Book Reviews: 1984 and the Anti-Communist Impulse

1984- Orwell
1984 should be in the NON-fiction section. Everything that it says has so much truth to it. There are a million examples of this. In the society in the book, there is the "Two Minutes Hate" in wich the "telescreens" show the national enemy and show you just how evil he is for you to hate him, then the screen shows "Big Brother", who is the nation's national symbol. People then will run up to the screen and cry because they love Big Brother so much for protecting them. Also, the history books are controlled and leave out important things, such as the fact that the nation was ONCE allies with their NOW enemy. Can anybody relate this to Iraq? My favorite aspect of the book was probably the "doublethink". "Doublethink" is a word for conciously possesing two contradictory thoughts similtaneously. When I was reading this at first, I was thinking to myself "there is no way that America or any other nation will get so ignorant that they will believe in two contradictory things at the SAME time without having a problem with their way of thought". Then later, I started realizing that we ALREADY have it here. A really good example is of the majority of American's thoughts on Communism.

Anti Communist Impulse- Parenti
I've been reading The Anti-Communist Impulse which reminded me of this. Americans similtaneously beleive that the Soviet Union was a great threat to America with all their missles and their super-power. But at the SAME time, they believe that communism, such as in the Soviet Union, would never work because the economy is terrible and very poor and could never get anything done. Therfore, people go on believing that it was a super-power, but at the same time it was super-weak somehow. Also, while reading the Impulse it is observed how politicians during the cold war constantly say things like "We can't trust anything the reds say, we must only judge what they do" whenever the communists talk of how the want peace. But when the communists cut back on military and try to make peace negotiations the news/politicians will say "we can't trust their communist ploys, they mean nothing, after all they did say..." and then they'll name an instance like the infamous Khrushchev "We will bury you quote" to 'show' that what communists do is just a plot when you think about the terrible things that they've said they will do. As you can see, these two things obviously contradict eachother, yet the people who say them and the people who beleive them seem to not have a problem with it.
The Impulse is a pretty good book, provided you are interested in the subject of the reaction to communism. It names a lot of inncidents that I don't even know about. It is pretty detailed and hard to read at times, but you get a lot of good information out of it. A lot of it is summed up in Parenti's later book Inventing Reality, which is a good book that deals a lot with how the media handled the cold war.