That being said, it's not a stretch to imagine that it takes two successive and opposed politicians to set up and orwellian state. Trump would set up the surveillance state (as he threatens to do), and some future authoritative Democrat could outlaw freedom of speech.
No, the surveillance state is certainly not a right-wing-specific thing, and in fact Orwell was probably inspired by the Stasi and other Soviet secret police agencies. Just to give you an idea:
By 1995, some 174,000 inoffizielle Mitarbeiter
(IMs) Stasi informants had been identified,
almost 2.5% of East Germany's population between
the ages of 18 and 60. 10,000 IMs were under 18
years of age.
You know when 1984 was written?
But even if you want to get technical: He started writing in 1946 and the final manuscript was presented in 1948. The "Volkskommissariat" may have been around, but you really can not compare their activity to the Stasi. If you were talking about them, then your quote makes no sense at all.
No, I'm claiming that from his position (particularly after his involvement in the Spanish Civil War), he was informed of the founding and early activities of the Stasi, and wrote the book based on the thought-experiment "what if a whole country was dominated by these principles?"
> The "Volkskommissariat" may have been around, but you really can not compare their activity to the Stasi.
That's not surprising, considering how "[i]n reality, K-5 was only nominally housed in the People's Police" (Dennis and Laporte, 2003).
I'm puzzled by this comment.
The US surveillance state was set up prior to Trump.
Is anyone still doubting the complete slurping of everything the TLAs (Three Letter Agencies) can get?
It wouldn't matter who the President was right now, this thing will march on.
Maybe it's convenient we get to lay some of the blame on DJ Trump. That's all.
[1] https://theintercept.com/2017/01/13/obama-opens-nsas-vast-tr...
> [1] “And certain things will be done that we never thought would happen in this country in terms of information and learning about the enemy. And so we’re going to have to do certain things that were frankly unthinkable a year ago.”
So it's not blame-laying, he's saying this stuff himself.
[1]: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/12/trump-and-his-advisors...
Any other potential president would have had their hand forced or led the charge too.
Saying something true by chance doesn't make the man honest when his words are randomly generated.
Now we get to conduct a similar experiment whereby we see first hand if having an actual clown in the oval office is any different to a real politician.
Trump reminds me of William S. Burrows Naked Lunch. Burroughs stated that the chapters are intended to be read in any order, and Trump is about as obscene.
While true, that is a non-sequitur.
These kind of comments really underscore how little credibility the anti-Trump crowd has, given the context of the last 8 years.