Yes, I've always read the story this way as well. Borges may have not been interested in politics, but politics was interested in him, and he clashed with the Peronists (who fired him from the library) and repeatedly criticizes fascism and anti-semites in his nonfiction especially, and when he was writing this in 1939/1940, obviously all of this was quite imminent and topical.
So what I take TUOT as being is an exploration of the Idealism idea, where Borges puts a twist on it: the (dialectical) beliefs of the communalistic idealists of Tlön turn out to be true, on a certain level, because sufficiently compelling ideas and totalizing ideologies make their claims true. In that way, 'perception' becomes 'reality'. Only that which the ideology or state can perceive is real, and everyone is required to see like a state. (As much as he loved Idealism & Platonism, Borges always seemed to accept them only on a literary level, as applying to fiction and literature - there is indeed 'Man' in fiction, but there is not an actual Man in a Platonic region of forms, there is only a term 'man' we nominalistically apply to entities as convenient.)
That is, idealism is correct, in a sense, and the artifacts of Tlön become real because the savants of the conspiracy 'perceive' them (in their minds) and create them. And as Tlön takes over the world and gains power, it gains more realness and more of its artifacts come into existence - or people just lie about them or pretend they exist and falsify documents to accord with the new party line, and doublethink their way to 'seeing' the new labyrinthine reality forged by their fellow humans.
One might say that _hrönir_, especially, are a savage Orwellian parody of how things go in totalitarian dictatorships: the description of the experiments with the prisoners could as easily be set in Stalinist Russia or Maoist China, where the real story is that on the fourth try, after turning up only the equivalent of fishing for a muddy boot, everyone has figured out that, to satisfy the decrees from above, they need to buy or forge some ancient artifacts of unconvincing antiquity (and so no counter-revolutionary skeptics can be permitted near) and that is how _hrönir_ are discovered. The same way Lysenko manufactured agricultural miracles or innumerable falsifications like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learn_from_Dazhai_in_agricultu... became official policy, doubted only on pain of death.
Those who disagree and wish to maintain their integrity, can only retreat into quietism or 'internal exile', and spend their time on topics with as little political relevance as possible and avoid even publishing (except as samizdat), and let "a scattered dynasty of recluses take over", as it is too late to stop the Tlön revolution, and "the [whole] world [will] be Tlön".
So what I take TUOT as being is an exploration of the Idealism idea, where Borges puts a twist on it: the (dialectical) beliefs of the communalistic idealists of Tlön turn out to be true, on a certain level, because sufficiently compelling ideas and totalizing ideologies make their claims true. In that way, 'perception' becomes 'reality'. Only that which the ideology or state can perceive is real, and everyone is required to see like a state. (As much as he loved Idealism & Platonism, Borges always seemed to accept them only on a literary level, as applying to fiction and literature - there is indeed 'Man' in fiction, but there is not an actual Man in a Platonic region of forms, there is only a term 'man' we nominalistically apply to entities as convenient.)
That is, idealism is correct, in a sense, and the artifacts of Tlön become real because the savants of the conspiracy 'perceive' them (in their minds) and create them. And as Tlön takes over the world and gains power, it gains more realness and more of its artifacts come into existence - or people just lie about them or pretend they exist and falsify documents to accord with the new party line, and doublethink their way to 'seeing' the new labyrinthine reality forged by their fellow humans.
One might say that _hrönir_, especially, are a savage Orwellian parody of how things go in totalitarian dictatorships: the description of the experiments with the prisoners could as easily be set in Stalinist Russia or Maoist China, where the real story is that on the fourth try, after turning up only the equivalent of fishing for a muddy boot, everyone has figured out that, to satisfy the decrees from above, they need to buy or forge some ancient artifacts of unconvincing antiquity (and so no counter-revolutionary skeptics can be permitted near) and that is how _hrönir_ are discovered. The same way Lysenko manufactured agricultural miracles or innumerable falsifications like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learn_from_Dazhai_in_agricultu... became official policy, doubted only on pain of death.
Those who disagree and wish to maintain their integrity, can only retreat into quietism or 'internal exile', and spend their time on topics with as little political relevance as possible and avoid even publishing (except as samizdat), and let "a scattered dynasty of recluses take over", as it is too late to stop the Tlön revolution, and "the [whole] world [will] be Tlön".