Okay, 1984 is a pretty bad political commentary and very much a strawman argument against socialism. But that’s not even the problem here. The 1984 quote is about changing history and gas lighting people to think the new narrative is actually how it happened (which I see the West doing more than the USSR or other socialist countries, BTW), but when exactly did Elliot Page try to convince anyone he was always called Elliot Page? It’s called transitioning for a goddamn reason?! Saying “I now prefer that you call me this” is not changing history, it concerns the present and future, not the past! Transgender people saying things like “I’ve always felt like I was the other gender” or “I’ve always wanted to go by this name” isn’t changing history either, they’re literally acknowledging that they were not recognised as that gender and/or name in the past!
All in all, you, commenter, get an F in literary analysis. You completely missed the significance of the quote in the original text, and tried to apply it to a completely irrelevant example.
I don’t think 1984 is supposed to be a critique of socialism - more a critique of authoritarianism. Ingsoc is socialist in the same way that nazis are - in name only. Animal Farm is more about socialism that 1984 is, and I think its message is that authoritarians can use socialist rhetoric to gain power and then turn around and start exploiting the working class just like capitalists (as we see in the real world in China, Russia, and a lot of state capitalism in general) rather than something like “socialism bad”. All in all, I don’t think Orwell was anti-socialist, I think he was anti-authoritarian, which is why some of his books were banned in both the US and USSR.
