George Orwell cleverly kept his pieces under a pen name. Orwell’s real name had in fact been Eric Arthur Blair. Orwell was a British writer and journalist, and a survivor of colonial rule, poverty, and war. Orwell’s sharp writing skills and clever imagination, inspired by a world where he knew what it meant to be a victim of corruption, led him to become the sensational dystopian writer we know him to be now. Orwell’s survival shaped his way of thinking, allowing him to follow the patterns of the geopolitical world, thus creating the universes within his writing, such as "Animal Farm” and “1984,” that astonishingly predicted the world we live in today.

Censorship in the world of literature and media has and may always be an obstacle humanity will be sentenced to as long as the ones in power continue to speak lies and remain in their secrets. Orwell’s books are among the many books that the U.S. federal government is attempting to erase from libraries. The author has been labeled a prophet as time continues to unfold, and Orwell’s predictions are pulled from the pages of fiction into the dimension of reality. He is considered a seer who warned of dark totalitarian trends of the future. From “newspeak” to “big brother,” Orwell’s cautions against government propaganda and surveillance are as relevant now as ever.

“Orwellian” is a term used to describe oppression, surveillance-driven or authoritarian conditions, as well as manipulation of language. The concepts that Orwell wrote in his fiction have become a political reality.

“Big Brother,” introduced in his epic novel, “1984,” is a system of nationwide surveillance by a corrupt authoritarian nationalist government that suppresses individual freedom.

We live in a carefully constructed political society where it has been made nearly impossible not to be in possession of a surveillance device. Once being in the possession of a device, it is nearly impossible to escape social media, and thus, choosing the very means by which we are being kept under surveillance by our own choosing. Humanity has willingly given up its freedom and privacy in exchange for these electronic gadgets that measure and document us. As a result, every individual loses their right to individuality unless it has been socially accepted.

Orwell captured the manipulation of freedom. A main aspect of the Orwellian concepts was the quote, “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” This was meticulously crafted in “1984,” which shows how language can be manipulated to make us all victims of corruption and control by distorting the reality in which we live; creating illusions of the reality the government wanted to preserve.

Similarly, we are given the illusion of freedom to choose, yet it is the majority of us who blindly follow a consumer culture that distracts us from the freedoms that are being taken from us by a government that is increasingly manipulating us to believe its distorted version of reality. We thoughtlessly follow society’s standards, culture, and trends, believing it is our choice when in reality, the government-curated society is dictating what we should and should not care about.

It is part of our daily norms to keep our devices in hand and utilize social media to engage in creating lifestyles fit to follow trends. Orwell explained this through the concept of "Doublethink,” which is how an authoritarian government creates the illusion of freedom: eliminate objective truth and critical thinking, ensuring absolute surrender to the one in power. In the case of the novel, the Party tells lies while genuinely believing them, allowing the government to censor and therefore change and alter history and reality, and forgetting facts once they become inconvenient. We are now experiencing this not only in the U.S. but in many countries where authoritarianism is taking hold.

Orwell’s concept of “newspeak,” or politically invented language that confuses reality and fiction, has been taking over news outlets, weakening what once were institutions meant to protect the public by rooting out corruption. With news organizations like the Washington Post, which famously broke the Watergate corruption case against the then-President Richard M. Nixon, now being reduced to such a small staff, it will be impossible for it to do the kind of reporting that made it one of the champions of freedom of the press. People will become even more vulnerable to newspeak.

President Donald J. Trump has explicitly manipulated news outlets with his calls of “Fake News” against any story that would question his authority, essentially disregarding any and all facts or morals that are inconvenient to those in positions of power. Orwell called this a “vast system of mental cheating,” manipulating the minds of those who fall victim to the lies and making them reject truths that would question the people in power.

Newspeak, or politically invented language that confuses reality and fiction, uses phrases such as “fake news” and relies on inverted meanings. This can be exemplified by the slogan, “war is peace” and “freedom is slavery,” which forces mental surrender to the authoritative doctrines that maintain belief in the people in power at the expense of personal liberties. As Orwell warned, the goal of newspeak is to eliminate independent thinking by forcing conformity to what the government in “1984” called “goodthink.”

Henry Ford Early College senior, Ziyad Abdulaziz, shared his thoughts on Goerge Orwell literature and the accuracy of his novels in comparison to our reality. “When I read Animal Farm, I recognized a lot of direct references to the Russian revolution. It also represented a lot of aspects of the communist party of the Soviet Union before the revolution.” Abdulaziz divulged further into the similarities of Animal Farm to the world we live in today, “Animal Farm represented a lot of propaganda which is something I recognize in modern day politics. Another significant detail in the novella was how everyone turned on each other in the end which shows how people in power become corrupt and greedy for more to the point there is no hope for alliance in the pursuit to achieving complete power.

Another thing that stuck out to me was that the animals which weren’t in power were sheep, and it felt like a very direct metaphor as how citizens blindly follow without question nor objection. Each animal in the novella represented a different aspect of a corrupt society. That part was particularly really interesting to me as I read the novella.”

Star International Academy student, Zayneb Ben Haj Mohammed, explained how she viewed the realistic themes in Animal Farm as, “Watching democracy backslide. In books and especially in reality, societies, civilizations, and those in power always begin with the best intentions. Especially the democratic ones. The problem is that we often see these well-intentioned democratic civilizations slowly evolve back to authoritarian and capitalistic ones. The rich become more greedy for money and power while everyone else remains a follower and victim of corruption.”

Orwell wrote accurate depictions of the dystopian world we live in now, warning his readers of the illusions of freedom and abuses of power in his novels. That the federal government is trying to ban his books illustrates just how important it is to heed his warning.