No, it's actually not perfect. I'm not Republican as I've already said.
I disagree with tyranny which is what Orwell was clearly against in his books like 1984 and Animal Farm. He was appalled by Stalin and the revolution in general that was in Russia. He did not approve of that at all.
That is true. I just think it’s a bit of a leap to presume what Orwell would think about modern-day policing and how it’s funded, on the basis of how Orwell felt about Stalin. It’s hard to translate Orwell’s early 20th century opposition to Stalin into early 21st century support for plenty of police funding.
His views, and the debate around police funding, both, are a bit more complex than drawing a line from one to the other.
I get that you are drawing a parallel between the counter-intuitive notion of “defunding the police will make us safer”, to Orwellian doublespeak.
The difference is that Orwell was referring to contradictory uses of the English language **without** reason or evidence behind it, only supported by party loyalty and repetition.
The concept of defunding the police, while certainly counter-intuitive in some respects, and clearly debatable, is based on the premise that we need to look **more closely** at the issue of police and safety than we have in the past. It is based on applying **more** reasoning and evidence to issues of homelessness and drug addiction. You might disagree with it - and that would be reasonable - but it’s actually fully within Orwell’s spirit of questioning heavy-handed authority, instead of blindly accepting it.
Orwell also wrote Down and Out in Paris and London, in which he documented the way the law in the UK forced the homeless to stay on the move and made it difficult for them to get back on their feet. Observers at the time thought there was something primal about wandering groups of men, never settling down and always on the move, like ancient hunter-gatherers. Orwell said it was actually an unnatural consequence of unemployment and the law, which prevented the UK homeless from staying in one shelter for a long period of time.
If one wants to draw parallels between Orwell and modern-day policing of homelessness and drug addiction, I would start there. And I would guess Orwell would be sympathetic to the view that mass incarceration in the US today is an unnatural consequence of social problems plus the way they are policed, much like the bands of wandering “hobos” in Orwell’s day were an unnatural consequence of analogous forces.
It is important to note that Orwell believed in the importance of thinking objectively and critically, above all else. He looked at socialism especially critically because he **was** a socialist. He looked at Britain especially critically because he **was** British. In his view when you agreed with something, that was the time to take a second look and apply even **more** critical thought to it.
His views and writings go quite beyond 1984 and Animal Farm, which sadly get all the attention because their criticism focused on Stalinism.
