1984 #2

Winston isn't buying what Big Brother and the State are putting forward because he's starting to think logically and make sense of it all. When he wonders about these things that the government is saying and is skeptical of it all, he realizes that maybe the government's not right and wonders why so many people follow it. Throughout it all, he's protesting the Party and his acts of defiance are indeed protests. The difference between Winston's protests and the modern day protests is that modern protests aren't trying to completely overrule the government all at once and are doing so in a way that's legal in our law system. Protesting in the setting of 1984 was illegal, forbidden, and they were going completely against the government, not just parts of it.