This essay examines whether the themes of George Orwell's 1984 remain relevant to contemporary government behavior. Drawing on the novel's core concepts — Reality Control, the rewriting of history, surveillance, and the manipulation of public fear — the author argues that parallels exist between Orwell's fictional totalitarian state and real-world U.S. government actions. The paper considers how shifting national enemies, the "Myth of Concern," government monitoring of citizens, and the possibility of manufactured crises echo the world Winston Smith inhabits. The essay ultimately raises unsettling questions about the relationship between state power, public compliance, and events like 9/11 and the Iraq War.
George Orwell wrote 1984 in 1949. The world had been through two world wars, the Spanish Civil War, and the horrors of the Holocaust. Although he was writing about England, like Machiavelli's The Prince, it is possible to see his vision in the workings of almost any government — especially one that is quite determined to do as it wishes, irrespective of what the people want.
I have not called the present administration conservative because I don't believe that term applies to it. To me, "conservative" means to conserve the founding ideals of the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, and the Constitution. The people who wrote those documents and founded this country were not far removed from the monarchies and hereditary dictatorships of the Old World. Their intention was very clearly to protect the new country from the kinds of abuses their families had experienced in Europe.
Orwell depicts a future where individuality is permitted only to the lowest classes. If you are a prole — short for proletariat — you are considered too insignificant to matter. Proles live in the worst housing and have the least of everything, yet they are allowed to be themselves.
In Orwell's world, to be a member of the Party, to belong to the "upper class," is to be controlled always, forever, in every way. Winston Smith, our protagonist, is entertaining anti-government thoughts — a crime punishable by death in this society. He contemplates the concept of "Reality Control": the government's policy of constantly rewriting history so that nothing exists except what the Party and Big Brother declare to be true in the present moment.
Winston works for the "Ministry of Truth." It is his job to do the rewriting — to make Big Brother always right. Whether it involves production records (Winston reflects that it doesn't matter what numbers appear in the reports, because none of the reports are true, and he believes that nothing was actually produced in the way of boots) or questions of who the current "enemy" is, Winston knows that none of it is real.
Is there anything in 1984 that mirrors our world or the way our government operates? When World War II ended in 1945, "we" — the "good guys" — had defeated the Axis powers, "the bad guys." Germany, Italy, and Japan, along with their fascism, had been stopped. The world was now safe, and peace seemed possible. By the time Orwell wrote 1984 just four years later, there was already a new enemy. Our former allies, the Soviet Union and China, along with Communism broadly, had become the new threat to decent people everywhere.
We went through the Korean "Police Action" — as one character from MASH put it, "What do they think we're doing over here, giving out parking tickets?" — and the long years of the Cold War. The Berlin Wall, symbol of that conflict, came down in November 1989, and the Soviet Union dissolved around the same time. During the second half of 1990, Arab countries began to be constructed as the new enemies.
"Fabricated justifications for military intervention"
"Government monitoring of its own citizens"
"Could governments manufacture attacks to control populations?"
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