i honestly am starting to think some fraction of the intense bootlicking is telegraphed (and the following applies more to blue maga libs then anyone else:)

people know they are being deeply surveilled. it’s like a prayer: “look daddy look how loyal and patriotic i am please don’t blackbag me in the night”

same with much of the cop worship. slap a sticker on the car, publicly suck off cops, and hope you get put on a list of “good ones” or at least not arbitrarily murdered.

literally all the stuff “evil 1984 communist dictatorship” makes the people do

The problem with that quote is that its from Christopher Hitchens who is a Reddit-tier debate bro who just makes shit up.

Orwell’s snitch list was prepared for and delivered to a British intelligence service - the British government propaganda office that Orwell worked for that is - and he didn’t just snitch on communists, he also snitched on homosexuals.

Orwell wasn’t just a snitch, he was a paid propagandist. A homophobe. A colonial policeman who believed in the British empire as a force for good up until his death, which can only mean also a white supremacist.

For one thing, Orwell named no names and disclosed no identities

The list was released and contains these, relating to a range of famous and obscure people.

they show that he gave it only to a woman whom he regarded as a trusted friend

Only after she started at the foreign office outfit as an assistant to Robert Conquest (yes, that guy) and told him about her work.

he said no more in “private” than he had long been saying in public

Yet:

Orwell adds that the list should be ‘strictly confidential’, concerned it may be libellous to label someone in this way.

Of course, the full details were only released in 2003 and Hitchens was quite busy by then

Hitchens argued the case for the Iraq War in a 2003 collection of essays entitled A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq

In 2005, Hitchens criticised the abuse of prisoners in Abu Ghraib but argued that overall “prison conditions at Abu Ghraib have improved markedly and dramatically since the arrival of Coalition troops in Baghdad”

In a 5 June 2006 article on the alleged killings of Iraqi civilians by U.S. Marines in Haditha, Hitchens argued that whether or not a massacre had taken place, comparisons with the My Lai massacre in Vietnam were “so much propaganda and hot air” that ignored substantial changes in the rules of engagement and US Army procedures and training designed to prevent and discourage such an event.

IMO the portrayal of him as a snitch seems a bit…overblown.

A bit underblown if ‘snitch’ isn’t proceded by ‘rapist’ and ‘racist’

There was pushback back then, against the illegal and unprovoked invasions, against the expansion of the surveillance state and it did exactly nothing to stop the descent into fascism. It can’t come as a surprise that people today remember this and ask themselves “why bother?” when they’re doing the same shit once again.