Analysis of 1984 in Reference to Censorship

Censorship dates all the way back to 443 BC in ancient Rome with the Office of Censor. In that time this was an office of great repute, the Office of Censor was charged with the shaping of the character of the people. Thus it was considered to be an honorable task, since then the connotation of the word and such an office has changed greatly. Today censorship is the practice of officially examining books, movies, etc. and suppressing “unacceptable parts” based on whoever is defining “unacceptable.” Unacceptable has been considered to be a wide range of concepts from ideas to sexually explicit content. Historically in the USSR most leaders used censorship in every form as a means of suppressing whatever or whoever was perceived as a possible threat. George Bernard Shaw once said, “Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.” A common practice in the book is the “vaporization” of citizens. According to the Newspeak Dictionary this was when The Party would completely wipe out any trace of the citizen and either kill them or send them to a forced labor camps.

1984 was written as a satire targeting the rise of Communism in Russia by portraying a world in which Communism has spread beyond Russia’s borders. In the book there is “The Ministry of Truth,” whose sole duty is to create and distribute propaganda. They also forge documents so that whatever The Party says appears accurate. Such practices were best denounced by Jeremy Bentham who once said “As to the evil which results from a censorship, it is impossible to measure it, for it is impossible to tell where it ends.” The Party alters so many documents so frequently it is nearly impossible to sift through all the lies to find even a kernel of truth.

1984 was published in 19...

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...ng thought really drives home Orwell’s point that if we allow totalitarianism it will overwhelm anyone and drive out any concept of free will. This world Orwell creates casts light on the psychological manipulation in totalitarian societies that leads to so many other infringements of human nature such as the ability to think for oneself and form your own opinions. This novel does not apply to today’s geopolitical state, however at the time of its original publication it was a great weapon in the fight against Communism.

Works Cited

Karolides, Nicholas J. Literature Suppressed on Political Grounds. New York, NY: Facts on File, 1998. Print.

"Newspeak Dictionary." The Complete Newspeak Dictionary. Web. 23 Mar. 2012. .

Orwell, George. Nineteen Eighty-four. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008. Print.