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Post by cato on Sept 12, 2017 14:33:31 GMT
I came across an article on the First Things Website today called "Christianity is for Cucks" which ties in African Priests bringing the gospel to an unbelieving Europe , Evelyn Waugh's Sword of Honour wartime novels and the alt right. It's a short reflection on Christianity, our plans, failure(-personal and as western civilisation) and true hope. Worth a read.
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Post by Séamus on Sept 14, 2017 10:57:50 GMT
I'm not reading 1984 at the moment, but seeing that Clinton has brought up the subject... I'm always intrigued: The archvillan could have been given any Anglo-Saxon name. Orwell chose to name him O'Brian. WHY did he choose an Irish name?
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Post by Maolsheachlann on Sept 14, 2017 11:47:41 GMT
It has been suggested that 1984 is influenced by Chesterton's Napoleon of Notting Hill, which is also set in 1984. (Chesterton doesn't say that explicitly, but he does say it is set eighty years in the future, and the book was published in 1904.) It is interesting that the King of England in The Napoleon of Notting Hill is called AUBERON Quin. O'Brien? Auberon? Maybe?
(Of course, it could simply be argued that 1984 is an inversion of 1948, the year the book was written.)
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Post by Séamus on Sept 14, 2017 12:48:54 GMT
I'd never have guessed that there was any influence there, although Quin seems a strange choice of name for an English king also. Perhaps because the Irish has such large families years ago, emigrating throughout the world, the English often viewed them the way people see Muslims now -as a future dominant force? An O'Brien to them was as scary as a Mahomet to us? Sir Henry Parkes, known as the 'father of (Australian) federation' complained publicly around the turn of the 20th century that too many Irish were coming to Australia and would be 'turning it into a Papal state'. Could Orwell have decided, as well as using the name of Chesterton's King in reverse, that an Irish offshoot was the most likely to have been a leader of a post-religious, big brother, world order?
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Post by ClassicalRepublican on Sept 14, 2017 13:22:47 GMT
I believe O'Brien is a homage (what's a Russel conjugation for 'homage' with a negative nuance?) to Orwell's boss Brendan Bracken, the Irish born British minister for information during the war. I think Mrs Orwell also worked at this ministry. Orwell hated him.
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Post by cato on Sept 16, 2017 19:00:51 GMT
Cork University press have published an Atlas of the Irish Revolution which will probably turn out to be one of the finest books published about the revolution so far and certainly this year. It's a fabulous collection of essays, statistics, maps and pictures many of which are new or rarely seen before. It is a physically large book so bring a wheel barrow if you plan to buy it. It costs 59 euros but will keep you occupied all winter.
I am going to drop hints to people that I Would love a copy should they be thinking of buying me an early christmas present. Cork University have also published excellent atlases on the Great Famine and County Donegal.
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Post by cato on Sept 16, 2017 19:09:06 GMT
I believe O'Brien is a homage (what's a Russel conjugation for 'homage' with a negative nuance?) to Orwell's boss Brendan Bracken, the Irish born British minister for information during the war. I think Mrs Orwell also worked at this ministry. Orwell hated him. Orwell had an intense dislike for catholics and a slightly lesser dislike for the Irish. I suspect these were typical 1930s middle class attitudes in England like mild antisemitism and casual racist assumptions which were also fairly widespread.
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Post by Maolsheachlann on Sept 16, 2017 19:16:46 GMT
I believe O'Brien is a homage (what's a Russel conjugation for 'homage' with a negative nuance?) to Orwell's boss Brendan Bracken, the Irish born British minister for information during the war. I think Mrs Orwell also worked at this ministry. Orwell hated him. Orwell had an intense dislike for catholics and a slightly lesser dislike for the Irish. I suspect these were typical 1930s middle class attitudes in England like mild antisemitism and casual racist assumptions which were also fairly widespread. He articulates his prejudice against Catholics in his essay about the thirties, "In the Belly of the Whale".
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Post by Maolsheachlann on Sept 16, 2017 19:17:54 GMT
Cork University press have published an Atlas of the Irish Revolution which will probably turn out to be one of the finest books published about the revolution so far and certainly this year. It's a fabulous collection of essays, statistics, maps and pictures many of which are new or rarely seen before. It is a physically large book so bring a wheel barrow if you plan to buy it. It costs 59 euros but will keep you occupied all winter. I am going to drop hints to people that I Would love a copy should they be thinking of buying me an early christmas present. Cork University have also published excellent atlases on the Great Famine and County Donegal. I can never get excited about a book with the word "Atlas" in the title. It seems like a near relation to a phonebook to me. Pure prejudice, of course.
