Essay Database

In 1952, Harry Elmer Barnes wrote a timely article, "How 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' Trends Threaten American Peace, Freedom, and Prosperity" as the final chapter of the classic revisionist anthology, Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace. Barnes analyzed George Orwell's classic novel as a work of prophecy and sounded the alarm to reverse the "1984" trends prevalent in the America of his day. Barnes argued that propagandists and "court historians" were fashioning a present, based on a falsified and inaccurate …

…are not reversed. Ironically, Bradbury mentions censorship of his book on censorship in the "Coda" of Fahrenheit 451. "I discovered that, over the years, some cubby-hole editors at Ballantine Books, fearful of contaminating the young, had, bit by bit, censored some 75 separate sections from the novel." (25) Let there be no mistake - the "firemen" are actively at large and active. Our future depends on truth and intellectual freedom rising phoenix-like from the ashes of the present.