Thursday, November 21, 2013

Religion of Orwell


These three slogans of the Party in George Orwell's 1984 are especially applicable to Islam; a religion of war that claims to be a religion of peace, whose political parties (such as the Muslim Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party) use "Freedom" in their name but stand for slavery, and ignorance of its true nature creates an illusion of strength for industrialized nations that imagine that they are only battling a tiny handful of outmatched extremists.

The Orwellian world finds its natural expression in our world of unnamable wars against unnamable enemies who are peacefully at war with us in the name of a religion that our leaders assure us is wholly peaceful and should not be identified with the people killing us in its name. There is enough convoluted reasoning in a single press conference after any act of Muslim terror to have provided Orwell with material for three sequels.

But in a Doublethink world where everything means the opposite of what it is, even Orwell isn't immune from inversion. The popularization of Orwell has made him ubiquitous. Animal Farm's book cover appears on reusable shopping bags. Every television show, from singing competitions to spy shows, will sooner or later be described as Orwellian.

Orwell is everywhere and his ideas are nowhere. Instead of censoring him, the Doublethinkers, in the fashion of the Ministry of Truth, rewrote him and made him banal.

Dubai, a city in a totalitarian state that practices censorship and fills jails with political prisoners, will host its Inaugural George Orwell Lecture under the auspices of His Highness Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum; a billionaire ruler with more wives and yachts than human rights.

Considering Dubai's international reputation as a glittering city for the wealthy built on the backs of slave labor, the stark contradiction between its primitive base and its skyscrapers, a party city where women have fewer rights than kidnapped child camel jockeys, there ought to be plenty of material for an Orwell lecture.

Dubai, like Islam, is slavery masquerading as freedom.

But His Highness Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum is not about to sponsor a lecture critical of his glittering tyranny. Not in a tyranny where the son of the UAE president and the brother of its crown prince was filmed using cattle prods, lighter fluid and nails to torture a businessman. In a properly Orwellian statement, the Ministry of the Interior, whose cops had been involved in the torture, said that "all rules, policies and procedures were followed correctly by the Police Department".

Orwellian tyrannies like the UAE don't allow lectures on Orwell unless they have been properly routed through the Ministry of the Interior, which follows procedures correctly when sticking a cattle prod into the rectum of a screaming Afghan businessman, the Ministry of Truth and their useful Western idiots who do all the Doublethinking on behalf of their countrymen.

And so instead of an Orwell lecture on the Orwellian nature of the country it's actually taking place in, Gavin Esler, a BBC television presenter, which is to say an employee of a massive media bureaucracy that everyone must support by law, will claim that 1984 was warning England about the threat of the X-Factor television singing competition and Wayne Rooney; an English soccer player.

And that is no exaggeration. That is the actual preview of his talk.

It is no doubt comforting to believe, as so many left-wing intellectuals seem to, that the threat of totalitarianism comes from the Daily Mail and Manchester United, rather than The Independent and The Guardian. Talent competition judges don't send people off to reeducation camps. That is more in the wheelhouse of left-wing intellectuals. And tabloids don't send people to blow themselves up in the London Underground to enforce Islamic law on the United Kingdom.

There is something undeniably subversive about an Orwell Lecture that is itself Orwellian, but that no doubt is not what Gavin Esler has in mind. In classic Doublethink fashion, he is unaware of his  inversion of reality because his own reality has been permanently inverted. And so an audience of Europeans will attend an event in a totalitarian Muslim country where the royal family casually tortures people and nod along knowingly to the revelation that Orwell wasn't writing about the tyranny of torture chambers and thought police, but the tyranny of television cliches.

Orwellian lectures on Orwell appear to be the fashion at the Orwell Trust. The annual Orwell Lecture has already been delivered by Muslim Brotherhood scion and stoning apologist Tarik Ramadan. The topic of Ramadan's lecture was "Democratising the Middle East: A New Role for the West".

To the Muslim Brotherhood, democratization means the same thing that a plane ticket does to their Al Qaeda splinter group. A Muslim Brotherhood Supreme Guide was once quoted as saying, "Democracy is like a pair of slippers that we wear until we reach the bathroom, and then we take them off." The Brotherhood was booted out of power because it decided that Egypt was already in the toilet and that it could take off its democracy slippers prematurely.

Democracy, to the Freedom and Justice Party of the Muslim Brotherhood, which offered neither freedom nor justice, was another word for tyranny. And that made Tarik Ramadan's talk title an actual embodiment of the Party's three slogans in 1984.

