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Comments by "Pyromania101" (@pyromania1018) on "George Orwell: The Uncompromising Visionary" video.
1984 has become rather dated, you know: 1) Those false confessions were extracted via combination of sleep deprivation and holding the victims' families hostage. They went to their executions with their minds intact. 2) Stalin's "court" was very tsarist. 3) While O'Brien is Mr. Exposition, most guys were cowardly sadists who wouldn't debate philosophy worth squat. 4) It is scientifically impossible to torture someone into believing something.
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@nota4688 Yes. And I will admit that these flaws are due to a lack of access to important information: at the time, a lot of people truly believed those guys were guilty, and Orwell assumed they'd been tortured to think they were, but you can't really do that. As I said, most caved in and confessed when the NKVD threatened their families. Orwell didn't know that. As for 4, while I've no doubt Winston would have cracked, he wouldn't have been internally happy and embracing the party line: he'd feel bitter and defeated, and likely suicidal.
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@ranweaslo9149 It's totalitarianism in general, but Stalinism was a major focus. Even other dictatorships that ran like that were controlled by fans of Stalin, such as Romania, North Korea, Maoist China, and Cambodia (AKA Democratic Kampuchea).
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@ranweaslo9149 I'm aware of that, but I've seen a number of people say that Orwell IS 100% right, ignoring the times he didn't have all the facts and was perfectly willing to manipulate and/or ignore info he did have to make his case seem stronger. It's why I feel "Animal Farm" does a better job of getting its message across than "1984".
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Not really. 1984 is kind of dated.
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