At no point in my lifetime has there not been war going on in the Middle East. Are we going to run out of boots or faces first I wonder? Or will it really just last forever?

  • FinjaminPoach@lemmy.world
    3·
    2 days ago

    Or will it really just last forever?

    Donald Trump and Israel seem to be happy with this as an outcome. Israel needs america to fight the war on its behalf though.

    I too was thinking about 1984 a lot since the iran conflict. Many read 1984 and ask “so when will it happen in our future?” as if it’s a certainty rather than a possibility.

    I would conjecture that we’ll look back on the USA-israel hegemony (194? - 2026) as being our own little Oceania/Orwellian-era. I think the war with iran will be what quickly and ultimately collapses this status quo, which was already receding. We should probably be thankful that living under it wasn’t as hellish as the book [1984] describes.

    Though you can, honestly, take any part of that book and find events across the gloval american empire which plqyed-out exactly the same as in the book; the torture ( or, ‘advanced interrogation’) the thought-crimes, the mass-surveillance and the establishment of controlled opposition groups.

    • DomeGuy@lemmy.world
      2·
      2 days ago

      1984 is an anti-tyranny dystopia that has more bad readings than any other work I can think of.

      The essential problem isn’t new-speak, the five minute hate, constant war, one-party rule, rat-based psychotorture, or even ubiquitous surveillance. Rather, it’s the abandonment of truth. It’s not nearly so bad if Big Brother is Watching, except that Big Brother lies.

      (And Orwell wasn’t even inventing the danger out of whole cloth: both the German Nazi and Russian Communist tyrannies had well trod the path of internal propaganda and historical revisionism)

      ((AND you don’t have to squint all that hard to argure that 1984’s Britian was most plausibly a pariah state that didn’t actually have any power beyond its aquatic border…))

      Like nearly all science fiction, 1984 wasn’t so much written about its future as it was written about the past.