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Post by MourningIreland on Sept 16, 2017 23:04:59 GMT
Cork University press have published an Atlas of the Irish Revolution which will probably turn out to be one of the finest books published about the revolution so far and certainly this year. It's a fabulous collection of essays, statistics, maps and pictures many of which are new or rarely seen before. It is a physically large book so bring a wheel barrow if you plan to buy it. It costs 59 euros but will keep you occupied all winter. I am going to drop hints to people that I Would love a copy should they be thinking of buying me an early christmas present. Cork University have also published excellent atlases on the Great Famine and County Donegal. The Atlas of Cork City is a beautiful book.
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Post by MourningIreland on Sept 16, 2017 23:10:07 GMT
I believe O'Brien is a homage (what's a Russel conjugation for 'homage' with a negative nuance?) to Orwell's boss Brendan Bracken, the Irish born British minister for information during the war. I think Mrs Orwell also worked at this ministry. Orwell hated him. Orwell had an intense dislike for catholics and a slightly lesser dislike for the Irish. I suspect these were typical 1930s middle class attitudes in England like mild antisemitism and casual racist assumptions which were also fairly widespread. My hitherto high opinion of Orwell has just gone down a couple of notches. Someone told me recently that he was a globalist. Perhaps I should have taken that claim more seriously.
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Post by MourningIreland on Sept 16, 2017 23:12:33 GMT
Cork University press have published an Atlas of the Irish Revolution which will probably turn out to be one of the finest books published about the revolution so far and certainly this year. It's a fabulous collection of essays, statistics, maps and pictures many of which are new or rarely seen before. It is a physically large book so bring a wheel barrow if you plan to buy it. It costs 59 euros but will keep you occupied all winter. I am going to drop hints to people that I Would love a copy should they be thinking of buying me an early christmas present. Cork University have also published excellent atlases on the Great Famine and County Donegal. I can never get excited about a book with the word "Atlas" in the title. It seems like a near relation to a phonebook to me. Pure prejudice, of course. I would be sceptical too based on the title per se, but these books are amazing. If North Korea takes out the grid with an EMP attack I might actually find the time to read them (as opposed to merely "pore over" them) - by candlelight of course.
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Post by Maolsheachlann on Sept 16, 2017 23:24:46 GMT
Orwell was full of contradictions. On the whole, I am a fan, though there are a lot of things I dislike about him. It's funny that someone so dedicated to truth-speaking and plain-seeing could have so many blind spots, but I don't think that would have surprised him.
He was a miserable git. I wonder was he clinically depressed his entire life?
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Post by Maolsheachlann on Sept 16, 2017 23:33:18 GMT
The funny thing is that, although he was a self-described socialist, he is now more embraced by the right than the left. His essay "The Road to Wigan Pier", not the reportage part of it but the philosophical part of it, really articulated my own anxieties about the future at a time when nothing else did. In this essay, he says that many are opposed to socialism because they see it leading to a "brain in a bowl", a completely rationalized and dehumanized world, and he admits there is substance to this fear. He tackles the same theme in his essay Can Socialists Be Happy?: By far the best known modern Utopias are those of H.G. Wells. Wells's vision of the future is almost fully expressed in two books written in the early Twenties, The Dream and Men Like Gods. Here you have a picture of the world as Wells would like to see it or thinks he would like to see it. It is a world whose keynotes are enlightened hedonism and scientific curiosity. All the evils and miseries we now suffer from have vanished. Ignorance, war, poverty, dirt, disease, frustration, hunger, fear, overwork, superstition all vanished. So expressed, it is impossible to deny that that is the kind of world we all hope for. We all want to abolish the things Wells wants to abolish. But is there anyone who actually wants to live in a Wellsian Utopia? On the contrary, not to live in a world like that, not to wake up in a hygenic garden suburb infested by naked schoolmarms, has actually become a conscious political motive. A book like Brave New World is an expression of the actual fear that modern man feels of the rationalised hedonistic society which it is within his power to create. A Catholic writer said recently that Utopias are now technically feasible and that in consequence how to avoid Utopia had become a serious problem. We cannot write this off as merely a silly remark. For one of the sources of the Fascist movement is the desire to avoid a too-rational and too-comfortable world.www.online-literature.com/orwell/895/
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Post by cato on Sept 18, 2017 12:25:36 GMT
Cork University press have published an Atlas of the Irish Revolution which will probably turn out to be one of the finest books published about the revolution so far and certainly this year. It's a fabulous collection of essays, statistics, maps and pictures many of which are new or rarely seen before. It is a physically large book so bring a wheel barrow if you plan to buy it. It costs 59 euros but will keep you occupied all winter. I am going to drop hints to people that I Would love a copy should they be thinking of buying me an early christmas present. Cork University have also published excellent atlases on the Great Famine and County Donegal. I can never get excited about a book with the word "Atlas" in the title. It seems like a near relation to a phonebook to me. Pure prejudice, of course. I think the word Atlas is unfortunate and may turn people off these excellent works. They are products of "geographers" but have a much wider scope. They are more like encyclopedias but that form of literature don't normally cause people to get excited either. They are big books with lots of nice pictures , and good texts.Perfect for a desert island library.
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