The only people who misunderstand George Orwell’s 1984 are those that go around trying to imagine it has a leftist message. It is mistaken to imagine that children in the English-speaking world get his work drilled into them like a mantra because, somehow, genuine socialists managed to sneak his work past a censor that banishes the likes of Karl Marx and Malcolm X.

The less complicated reading is the correct one: it’s an anti-communist book that the establishment pushes, and the right adores and cites constantly, because it is effective anti-communist propaganda.

from https://redsails.org/on-orwell/

I think Animal Farm and 1984 are worth recommending, if you’re willing to dig into the Trot/ML debates that heavily informed those two books.

Absolute left anticommunism hours. The book Winston reads in 1984 describes all of the superstates as “Oligarchal Collectivism” for fuck’s sake, which is an obvious reference to Trotsky’s theory of “Bureaucratic Collectivism”.

That’s why I said “explicit”. They certainly toss out more than just a book’s worth all the time, but the closest they get to being explicit about it is selectively ignoring the Old Testament because of Christ ushering in a “New Covenant”