Welcome to the latest in our series of audio adventures, Tales for Our Time: This month's pick is George Orwell's ever more timely tale Nineteen Eighty-Four. Thank you for your kind words about our opening episodes. Aly, a California member of The Mark Steyn Club, writes:
I didn't want it to end so I listened to it again! Both riveting and horrifying, the parallels with current events are many. I'd read it in high school but at the time it wasn't viewed as a cautionary tale as it seemed impossible and unthinkable that such a thing could ever occur in America.
Mark, thanks for choosing this modern classic which so perfectly exemplifies the show's title - Tales for Our Time.
Thank you, Aly. In tonight's episode, Winston Smith is startled by his neighbor's kids. Under Big Brother, children are recruited to serve in the state's youth group - not the Scouts, but the Spies. After all, many grown-ups are barely aware of the moppets hither and thither, so it's very useful to the Party to train them to monitor what the adults are up to, including their own parents. Even when they're not spying, their fierce loyalty to the Party can lend footling children's games a frisson of terror:
'Up with your hands!' yelled a savage voice.
A handsome, tough-looking boy of nine had popped up from behind the table and was menacing him with a toy automatic pistol, while his small sister, about two years younger, made the same gesture with a fragment of wood. Both of them were dressed in the blue shorts, grey shirts, and red neckerchiefs which were the uniform of the Spies. Winston raised his hands above his head, but with an uneasy feeling, so vicious was the boy's demeanour, that it was not altogether a game.
'You're a traitor!' yelled the boy. 'You're a thought-criminal! You're a Eurasian spy! I'll shoot you, I'll vaporize you, I'll send you to the salt mines!'
Suddenly they were both leaping round him, shouting 'Traitor!' and 'Thought-criminal!' the little girl imitating her brother in every movement. It was somehow slightly frightening, like the gambolling of tiger cubs which will soon grow up into man-eaters. There was a sort of calculating ferocity in the boy's eye, a quite evident desire to hit or kick Winston and a consciousness of being very nearly big enough to do so.
Members of The Mark Steyn Club can hear Part Three of our adventure simply by clicking here and logging-in. Parts One and Two can be found here.
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15 Member Comments
A thankyou for this superb reading: it is worthy of such a classic novel. Those interested might read Evelyn Waugh's letter to Orwell. It is appreciative and - of course - insightful. Waugh points out the lack of any religious sentiment which makes 1984 a permanent hell. Religion is there to release us - for Waugh, of course, it was (Roman Catholic) Christianity. Without the soul the Party wins forever,. (Waugh also states that Winstons rebelllion was false - the Brotherhood is a similar gang to the Party. The letter is on p302 of Waughs Collected Letters.)
Waugh visited Orwell while he was very ill in hospital. A kindness to a fellow writer.
Today I feel like being another Winston Smith writing these notes in an electronic diary knowing full well that what I say here can and probably will be used against me for thought crimes.
As I write this, the USA is on the eve of one of the most historically significant votes in Congress. If ever a mob was created in haste to rush to judgement, this is the time and place. History usually plays out slowly but at times it rushes forward with the speed and power of an avalanche . The French had their Dreyfus Affair and now we have our "Donny" Affair. The lead question is whether the Congress will politically assassinate a standing President of the United States by removing him from office for no true offense. Impeachment is a political process but with the present facade of "due process" being stripped away. The obvious conspirators are known but it is the co-conspirators this time that will potentially make it so. This is a hinge point in history and if successful will unhinge the country forever. The Left appears to have racked up a series amazing election and political successes in the past year and none of them with any hint of propriety. Rudy Guliani recently asked the question of what the real cost of removing Donald Trump was and he was correct. The cost was the Republic. For the co-conspirators, they will be the expendable "patsies". A key rule is assassinate the assassins. This time the Republicans in Congress who enable this removal will have committed political suicide for themselves, and for the Republican Party. The cost to the Republic is just.an afterthought.
These are the notes of a dead man. I cannot love Big Brother.
I don't understand why the Republicans are doing this and what's their end game. Surely, they must realize most of their constituents are Trump supporters, or if not so much, would at least feel that to conspire with the Democrats at this point would be a betrayal? Do they think everything will be as it once was when Trump is gone and "erased" from the annals of American history?
There is definitely a GOP agenda but I can't determine what it is or how it would benefit them in the future. Maybe they think the American people/voters will have forgotten all about this in a few months time and then they can go back to posturing and pontificating about conservative values and protecting our "freedoms" but by then it will be too late.