Tarik Ramadan has described the Muslim Brotherhood as a "legalist, anti-colonialist and nonviolent movement that claimed legitimacy for armed resistance in Palestine against Zionist expansionism during the period before World War II." That's a rather roundabout way of saying that it was an Anti-Western totalitarian movement that drew support from Nazi Germany because of their common goal of exterminating the Jews.

"Al-Banna's objective was to found an "Islamic state" based on gradual reform, beginning with popular education and broad-based social programs," Ramadan writes. But he neglects to mention that Hassan al Banna was his grandfather or that his Islamic state would "regulate every aspect of life", conduct "surveillance of theaters and cinemas", confiscate "provocative stories and books that implant the seeds of skepticism", criminalize the mingling of men and women and restore the Caliphate.

If this sounds like an Islamic Oceania, that makes it all the more outrageous that his grandson should, in thoroughly dishonest terms, promote the creation of this Caliphate, where men and women will be flogged, books will be burned and the Freedom and Justice Party will watch everyone all the time, at a memorial lecture for the writer who warned that Oceania was coming.

It was the very rise of this burgeoning Caliphate in Egypt that turned the Tahrir Square protesters against Muslim Brotherhood rule. Just as it provoked youthful uprisings in Turkey, a despotism that Ramadan promoted as the Brotherhood's ideal model. But according to Ramadan, the overthrow of the Brotherhood, the mobs in the street chanting for Morsi to join Mubarak, was a Zionist conspiracy.

Unlike Machiavellian, Orwellian was never meant to characterize George Orwell as a supporter of the totalitarianism that he wrote about. But the Orwell Trust has perversely embraced the very same totalitarianism depicted in 1984; the distortion of language into Doublethink and the advancement of slavery, war and ignorance under the guise of freedom, peace and justice.

Consider Orwell book prize judges like Arifa Akbar, who has spent a good deal of time claiming that the UK isn't the victim of Muslim terrorism, but that Muslims are rather the victims of UK counter-terrorism, a proper inversion of the truth worthy of the Ministry of Truth, and winners like Raja Shehadeh for Palestinian Walks; the former director of a group that supports terrorism.

In a Harold Bloom edited collection of essays on Orwell's Animal Farm, one essay suggests that the
writer was drawing on Islamic themes when describing Napoleon's four sows, matching the number of permitted wives in the Koran, and writing that Sugarcandy Mountain, the fictional afterlife propounded by one of Napoleon's stooges was derived from descriptions of Islamic paradise.

Commentary of this sort however has grown rarer and rarer. Instead of using Orwell's work to shine a critical light on distortions of language that enable totalitarianism, the deceased writer has been recruited to distort language to enable the totalitarian fantasies of Islam.

The Orwell Trust has become Orwellian in the worst sense. Its descent into collaboration with totalitarian states and ideologies is the very sort of conduct among the left that Orwell had been writing about.

George Orwell struggled to publish Animal Farm because no one wanted to hear anything negative about Stalin and the Soviet Union. Today, Islam and the Caliphate have taken the place of Communism and the Soviet Union. The new Doublethinkers of the left have drafted Orwell into their Ministry of Truth that claims Islam is a religion of peace, that the Freedom and Justice Party of the Muslim Brotherhood does not stand for the enslavement of half the population and that ignorance of these things is not a weakness, but a strength.


Anonymous said...

Doubleplusgood, the truth ration was just increased to 30 grams. I'm off to the two minutes hate so I can scream at the agents of Goldstein. Doubleplusgood!

mrs adela bradley said...
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Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog said...

I don't think Orwell was working from Islamic scripture, but the author of the essay is probably of a Muslim background based on his name and predictably projects that.

Orwell was likely addressing the Russian Orthodox Church, if the novel is meant to be a definitive parallel with the USSR, and its exploitation by Stalin (and now by Putin) to make their tyranny appear more passable.

The use of Moses certainly does not suggest an Islamic derivation.

Chris said...

I guess some Islamic pigs are more equal than other?

Obviously freedom of squeal is not a basic right....

Anonymous said...

I'm starting to believe more and more in the theory of Julia as the "one that got away." There is no mention of what happened to her in room 101 that I can recall.

Also, during Winston's first meeting with O'Brien, O'Brien slips up and says only thought criminals insist that the resistance isn't real. Given the many twists and turns in the novel who can really tell what he meant by this? Mixing lies with truth?

Given all of the language manipulation and distortions in Oceania even Party members will slip up. There will always be an open mic, eavesdropping, passed messages, resistance movements, and ones that get away.

You are second-generation proof of this, Daniel. Beginning with Moshe, to Mordechai, to Esther, along down the line right to you. Speaking of Moshe and Hadassah...both, for lack of a better word, under deep cover within evil empires.

