Orwell's Warning: The Greatest Amerikan Paradox

How did Francisco Pizarro use the secret trick of Christopher Columbus to conquer the mightiest empire of South America in one evening, with a single boat load of men, with almost no resistance? And what does this have to do with YOU?

In his classic, 1984, George Orwell selected certain features of his society as a basic skeleton, then fleshed political fiction over the bones. Many parallels between 1984 and the modern world have long been recognized. In Orwell's Warning: The Greatest Amerikan Paradox, Erik Blaire compares these features to the paradoxes of American politics, violence, and religion. Finding they are inseparable, he proposes that American freedom must therefore also be paradoxical. Armed with clues derived by examining American schizophrenia, obedience, disobedience, and paranoia, Blaire adopts as a factual skeleton the historical puzzle of Francisco Pizarro's conquering the mightiest empire of South America in one evening with a single boat load of men. Solving the puzzle, he then fleshes in fiction a working model for the most important, yet most neglected of Orwell's features, the central secret of Oceania. Blaire's conclusion: Any society which is founded on, and therefore conceals a central secret, must be characterized by a paradoxical or Orwellian state of freedom just like The Greatest Amerikan Paradox.

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