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Monday, May 13, 2019

Orwell’s Newspeak and The Observer (a/k/a the Sunday edition of The Guardian)




Simon Tisdall, Mike Pompeo: a bully boy calls at No 10, The Observer (a/k/a the Sunday edition of The Guardian) (May 4, 2019, 15:07 BST) (emphases added), <https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/may/04/mike-pompeo-bully-boy-calls-at-no-10>:

The [American] decision to invite Hungary’s much-ostracised nationalist leader Viktor Orban to meet Trump at the White House on the eve of this month’s critical EU parliamentary elections smacks of typical Pompeo-style contempt for European democracy.

Orban was elected by the voters of Hungary. So it is difficult to see why meeting with him should be construed as an offense against democracy. One might as well posit the opposite: that failing to meet with an elected leader is a sign of contempt for normal democratic institutions. Of course, Tisdall, the editorialist, does not speak to anything like common or ordinary democracy; rather, he speaks in terms of something elsesomething more enlightened, more complex, and more nuanced: European democracy. The EU is a parliamentary “democracy” that lives and breathes absent anything like meaningful responsible government. What Tisdall means is that Orban—although popular with actual voters in his own country—among people who have an incentive to know precisely what Orban is up toremains an object of suspicion among the bureaucrats in Brussels and among members of the European Parliament from countries other than Hungary. What Tisdall does not understand is that it is he who is illustrating a contempt for ordinary democracy and ordinary voters. 

Orwell’s newspeak and 1984 were supposed to be an account of a fictional dystopic future, not a how-to manual.

Seth

Seth Barrett Tillman, Orwell’s Newspeak and The Observer (a/k/a the Sunday edition of The Guardian), New Reform Club (May 13, 2019, 9:41 AM), 
<https://reformclub.blogspot.com/2019/05/orwells-newspeak-and-observer-aka.html>. 

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4 comments:

MKBAR said...

Democracy has a different meaning in the EU and its leaders than it has among what can laughingly be called its voters. The great irony in the EU is that it has resulted in Germany effectively winning WW2 without firing a shot. Now it is importing people who have no compunction about finishing off the second part of the German program -- elimination of the Jews.

As far as I am concerned, the EU is no different than the Weimar German government which resulted in the legal accession of Hitler to power. They have allowed globalist lunatics to take charge of the EU.

My idea for the destruction of the EU is simple. If it wants to be a single unified country, it gets a single team in Soccer's World Cup. It won't survive the soccer hooligans.

Rich Rostrom said...

MKBAR: The World Cup is open to "countries", not nations. England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have separate teams. So do Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands, American Samoa, and Guam. Also Hong Kong and Macau, and a whole swarm of Caribbean colonies.

MKBAR said...

I get that. But if the point is to destroy the EU, which would be a positive from my perspective, I would make an exception and treat the unwieldy thing as a country.

Of course, my views about FIFA closely parallel my views on the EU; both unwieldy and corrupt.

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