Revolution !!!

Orwell wasn't a communist

He was a socialist

 

a good way to start is get a ton of people to smoke weed and drop acid

 

Timothy Leary suggested at one time during the War in Vietnam that we spike (my word) the Vietnamese water supply with LSD. He thought that if we did this the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong would not want to fight anymore. I'm not sure how he proposed to make the Americans less motivated to fight.

 

Are you sure it wasn't the other way around? (I'm not hinting anything, it just seems to make more sense)

 

communist. i dont have a source atm, but ill rat one out

 

If I remember correctly he started out as a marxist during the Spanish Revolution and then became a socialist after WW2

 

All i know is that he was a communist when he wrote 1984...

 

As to the poll question, I voted yes: yes I think the U.S. needs a revolution, and yes I think there'll be one, but...

I fear it'll be the same kind of revolutionary change the Soviet Union underwent fifteen years ago, or that Rome underwent a little over fifteen hundred years ago, for that matter. You can argue your pet causes for each until the cows come home, but the bottom line is, they became huge, inefficient, repressive, and fundamentally non-viable, and they fizzled.

The U.S. isn't immune from the laws of economics, or Nature. You can't keep voting yourself bread and circuses--not to mention "pork," a Big Brother tough enough to enforce prohibition of all your petty irritations (along with the out-of-control bureaucracy that comes with him), and politicians wholly owned and operated by their major campaign donors--without creating one of those non-viable situations.

So really, I don't expect a U.S. revolution to occur at the polls or in the streets. I expect most citizens to sit on their fat asses, drink their beer, smoke their pot, watch their TVs and play on the internet, try to escape their mostly stultifying existences through irrelevant diversions, drive their SUVs, reproduce like rabbits, vote Demolican or Republicrat, and stand there drooling when it all comes down around their ears.

Then, as scarcity worsens, the Falwell and Limbaugh types will blame gays, pagans, feminists, and possibly Mexicans for it, and at that point you might see some running in the streets. A few good lynchings. Maybe even some death camps. Who knows? At some point, the rest of the world will get sick of us and kick us to the curb. It's happened over and over. The fact that most people can't even imagine such a thing is merely proof that most people's knowledge of history and sociology are stunted, along with their imaginations.

Geez, I hope I'm wrong about all that. I do have a glimmer of hope that people will wake up. I'm seeing signs of it. I just pray it isn't too little, too late.

 

Probably it was the other way around. It does seem to make more sense. Although I never really took that much LSD myself, I may have interpreted Leary's idea the way I did because of the LSD I did take. Anyway if you want to know for sure, (that is unless I'm mixed up about this too), I think the idea of stopping people from engaging in violence by putting LSD in their water supply was expressed by Leary in a book he wrote called the "Politics of Ectasy."

His idea appealed to me when I was in my late teens and early twenties and maybe a little older than that but at 56 the only thing I find appealing about his idea is that a hit of LSD might kill me and then I wouldn't be able fight at all.

 

After the Communist tried to kill him in Spain, Orwell saw the communist under Stalin as being no better than the Fascist under Hitler.

"Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism as I understand it," - George Orwell 1946

1984 is not a book specifically about communism, it is about a totalitarian society in general.

 

I absolutely agree with you tikoo, but what exactly will happen once there is no ruler? I mean communism, true communism, is the "establishment of a classless, stateless social organization based upon common ownership of the means of production" to quote Wikipedia. The process (if I understand correctly) is supposed to go from capitalism, to socialism, to communism. How do we get from capitalism to socialism without falling back into the trap of capitalism?

 

We don't, because none of those systems factor human greed and lust for power into the equation.

Our political labels are meaningless. Capitalism, socialism, communism... these are all economic systems.

Democracy, fascism, totalitarianism... these are power systems. One has nothing to do with the other, but people confuse them all the time. To the mind of the average U.S. citizen, democracy=capitalism and totalitarianism=communism, but that's not really how it works.

All systems tend to devolve from freedom into slavery. Capitalist democracies are no different. Any American who currently believes this is a free country is an idiot. It's a totalitarian police state, and if you don't believe it, try to promote a big party with lots of drugs and sex to be held on PRIVATE PROPERTY sometime.

