It just struck me that we devote a lot of time explaining why Orwell was terrible and racist and misogynistic and aristocratic, but we don’t even need to attack the author to convince baby leftists that this book is deeply unserious.
Look at most decent dystropias, they all criticise the status quo by exaggerating one aspect of a society to a logical extreme. Brave New World is about capitalistic hedonism, Hunger Games is spectacle and inequality, Handmaid’s Tale is about patriarchy. All existing defects of the status quo.
Now , the society in 1984. Is it patriarcal? Not that much more than 40’s England. Is it racist? It kinda looks like racism or antisemitism aren’t a big deal. Is it expansionnist? It does have a thing with war but there is no conquering any kind of new space. Is it colonial? Given how barren the economy is, maybe England even lost its Empire. Is it unequal? Everyone is miserable in a way, nothing like billionaires owning everything imaginable. Is it full of illusions of fake freedom? No it’s really explicit about how unfree and intrusive it is.
So basically, this dystopia takes the status quo and does not highlight any of its current problems. So what problems does it have? Basically it takes the ONE thing western regimes pride themselves about and it removes it as hard as possible: freeze peach. It’s just that, Orwell simply tells you : imagine how horrible it would be if we lost the one thing that this system is worshipping the most. He takes the most consensual thing in his current society and tells people that we should really keep doing it hard
So don’t go for shit throwing contests with people who think 1984 is good. Simply show them the message it conveys!
I read it a long time ago and I don’t remember what was it that the main character wanted to do or say that his government wanted to nip in the bud. As I remember it, the government is very surveillance oriented and they are watching the main character (along with everyone else) at all times. The main character objects to this surveillance which makes him a target of repression. But was the main character doing or anything that was disrupting the government’s narrative?
Yes that’s totally nuts, it’s the bourgeois fantasy of a Soviet regime that just watches everybody for no reason like it’s a kink or something. But I think that the book was actually effective reinforcing this image of “totalitarian control” and making it credible to people even if it doesn’t make sense when you challenge the idea