed to serve some political goal and everyone just went with it.

I am not resistant to narratives but I seem to routinely miss them. Then I wake up and everyone is saying some strange extreme things and are angry at each other and it seems fabricated to me many times.

Such as in my city was recently some uptick of anti car sentiment. Yeah like discussion is normal and we want to live in best possible environment but this wasn’t discussion. It was just people throwing shit at each other and extreme tribalism. It’s unsettling to see this. Social media has been doing something terrible to people. And I think it all serves somebody’s interests. Someone benefits from these divisions and wars.

We need to collectively unplug and get a grip

[ryandrake]

> I don’t know what to think about China. I think I was brainwashed already.

Try visiting if you get the chance and see for yourself how things are. Depending on your workplace you may also have many Chinese coworkers who would be glad to tell you what life is like there.

Definitely don’t listen to Reddit, but also don’t listen to the countless other forums trying to convince you it’s a North Korea like dystopia.

[johnny22]

I want an honest assessment on public criticism of the government in china.

Can i have a comedy tv show where i satirize government actions I don't like?

Can you point me to one?

[amiga386]

I know the feeling. The only thing you can do is try to keep an honest perspective on reality. Look for confirmation from reliable sources, wait to see how things turn out before passing it on. It feels bad finding out something important is actually hallucinated codswallop, but it's much worse if you sent it on to your friends first. Don't believe things because you'd like they were true, or reject because you'd prefer they were false.

There's always a tussle for who "controls the narrative", it's not always the well-informed. Look at the Covid 19 outbreak. An honest medic would say it's your choice to take the rapidly-developed vaccine, we don't have as extensive safety and efficacy studies as usual but we're in a time crunch, here are its known side-effects, but also consider what happens if you don't take it and end up contracting the virus, which was ultimately fatal for millions, more fatal the older you were. I wouldn't have believed such basic medical advice could be politicised, but there it was with an American right-wing claiming the medics were lying (why would they?!) and performatively defying basic instructions to avoid spreading a pandemic, then predictably dying of something they could completely have avoided, like Herman Cain. Then they started going for the absolutely bonkers science-free "remedies" invented by their tribe, like shining UV light up your arse or taking horse de-worming tablets. Meanwhile the American left-wing wanted to insist on people wearing masks (even where distancing or ventilation improvements would be more effective) and fire people for not taking the vaccine (what happened to informed consent?)

I don't know which Nobel prize winner became the villain, but I can believe both that it can happen unjustly (politicians or social activists start attacking them for their other beliefs), and sometimes justly; "Nobel disease" is when the celebrated scientist lets recognition go to their head and starts speaking in areas where they aren't experts. The famed example is Linus Pauling who got the Nobel Prize for Chemistry, but in later years started hawking vitamin C tablets saying it could cure cancer; it can't, and he died of cancer. Additional studies have shown that when taken intravenously it can have an effect on some cancer cells as part of a chemotherapy regime, but as orally ingested tablets it's worthless.

For what I've said on China in the previous comment, I have never been, but I am fairly certain of the veracity of all the issues I raised. I can't speak for any specific Chinese person and how they feel about their government, I'm sure millions of them are happy in life no matter how the country is run, and certainly the country is more prosperous these days, but these issues are still there, and we in the West should try our best to avoid lapsing into authoritarianism or totalitarianism.

[js8]

Your reading of 1984 is a bit shallow.. It was a warning against censorship in the UK as well. (And honestly I think the authoritarian state of 1984 is just a setting, I think Orwell's main point was we shouldn't give into extremism of any form, otherwise we lose our humanism.)

Orwell has been quoted that Animal Farm was a also a critique of capitalism, in favor of democratic socialism.

You also say GP is naive about China. But China has been actually less oppressive as time goes along. In fact, historically, authoritarian states often become less oppressive without foreign interference (my home country, Czechoslovakia, was on path towards democratic socialism in the 1960s, unfortunately, it was reversed for geopolitical reasons; such has been experience of many American client states as well). (And you also have liberal states becoming more authoritarian on their own, we can see that in the western world, due to concentration of wealth.)

This indicates there is no "natural law" that makes things more (or less) authoritarian. It depends on people pursuing politics, and being informed.