GULAG was a system of combined labour/death camps. By comparing it to Gitmo you only insult the millions victims postmortem and devalue the rest of your point. There must be a term for it; I can only describe it as reverse Marie Antoniette attitude.

The problems of modern Western societies, while numerous and deep, are nowhere near dystopian levels yet. I lived the initial part of my life in USSR, arguably in the period when it gave up doing communism full strength. Still, 1984 ring true in very special way. Not just the basic concepts of oppression, surveillance and lies, that you can argue in any society with a government. By reading it you instantly recognize the behavioral traits of your friends, your parents, teachers and yourself in a shockingly precise and fitting manner.

The 1984 is not a stretch of imagination, not a metaphor or a fitting analogy where you supposed to "draw parallels". It's a description of a totalitarian society modeled on totalitarian societies of the time and people subjugated by them. It's an anti-totalitarian, anti-communist text that always caused problems to the Western political left by its uncomfortable, uncanny plausibility. Hence the endless efforts to re-interpret it as we have here.