A Place to Stand

The worst thing about the society Orwell portrays in 1984 is its intentionally unchanging nature.

If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever.

Strangely enough, since the book was written as an attack on Stalin this is the particular point on which the attack is misdirected. Stalin, with his 5 year plans & such was committed to economic progress at any cost & to making the USSR change into a a modern industrialised power. In this he succeeded, though Brezhnev & the bureaucracy then screwed it up.

Stalin’s legacy perhaps was summed up best by Winston Churchill – “Stalin came to Russia with a wooden plough and left it in possession of atomic weapons.”

That may justify what he did. Certainly nothing else could but equally certainly it is what makes Stalin a creative force in world history when Hitler was merely a destructive one.

Which brings us to the "environmental" movement. I recently had a discussion online involving a Green who asserted specifically that economic growth is not a good or desirable thing. Many of the Greens actually want to go backwards to some sort of medievalism, others to"1976 when we were poorer and led a less materialistic lifestyle" but most in practice & sometimes in theory too only want to stop everything dead right now, without any deeper thoughts.

In this they are not emulating real communists but a sort of Spitting Image version. No wonder so many of our current political leaders were "Trotskyists" in their youth. You can be a "Trotskyist" without understanding much about communism or indeed Trotsky & without taking any responsibility for their real achievements, bad or good. All you have to know is that they were sort of revolutionary & left wing. You certainly don't have to know that Trotsky not Stalin first called for productivity growth or that Marx's whole thesis was based on economic progress:

"Trotsky called for workers' democracy and the eradication of bureaucratism linked to a perspective of rapidly building up the country's industry through the introduction of a plan.....Trotsky's proposed economic plan on the contrary was intended to develop the material level of the country".

Instead we see ex-"Trots" like Miliband & ones who still, sometimes, claim to be so like Sheriden adopting the anti-progress policies of the Greens. So ignorant of the movement they were part of that they have adopted Orwell's parody of it.

Another feature of 1984 is the way the State uses language to mean the opposite of its OED version. Thus the Ministry of Truth was his propaganda ministry & our Department of the Environment & Energy is the one that builds windmills. In the discussion mentioned above the Green claimed that he supported "improvement" but that while a wealthier society was no improvement "better education" & more regulations (specifically on housing) & regulators were. (Better education sounds good but he had previously supported the showing of Gore's film in schools, packed with proven lies, as an example so clearly "better" was an Orwellian redefinition of the term to mean "with more propaganda lies").

"Ignorance is Strength" according to the State in the book & we all know the ability of "environmentalists" to treasure their ignorance of physics, economics or even simple arithmetic. Amory Lovens, leader of California's nuclear shutdown initiative, sneering "The only physics I ever took was Ex-Lax", as though it were something to be proud of was merely an early entrant in a long queue of apparatchiks who still lie to us.

This is what, behind all the lies, for them 2 & 2 does make 5 if the movement demands it. But behind all that they are just scared. They know human progress is not only possible but easy to achieve. Nobody devotes their lives to destroying something they do not believe exists. It is just that an eternity of stamping on human potential is something they understand & thus scares them less than progress.