The U.S. founding fathers had it just about right: there is no way to insure freedom without an enlightened, educated electorate, and the U.S. doesn't have one. Maybe the Netherlands does. It's the only place I can think of that shows signs of it.

Barring some kind of airy-fairy spiritual paradigm shift, I see no way out of humanity's cycles of boom and bust.

 

I'm all for a revolution, as long as we know what we're doing and how to achieve our goals. We'd better do something about our current issues before it's too late. Make a difference as apposed to sitting around. If you want something changed, do something about it, and dont let others control how you live.

 

The world wasn't always like this. I'm not sure who said it, but in early societies in our prehistory they most likely operated in a communistic way. Greed and lust for power as you say are indeed diseases of humanity right now, but I do not believe that this was always so.

So I ask again: how do we get to communism, true communism, not the "communism" in China or the Soviet Union, but the real communism, the utopian version? I cannot believe that we were meant to live this way: angry, oppressed, and hopeless. I know utopia sounds naive, but...there just has to be something better.

 

I think that we are due for a revolution. But do not misunderstand; this would have to be a peaceful endevour. The exact thing i would aim at revolting is the oppression- the feeling that people are better than one another. The problem is that we have gotten too big, too corrupt. We need a revival of peace and of love. Without these things as guiding principals we will fall right back into the problems we face now. Outsiders to this belief think that peace and love are ideals, but they are possible. The problem is how to connect people. How do you make people "buy into" the notion the revolution hasn't died with the sixties?

 

heres my question?what about the violence today?like murders /gangs hell people killing thier own parents /spouse/grandparents?we want only go up against the gov. well go up against fellow man.times have changed and when someone sees that peace is in the air.theyll kill it people today in this world are corrupted by power.{then the gov}so if we go in with a non-violent method no guns/ no war kind of attitude.then the gov. not going to care about wasting a few hundred people to make a point. then some of your people will branch off and the whole thing will fall apartso in a way im for the violence method but then were no better then them.so so how do we go about this,because i see violence playing a big role in a new revolution.and i also see alot of people losing lives in the process.

 

the thing about it is, if you want to start a revolution, you have to be willing to sacrafice yourself. That is within the spirit of revolution. We could go in non-violent, do our thing, etc. If the government chooses, like they have done in the past, to use violent force against non-violent revolutionists, then it makes headlines...people are appalled by those sorts of things, and then the wheel starts turning...its like the song, "Every time that wheel turns round, its bound to cover just a little more ground"
If we can just push it a little farther than its gone before, we've made progress. We could def. find the support, or at least i believe we could. People like Ghandi and Martin Luther King JR are remembered not only for their peaceful message, but for their courage. You have to be willing to fight the good fight and go down in battle. Not that it isn't scary, or dangerous...but we'll all be back someday anyway, and you gotta see your life's purpose through. Things are plotted out already...so i say we all just walk the plank and see if at the end we can fly back to neverland or get eaten by the croc.

 

In response to what vodoo chile said: I see why you would think violence is the answer. Things are so far gone that it would take something major to turn everything around. Sometimes I get so frustrated that I wish we could all just take to the streets and start fighting back that way. I'm not necessarily a pacifist, but I don't think violence is the answer. YEM36313 is right about us just having to do it. In order for this to happen I believe that there will have to be some kind of critical mass where people all over the nation come together for a single purpose- peace. How we would accomplish this I'm not sure. While I disagree with a violent approach, some will probably die in this fight.

 

never will a mass amount of people join together for peace. at least not enough people to change anything. the world is run by hate, greed, and personal gain. it always has been and its not gonna change anytime soon.i agree that violence isnt right, but with people who will use violence against peacemakers and support violence, we must use violence too. peace marches and sit-ins, etc, are a good start, show people what we stand for and all that and when the govt finally feels threatened, they will use violence against us. then we retaliate.

 

I don't agree. This is the easy answer, but not the right one. As long as you accept this, you are part of the problem. No where near a new answer. Perhaps that is what you want to be.

Whenever you accept violence you leave yourself open to being manipulated. You are jumping on Jim Morrison's fame, why not speak for yourself and make your own statement. I am tired of replying to pseudo "Cat Stevens" and "Jim Morrisons". What's wrong with who you are? Not sure you measure up?

Well if you never let anyone know what you really stand behind, you probably never will.