Totalitarianism

Summary Mayer initially planned to go to Germany in 1935 to interview Hitler himself. He failed to secure an interview but discovered, to his horror, that the Nazi movement had more mass appeal than he had previously expected. He decided to switch tactics and focus on the experience of the man on the ground. How does a person, who in most other respects would be considered normal or even good, get swept up in a genocidal ideology? After the war he moved to a small town that had strong support for the NSDAP before, during, and after WW2. He made genuine relationships with 10 of the residents and engaged them in extended interviews. The first half of this book is essentially these interviews, organized into a clear timeline. The second half is Mayer attempting to psychoanalyze Germany as a whole based on what he had learned from these interviews. ...

Finished this book UNABRIDGED, double plus good. Hated how believable it was. This should be required reading. The main new idea I got this time through was that the party doctrine sounded a little bit like biocentrism. They had just swapped the party for consciousness. Biocentrism says reality exists only by conscious observation. Winston said reality only has true existence by the party’s doctrine. He who owns the present owns the past. Winston’s point about immortality through the party is also the same point that people have made about the “I” continuing to exist through the other “I"s that succeed it. In Winston’s case he believed he was immortal because the party would never die. I think this is a great insight by Orwell, because it would seem that it is impossible to set up a society without bringing along metaphysical baggage. The desire (need?) for metaphysics is like a sexuality that if repressed just comes through the cracks in very disturbing ways.

This book has been on my list for a long time. A very entertaining short story written by the same guy who wrote 1984. The story takes place on a farm where a pig, shortly before his death, prophesied about a day when the animals would unite and overthrow their human farmer overlords and run the farm themselves. This prophecy comes to pass a couple years after the prophet’s death. The story then follows the conditions and developments that take place at the newly “freed” farm. The story on the whole is very well written and carries a similar sense of despair as 1984 did. Written shortly after WW2 it was Orwell’s unpopular (at the time) critique of the Bolshevik revolution and the new USSR. I feel like this book as well as 1984 gets taken out of context and applied to all types of movements to greater and lesser degrees of accuracy. While this book was written critiquing communists, I don’t think the point was a critique of communism per se, but more a critique of censorship and ideologies. Overall great/ easy read.