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Examples Of Censorship In 1984 By George Orwell

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Censorship of History

One day thousands of Chinese citizens were slaughtered by their government, and the event known to the rest of the world as the Tiananmen Square Massacre was essentially erased through censorship. Victims of the Tiananmen Square Massacre weren’t mourned, familys were forced to remain silent in their grief because of the government’s prohibition of the truth. George Orwell wrote his famous novel 1984 in 1948 forty-one years later the Chinese government proved to the world what could happen when there is a significant power imbalance. The Party in Orwell’s work said “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” The attempt to rewrite history regarding the Tiananmen Square …show more content…

“The state is enforcing a collective amnesia about not only recent political events but those that happened years ago” (Lim & Sala, 2019). The United States has been researching the Qing Dynasty (the last imperial dynasty), in response the Chinese Republic has published within their news media that the US is over-reaching and purposely altering history for their own purposes. The reason for China’s propaganda is that the findings of the US contradict the narrative written by the Chinese government. In their mission of “enforcing a collective amnesia” surveillance measures have been increased. “One interviewee, Tiananmen Mothers Co-Founder Zhang Xianling, said she had once managed to hold a small act of remembrance at the spot where her 19-year-old son, Wang Nan, had died from a bullet to the head. The next year a closed-circuit camera had been trained on that spot, designed to prevent any public act of rememberence” (Lim & Sala, 2019). As we read further into 1984 Winston holds acts of remembrance for the things he recalls. Unfortunately for the government (and for Winston) his memory is not under complete control. Winston purchases a journal from an old junk shop and begins to document the things he recalls. Winston, and all the citizens of Oceania, are constantly surveilled even in their homes. Winston is only able to conceal the evidence by sitting in an alcove in his flat that is not in the direct line of sight of the government’s surveillance camera and telescreen. He is further able to hide the fact that he does have memory recall by being mindful of how he communicates with others and his facial

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In 1949, an author by the name of George Orwell decided to put the tragedies that were happening in real life onto paper to create a frightening story that would haunt several generations. In the thrilling dystopian novel 1984, tells of a story of a new world that is filled with manipulation, fear, control, and a brainwashed public. This world depicts a government who is everywhere, sees everything, and controls every aspect of every person's life. Not only is the government controlling the public, but they are also in the media. Mainly the news being the source of manipulation, many stories get rewritten and several words get cut out of the news every day.

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In this essay “No one died in Tiananmen Square” by William Lutz, it is evident that the events displayed confirm the warnings that Orwell shared in Nineteen Eighty – Four. This essay resembled the novel by George Orwell in many different ways, both exploit the government to manipulate the mind of an individual over the actual reality and both governments overuse and abuse there powers. In “No one died in Tiananmen Square” the government uses violence to stop the peaceful protesters. This is similar to 1984 because the totalitarian government in Oceania uses violence if they do not obey the rules of Big Brother. A quote from 1984, from part 2 of chapter 10 displaying violence for commenting thought crime is “One of the men had smashed his fist into Julia’s solar

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Tiananmen Square is a city located in Beijing, named after the Tiananmen located to its north, separating it from the Forbidden City. In 1989, there was a “massacre” of mostly college students from the government, due to protests attempting to overrun the one-party system and make it a democracy. The government claims nothing happened and wants to keep it like that. The book “1984” written by George Orwell in 1949, is a book representing the ideas of a totalitarian government coincidentally relating to some of WWII era’s axis governments. In the article “No One Died in Tiananmen Square” by William Lutz, Lutz argues that people actually died in Tiananmen Square through the use of repetition, through examples of government manipulation, and communist governments, much like how it is seen in “1984”

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A crime which Winston is fully aware of committing, he wrote, "DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER." (1:1:36) Winston, knowing the consequences, he continued on, "It was not by making yourself heard but by staying sane that you carried on the human heritage." (1:2:37) He then wrote to an audience hoping his thoughts would be passed on someday, “To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free…from the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink-greetings!”

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In August of 1966 the Red Guard had gotten out of hand, the widespread chaos and destruction they had caused even caught the attention of Mao. Mao had sent the Red guards on a mission to destroy “The Four Olds” , old customs, culture, habits, and ideas. In an attempt to call the nation he invited every Red Guard to  go to Beijing on public transportation free of charge. Children swarmed to the city in masses to see tiananmen square, the memorial to the fallen heroes of the revolution and Mao’s mausoleum. They crowded into the square in identical uniforms to read quotations from the Little Red Book  and to admire the massive image of Chairman Mao that had been placed on the front of the gates to the forbidden city.

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As mentioned earlier, Chinese protestors, specifically students, took to the streets of Tiananmen Square in the 1980s in order to fight against the system of stratification placed on them by their state. Specifically, the protestors had a rallying cry for their own, “greater political freedom” (“Politics, Power & Violence”), deprived from them by the rather authoritarian government of China. Furthermore, the students were also calling for political reform within the country, feeling that the current state system was ineffective and needed to change. However, this aim to begin to dismantle the stratification system implemented against them by the state had dire consequences. Instead of just arresting individuals or eventually compromising with the protestors like UC Berkeley, the Chinese government turned to violence.

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In the article, “China Censors: The Tiananmen Square Anniversary Will Not Be Tweeted” it wrote, “Tanks and soldiers were sent in to control the crowds.” In 1989 some students were protesting against the Chinese government, and it got out of control and people were injured. People all over the world were reporting on this topic. This may emphasize why we need to censor the world, so violent protests will not occur. This is the opposite though, without protests no change will occur.

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George Orwell, the author of 1984, writes the book to warn his readers about the possible future of a tyrannical government. The Party manipulates its citizens through psychological methods to gain power. By restricting the words of its citizens,

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“In 2009, the US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, released a statement to urge Beijing to account for those killed in a crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square 20 years ago” (Branigan). Additionally, the Tiananmen Square puts democracy in a certain text. By demonizing the Chinese, it makes China and Communism appear weaker, especially when they are antagonize on the ground of lesser human rights. Thus, in the next five years, the Tiananmen Square

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Other people know of the rewriting of history, but don’t seem bothered or affected by it. The iron fist of Big Brother does not allow people to speak out of turn; he keeps them in check by eliminating them. In 1984, the government controls the citizens of Oceania by “memory control”, keeping the people in check by altering history.

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The lack of response from Winston conveys that he is not confident and is fearful of the government, which in turn leads to the oppression of his own thoughts about the country’s history. This concept is similar to American society in 2016 since the U.S. government frequently requests from Google to take down certain searches from the search engine. Google has been requested to take down 6,321 different things by the U.S. government, which shows how these requests can be considered a memory hole in real life (Sutter). Taking down information from Google results

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Chang (1997) pointed out the fact that the Nanjing Massacre has been branded into the Chinese collective memory as the unhealed wound for more than half a century. On December 13 in 1937, Japanese troops began six weeks of slaughter after the siege of Nanjing City, resulting in an estimated 300,000 Chinese civilians and disarmed soldiers died. However, Japan’s refusals to apologize for its war crime in China, especially the downplaying of the Nanjing Massacre as an “incident” with relatively few causalities in Japan’s new secondary school history textbooks at the start of 2005, have become a rally point for expressions of Chinese nationalism, as demonstrated by the eruption of anti-Japan protests throughout China in 2005, 2010 and 2012, respectively

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