No coincidences in the Torah. Again, there will never be total extinction of Jews, and we know the ultimate ending of the Torah, too. In the meantime, we must strive to keep the death and misery counts as low as humanly possible.

But getting back to Orwell: The Left is horribly distorting his message. He said the moral of 1984 was a simple one--don't let it happen.

Jews will never be extinct. Near extinction but never total so there is always hope and opportunity to survive. While the Nazis were building concentration camps the Bielski brothers in Poland were building chai camps in the forests, and of course successfully resisting.

If Muslims can twist Eric A. Blair's novel into something it wasn't why can't I believe that Julia wasn't one that got away, if not physically at least intellectually and morally?


mrs adela bradley said...
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mrs adela bradley said...

Speaking of Islam's shameless thieving, there's a movement afoot in Turkey to turn Hagia Sophia into a mosque again.

Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog said...

Chris, Freedom of Squeal, I like that

K.A. Orwell had despaired of the left. 1984 reflects that despair. He saw a movement that worshiped power. Specifically he despaired of the left's elite, so his last resort is to place some hope in the proles, the working class

mrs adela bradley, They're bound to sooner or later. The Islamists have solidified their grip on power with the aid of Europe which preferred them to the military.

The pigs claim to aspire to animal freedom, but what they aspire is to be a poor mockery of the humans they replaced. Likewise, the Communists took power only to become classic Asiatic totalitarian regimes. Orwell would have said that he predicted the final outcome in China where Communism has become crony capitalism.

Judaism did not have prophet rulers after Samuel, I believe. The prophets anointed the kings by divine will. They did not generally rule in their stead. The monarchy represented secular power, etc...

Stalin, like Lenin, however extended into the fourth dimension, since Communism was an imminent kingdom of utopia. There was no true Communism, the Communist rulers were working to bring Communism into being on earth.

Anonymous said...

I can't really go into too much that is going on with me off line but suffice to say that when a cop silently gives me the peace/victory sign and before that another tells me that people who are doing good can't be harmed and that is in the bible, and also that he "lives here" in the community and says people "don't see this" and points to an emblem I feel totally entitled in believing that Julia is the one that got away. Orwell didn't include it in his novel but suppose there were others that got away intellectually and morally? That would give the novel a positive ending.

Potential and actual? Orwell has said that the moral of 1984 is simple, don't let it happen. It seems logical that there would be so much emphasis on words and numbers. Learning to read and count.

Besides, a novel is a work of art and open to interpretation, so if the Muslims you wrote about it can have their meaning I can have mine, too. Everyone typically reads between the lines when it comes to literature.

OT but you know I always do that LOL. I'm reading and thinking of the letters, at the kaph sofit.

Way OT but isn't 1984, a novel full of letters, numbers, meanings and things being turned upside down? So why not think about letters, numbers, and deeper meanings before Chanukah? Season of letters, numbers, words and of course light.


(tefillos and ratzon.)

mrs adela bradley said...
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mrs adela bradley said...
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Anonymous said...

I can't recall the moment we began living in Orwellian time but we have been there quite a while. Might have been in 1973 when the U.S. Supreme Court found a "civilized" society, founded upon the first principle that God gave us a right to life, could exterminate whatever number of human beings women decided to exterminate, also denying any right of the father towards that child. The reality of abortion-murder-had to be guarded and so its real meaning was changed to the nice sounding "reproductive choice".

Since then, the idea of choice in anything other than the extermination of the unborn, is becoming obsolete because our society has adopted the religion of Orwell. Free speech, representative government, the rule of law, moral and ethical standards, the truth of things, individual and community responsibility are not the tenets of this religion and all are becoming obsolete.


Anonymous said...

Every time I think I understand just how messed up the world is, another zinger. We are [all] seeing plenty of the doublethink here (US), and reading the account above is still mind boggling. Can you imagine somebody 100+ years from now looking back on this event (and Orwell's books) and trying to develop a theory of what brought it all down? dr

mrs adela bradley said...
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Anonymous said...

Hagia Sofia into mosque. Oh NO! Exchanging one heathen temple for another.

lemon lime moon said...

Pigs provide great benefit for farms and ranches and so are kept for their benefit and not just for food.
1. They aerate the soil better than most other animals and provide excellent fertilizer.
2. They eat snakes and are one of the best lines of defense against rattlesnakes on a farm or ranch especially. Put in a herd of pigs and rattlers will disappear.

Anonymous said...

Do liberals count as snakes? DC could use some pigs to get rid of the snakes..


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