The cringiest thing about 1984 for me was how he wrote that female character. It was…very weird.

One thing I have noticed that in the liberal conception of freedom, a state, it’s subjects and the dissent by subjects exists in vacuums separate from each other and everything else. People protest against authoritarian governments demanding democracy. You are never told how their democracy was infringed in the first place, but this becomes tautological after the authoritarian state cracks down on pro-democracy protests, infringing democracy in the process. 1984 does that too. It is alleged that the government is manufacturing perception but the concrete details of how the subjects are oppressed are left out. Then the protag starts acting sus and starts being monitored and hunted and the state’s antagonistic role is tautologically established.

Not to say that states cannot be overly authoritarian and dissent suppression is not something worth paying attention to. In fact, these are very real problems. In India, activists and journalists are jailed for many years and abused by the police without trial because they are alleged to be Maoists or terrorists based on evidence that was planted on their laptops and phones by hacking (thanks Israel). The BJP government was also spying on opposition politicians (thanks Israel again). But these things have to be grounded in reality and historical analysis rather than the liberalism-induced fantasy that liberals are living in.