My Liberal Identity:
You are a Peace Patroller, also known as an anti-war liberal or neo-hippie. You believe in putting an end to American imperial conquest, stopping wars that have already been lost, and supporting our troops by bringing them home.
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Painful Stupidity
The most cursory research will show that George Orwell was a socialist and anti-authoritarian. How then, to explain this?
From "A Conservative Summer: An NRO Symposium on Books".What's the best political novel you've ever read? Why is it the best?
The best remains George Orwell's 1984. Through it, fiction becomes a vehicle for expressing truth, namely, the bleak, moral wasteland of communism and Stalinism's relentless attack upon individual liberty. The collectivist system inexorably grinds down the dignity of each person, or, in the novel's case, its two leading protagonists. "Do it to Julia!" shouts Winston, in 1984's macabre conclusion. In their final, pathetic meeting, Julia confesses a similar transgression to Winston: "Sometimes they threaten you with something - something you can't stand up to, can't even think about . . . You want it to happen to the other person. You don't give a damn what they suffer. All you care about is yourself."
To my mind, we can never read enough Orwell. His essays and books are like intellectual depth charges, detonating the smug operating assumptions of large swaths of our cultural elite. His masterpiece, 1984, written 60 years ago, is relevant today. "Newspeak," the sterile official language of Oceana, anticipates the politically correct, sanitized idiom of our time, when the Department of Homeland Security has instructed its officials to refer to men like Osama Bin Laden and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as "the dangerous cult leaders that they are," but not as "jihadists," "Islamists" or "holy warriors." According to the Orwellian DHS press release accompanying its new guidelines, "Words matter." George Orwell would agree, which is why, if he were writing today, he would call these fanatics exactly what they are: radical Islamic terrorists, sanguinary butchers, evil murderers.
Thankfully, elements of Western culture are starting to see Orwell's vision more clearly; his worldview has been reflected in recent works of art, literature, and theater, including a Broadway revival of Shakespeare's Macbeth that excoriates Stalin, a production recently reviewed by Andrew Stuttaford, NRO's indefatigable critic of the desolate legacy of the Soviet dictator. (Joseph Morrison Skelly)
I think I can distill the difference between liberals and conservatives: research.
