Posted by Tom on October 29, 2001 at 09:21:30:
In Reply to: Empty Age posted by Emanuel Blake on October 11, 2001 at 23:25:38:
Thank you for replying. I do see the point you are making, but I don’t think that that is what Orwell was referring to. I believe that he was talking about specific ‘delusions and hatreds’ that existed in other parts of the world during in his lifetime and not in any hypothetical future scenario; like the evolution of post modernism.
Because Orwell uses the word European, we immediately think in terms of continents. Given his time in Burma, the first possibility that springs to mind is Asia. A clue but still no closer to what he means. It is strange that no obvious answer springs to mind. Hatreds and delusions are not light terms, and one would have assumed that what he was referring to would eventually have impinged on the European consciousness, and therefore we would know what he was insinuating.