[lbo-talk] War and Morality

Andy F andy274 at gmail.com
Wed Sep 27 05:28:32 PDT 2006


On 9/26/06, B. <docile_body at yahoo.com> wrote:


> In the 1940s George Orwell asked readers to image a
> future, a "totalitarian age … in which such things as
> mass bombing of civilians, the use of hostages,
> torture to obtain confessions, secret prisons,
> execution without trial, floggings with rubber
> truncheons, drownings in cesspools, systematic
> falsification of records and statistics, treachery,
> bribery, and quislingism [reconciliation with fascism]
> are normal and morally neutral, even admirable when
> they are done in a large and bold way." ["Raffles and
> Miss Blandish," 1944]

If you read the whole thing (it's an essay on trends in crime fiction) here:

<http://gaslight.mtroyal.ab.ca/Orwell-C.htm>

you might recognize the present day in 1944, which then leads you to wonder if anything had actually changed back then from 50 years earlier.

-- Andy



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