George Orwell's Prelude on Politics Is The Mind Killer

I have found this most wonderful (if fairly lengthy) article, and thought you would enjoy having it brought to your attention.

It is so good, I think we should include it among the references in the "Politics is the Mind Killer" wiki page. But, before that, I submit it to you, and ask you: is there anything in this article that would warrant its exclusion from this site? I mean, besides the fact that it is about politics, and written by a notorious Social-democrat (And is that in itself grounds for exclusion?).

I have found this most wonderful (if fairly lengthy) article, and thought you would enjoy having it brought to your attention.

people's (quite reasonable) anger against the worst outrages of the New Deal regime.

Could you give a few examples of those worst outrages?

Moldbug has written a very insightful analysis

I can't say I find it very convincing. In particular, he writes (and I think this claim is central to his argument, in so far as there actually is an argument)

McCarthyism, in neutral language, is the irrational belief that unelected and/or extra-governmental officials should be responsible to elected officials.

which seems to me rather like saying "Intelligent Design, in neutral language, is the irrational belief that the education establishment should be responsive to the opinions of the parents of the children it's educating", or "Communism, in neutral language, is the irrational belief that the marginal utility of money decreases with wealth". That is, yes that's part of it, but it's far from all of it, and it's not the bit that people actually get upset about, and pretending otherwise is just silly.

McCarthyism was the belief that unelected officials should be accountable to elected ones. And that that accountability extended to having them fired for having Communist connections. And that this applied not only to unelected government officials, but movie-makers and teachers and union leaders and so forth. And that "having Communist connections" should be interpreted very broadly indeed.

So it seems to me, anyway. I'm very willing to be informed better -- but I'd like, y'know, some actual evidence.

"Communism, in neutral language, is the irrational belief that the marginal utility of money decreases with wealth"

You know, I've got to use this one sometime, with a straight face, just to see the reaction.

13Vladimir_M14y

Have in mind that the New Deal and WW2 are at the very heart of the political myth of the modern U.S. (and the whole modern West by extension). Demythologizing this part of history is extremely difficult, since huge inferential distances have to be bridged and much counter-evidence to the mainstream view must be marshalled before it's possible to establish a reasonable discussion with someone who is familiar only with the mainstream view, even assuming maximum open-mindedness and good faith on both sides. (In fact, one of the reasons for McCarthyists' seemingly obsessive focus on Communist infiltration was that although they perceived correctly at some level that the problem was much deeper, they never dared to proceed with any further serious attack on the whole grand sacred myth of FDR's regime. The Communism issue was a convenient thing to latch onto in their struggle against the New Deal establishment, since it was by itself an extremely powerful argument but didn't require questioning any of the central untouchable sacred legacies. In a way, FDR managed to play the ultimate head-game with all future American right-wingers by wrapping his legacy into the image of a great war leader whom someone strongly patriotic can't despise without feeling disloyal. Sometimes this leads to grimly amusing stories, like when a few years ago American veterans protested over a new WW2 memorial that featured a bust of Stalin along with FDR and Churchill.) The least controversial examples, however, are those related to the American cooperation with the Soviets during WW2 and in the immediate post-war period, many of which go far beyond any plausible claims of strategic necessity. Some of them are in the "outrage" territory by any reasonable meaning of the term, like for example the Katyn massacre coverup or the Operation Keelhaul. Another example, which was perhaps the principal impetus for McCarthyism in practice, was the handling of the civil war in China (see the OB post I lin