this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2025
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Uh... Yeah? If you've never read Nineteen Eighty-Four, it's a phenomenal and bone-chilling read, but as a minor spoiler you'd figure out not too far into the book: Orwell, an anarcho-socialist(asterisk), is critiquing authoritarianism through an attack on Soviet-style socialism.
Haven’t read it. I know about it obviously but never gotten around to it. I’ll probably read it soon though, I’ve been putting it off too long.
Well, technically he's attacking a fictional strawman of soviet-style socialism, which ends up drawing more on British liberalism.
Ah yes, much like Catch-22 is a strawman of war. Or The Handmaid's Tale is a strawman of patriarchy and theocracy. You know what, like, themes are, right? Is "dystopia novels aren't literally reality but are designed to critique existing political structures through an exaggerated late-stage version of them" too nuanced for ML?
Is there a rule when you join .world that you have to explicitly point out .ml user's instance every time you see them? You realize this is just lazy ad-hom.
As for 1984, it's a critical description of British authoritarianism, which is then projected onto the USSR in a "I have already depicted you as a soyjack" kind of way. Which makes sense given your reference to Catch-22, which is based on the authors own experience in WW2. Meanwhile Orwell's own experience was composing lists of communists and minorities for the British government (and being a rapist, bust that's neither here nor there).
Ultimatum, describing a one dimensionaly evil society, then pointing at your ideological enemies and declaring "this may not describe you in any literal sense, but it's you thematically!" is a completely vacuous thing that anyone can do to anyone and there's no real way of arguing one way of the other.