Government Censorship and Control in Brave New World

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Recommended: The nature of totalitarianism

Imagine a society in which its citizens have forfeited all personal liberties for government protection and stability; Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, explores a civilization in which this hypothetical has become reality. The inevitable trade-off of citizens’ freedoms for government protection traditionally follows periods of war and terror. The voluntary degradation of the citizens’ rights begins with small, benign steps to full, totalitarian control. Major methods for government control and censorship are political, religious, economic, and moral avenues. Huxley’s Brave New World provides a prophetic glimpse of government censorship and control through technology; the citizens of the World State mimic those of the real world by trading their personal liberties for safety and stability, suggesting that a society similar to Huxley’s could exist outside the realm of dystopian science fiction.

Huxley illustrates just how a real world government can come to tyrannical power over its citizens through the fear of war and terror. Barr explains this very method when he states:

Even more troubling than Huxley's prescient description of technological advances employed to manipulate and control mind and body is the manner in which government seizes on a military threat as the vehicle to not only control the population, but also to convince the people, even as their freedom is being stolen from them, that it is necessary to do so, and that taking freedom will make them free. (Barr 850)

Historically, citizens of many countries sacrifice their personal liberties for a sense of security masked as a governmental attempt for pushing their views onto the citizens. A historical example of this scenario is the passing and enforcement of the Es...

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...elies: The Cinema of Sensation in Brave New

World."Twentieth-Century Literature (2006): 443-66. Literature Resources from Gale. Web. 24 Feb. 2014.

Hodgkinson, Tom. “Don’t sell me your dreams: far from liberating us, technology isolates us and

makes us stupid. I want no part of your sterile, bloodless brave new world, writes Tom

Hodgkinson.” New Statesman [1996] 4 May 2009: 39. Literature Resource Center. Web. 17

Feb. 2014.

Horan, Thomas. "Revolutions from the Waist Downwards: Desire as Rebellion In Yevgeny

Zamyatin's We, George Orwell's 1984, and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World." Extrapolation 48.2 (2007): 314-39. Literature Resources from Gale. Web. 24 Feb. 2014.

Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. New York: HarperPerennial, 1998. Print.

Sale, Kirkpatrick. “THE FUTURE BROUGHT TO BOOK.” The Ecologist 30.8(2000): 40. General

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