How Orwell’s ‘1984’ helped end Communism — and why it’s being banned in America today

How Orwell’s ‘1984’ helped end Communism — and why it’s being banned in America today

In the dark corridors of Warsaw University's library of social sciences, a lone dog-eared copy of George Orwell's “1984” still has a quiet story of resistance. Smuggled across borders and hidden from state censors, the novel was in the past a beacon of hope for truth-seekers trapped behind the Iron Curtain. Now, the same novel—formerly forbidden in the Soviet Bloc—is in danger of being prohibited, this time in US schools and libraries, as part of a new and expanding conservative movement against so-called "woke" literature, the New York Times reported.

A novel that defied totalitarianism

Orwell's novel “1984”, written in 1949, predicted a dystopia where language, memory, and truth were controlled by the state. In Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe, that fiction came perilously close to reality. Censorship was institutionalized; even typewriters and photocopiers were regulated. Books that did not conform to party ideology were burned.

And when copies of Orwell's book did circulate in Poland and elsewhere, typically brought in by tourists or sent surreptitiously by mail as part of a covert CIA operation, they gave something more than to the imagination—Intellectual resistance. The CIA "book program" clandestinely smuggled 10 million banned books and magazines into the Eastern Bloc and contributed to an underground opposition culture.

Literature as a Cold War weapon

From Paris to Poland, print runs of “1984” and other books like Huxley's “Brave New World” and Vonnegut's “Slaughterhouse-Five” found their way into waiting hands. Polish underground presses—most of them funded or supported by the CIA—amplified their readership. Orwell, who had never been to Eastern Europe, so accurately described its realities that readers believed he had.

By the 1980s, the flood of uncensored books eroded state control over information. The disintegration of Poland's censorship machinery contributed to the collapse of Communist regimes in Eastern Europe. As former dissident Adam Michnik put it: "It was books that were victorious in the fight."

A new wave of censorship in America

Those same books are now being purged once more—but from US classrooms and libraries. Iowa's Senate File 496, passed into law in 2023, calls for erasure of thousands of books deemed objectionable according to conservative standards. Under the guise of protecting parental authority, the law censors books with LGBTQ+ themes, liberal ideas, and even classical political satire. Orwell's “Animal Farm” and “1984” are two of them that are prohibited.

PEN America has documented more than 10,000 school book bans over the past year alone, with Iowa and Florida leading the way. Executive orders from the Trump administration have taken the purging into federal grant programs and Department of Defence schools, where even such terms as "diversity" and "ethnicity" are prohibited.

The irony of freedom's reversal

The United States was long the intellectual freedom champion of the world, backing behind-the-scenes book campaigns to fight authoritarianism. Today, a number of those very same books face domestic censorship. The defenders of these bans—Trump, Ron DeSantis, and JD Vance, among others—invoke free speech while dismantling it, attacking public broadcasters, harassing the press corps, and defunding independent media.

But history provides a warning. Censorship tends to boomerang, fuelling demand for the very works it aims to repress. Orwell's “1984” has again and again burst into bestseller status as authoritarianism advances—possibly because, as Orwell cautioned, "who controls the past controls the future."

Just as it once held up to Soviet tyranny, “1984” is reflective of today’s changing times in America.