ANC And Orwell

 Dear Mr Mashatile

In a horrible nightmare, I was viewing a month old corpse at a morgue, when the undertaker intoned: "His recovery is underway". Bizarre. Then I read the tweet below:

The Treasurer-General of the ANC, Paul Mashatile, has written an article on Business Day, and argues that South Africa’s recovery is underway. He writes, “it is not all gloomy on the economic front”. Touts Operation Vulindlela.

Whatever you are smoking would have been described in the old Western novels as 'heap powerful medicine'. The purveyors of Durban Poison would be green with envy.  Yes, all is not gloomy. It's pitch dark, and not courtesy of Eskom only. Rampant crime, rolling corruption, blackouts, blunders, neglect, incompetence, buffoonery...that not gloomy enough for you? I've read that the Chinese word for 'crisis' has an implied meaning of 'opportunity' also. The only opportunity that your Party seems to have grasped is the opportunity to bugger up whatever has remained unbuggered to date. 

I don't think that you are on hallucinogens, surreal though your utterances are. I think that your Party makes liberal use of George Orwell's 'Nineteen Eighty-Four as a handbook. I sympathize. What else can one do, when the mess is beyond explanation or justification,  but create a new reality? And hope that 'proles' and Party members will guzzle  it like fine wine at a budget speech function.

Some quotes for you:

"All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. 'Reality control', they called it: in Newspeak, 'doublethink'"

There are many useful and intriguing concepts in Orwell's book that I'm sure you are familiar with. Apart from that, I liked the song:

Under the spreading chestnut tree
I sold you, and you sold me
There lie they, and here lie we,...

I leave you with a quote from an earlier post:

If George Orwell had written 2020 in South Africa:

The party's ever-present slogans fluttered proudly from deserted dairy farms, vandalized railway stations and scorched public buildings:

INCOMPETENCE IS HEROISM

DECAY IS PROGRESS

BULLSHIT IS TRUTH

Yours in the struggle with the elusive truth.

Richard

Tips for the blogger gratefully accepted 

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