I'm flattered to have my post mentioned in Mark's intro. The topic of "spy kids" is an interesting one and a methodology all totalitarian regime's employ in some capacity. My dear friend, a woman of 88, was a young girl living in Nazi Germany, more specifically on Norderney, part of a little-known group of islands (at least to Americans) off the coast of Northern Germany called the Frisian Islands. Because of its proximity to not only Germany but the Netherlands and Denmark, it was strategically important during the WWII.
She told me how her family were afraid to discuss politics or the war in their own home lest a neighbor might hear them from an open window and that her parents couldn't trust their children, or rather, didn't want to put them in a vulnerable position where they had knowledge of such discussions as they might be questioned at school or by the authorities.
Sadly, her eldest brother was killed one night when he was on the beach with friends camping out as part of a scouting expedition, as he was only 16 and not in the military. British aircraft flew over the island and strafed the beach with gunfire, killing her brother. Why it happened was never made clear but it appeared to be a random act, not a military order. She said her family never got over his tragic death.
Ironically, after the war was over the British occupied Norderney for many months, and at only 12 years old, she became the interpreter and liaison between the British forces and the people of the island. She is a brilliant woman, a true American patriot, a staunch Conservative Republican who worked for Reagan when he was governor of California and went on to have a distinguished and trailblazing career with the CA DOJ.
I'd like to nominate a rather obscure but important novel for a future Tales of Our Time that is set on the island of Norderney. It's called, "The Riddle of the Sands" by Irish author and revolutionary Erskine Childers. It's considered by many to be the first spy novel ever written and influenced subsequent spy novelists such as John le Carre and Ian Fleming.
Now, for the important matter at hand, tuning in (or rather logging in) for the latest installment (Part Three) of "Nineteen Eighty-Four"!
Mark replies:
We beat you to it, Aly. You'll find The Riddle of the Sands here.
Aly, My two favorite books Mark has done are "The Riddle..." and "Three Men and a Boat" (for comic relief). In both cases Mark's reading is brilliant.
The glorification of snitching on one's parents started in the old USSR with Pavlik Morozov in the early 1930s, during the bloody campaign against "kulaks", well-to-do peasants.
He was extolled as an example for every little kid in the country.
There were other "little heros" but he was, as far as I remember, the only one who informed on his family.
I am onto part 3 tonight but the first two episodes have terrified me...am I the only one who sees we are now living this...!!!...I feel like I am losing my mind as this story unfolds like today's headlines...We have allowed 1984 to be 2021...God Save Us All..
My perspective, as an observer with no personal experience of a culture versed in colonization of the sub-continent, as relates to the gambolling of tiger cubs, is sadly lacking. All the same it's a highly effective device. Easy to imagine, that is. Such is the brilliance of Orwell.
Just reading on the CBC site a story about a teenager who explains why she publicly ID'd her family at D.C's pro-Trump protests. She says she would love to make amends one day, but for that to happen, her mom would have to admit what she did was wrong and get some help.
Her mother has been fired from her job at a hospital.
Terrifying...
A teenager? She's been indoctrinated all her life by her educational institutions. A 'liberal education' is a liberal indoctrination, no different in essence from the Maoist 'education' the Muslim Uighurs get in Maoist China at the moment.
The alternative is a democratically free education - and a democratically free culture generally. We need a democratic revolution, something that can only be accomplished by us, the demos, individually and collectively, locally and nationally.
Therein definitively answering the question in the title. So mere attendance at a pro-Trump event is grounds for cancellation. Not like Nineteen Eighty-Four at all!
Guilt by peripheral association. As people recoil from this all they see are the broad strokes and not the mechanism and granular detail. I work closely with a very progressive female adminitrator. She has a kind heart but a stone cold killer reaction for " unfairness " in the world. There is an icy breeze...faint but there now....I am not expendable and she knows it. I cannot explain that hopefully a thorough investigation will probably take The Narrative down several notches to naive people played superbly by well trained agents provocateur. Honest people with pent up frustration, and excluded from having just resolution. Primer and ignited. Howver, their crime is whiteness (not all of course) and a despicable ideology. Unforgivable. So anything I say is not only WrongSpeak but based on ThoughtCrimes. Vaporiaztion? Add Nacht und Nebel.. Spoiler... I truly hope I don't t learn to love Big Brother.
Just like the Nazis, cleansing the filth from their ordered society. MAGA is becoming Juden last night's Two Minutes of Hate is now a 24/7/365' Perpetual Hate news cycle. Orwell was an optimist.
Hi Mark, I would like to nominate "Starship Troopers" by Robert A. Heinlein for the next Tales for Our Time. Surprisingly, one of the best novels about military virtues written. In troubling times, something to embrace. Thank you for its consideration. ~ Matt