Talk:George Orwell

When I was in Rangoon I would get e-mails from various acquaintances openly asking me questions in which criticisms of SLORC were implicit. E-mails are subject to police monitoring there so such criticism is dangerous, not only in sent mails but in received ones. Since both locations from which I accessed the Internet were in places I wasn't legally supposed to be anyway (one was a school and the other was a private home), receiving these mails potentially posed a rather severe danger to my hosts.

So I had to find ways to tell these people to shut up without acknowledging what they had written, without mentioning the insecurity of the communication and preferably giving the appearace of enjoying my "vacation." The most effective route would have been to lie and say that the regime was in fact perfectly legitimate and benevolent and was the victim of a smear campaign in the international press, but shilling for a dictatorship struck me as distasteful, even though I knew I'd be able to set the record straight the minute I got back to the free world.

A less direct, more palatable tactic I tried was to tell people "It's a lot like it's portrayed in the Orwell novel." My hope was that the police, being from Myanmar, would most closely associate Orwell with Burmese Days, while Westerners would be reminded of 1984 and understand that I was being monitored. Not sure whether the police were fooled (apparently variations on that Orwell trick are tried fairly frequently so I would assume some smart officer is aware of it) but no one to whom I wrote that caught the reference. I even got back one response that said "Orwell, huh? Animal Farm was pretty good, one of these days I'm going to read 1984."

By contrast, editing this wiki from Rangoon was so delightfully safe that I did about as much here as the slow and spotty Internet connections would allow. It helped that it's the most boring city of millions you could ever hope to see. No one has enough disposable income to support much of a nightlife, and those who do spend it in private. Turtle Fan 04:20, March 17, 2010 (UTC)