Reflections on George W. Bush’s ‘War on Terror’ through George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four

Abstract

In this dissertation, I intend to examine George W. Bush’s ‘war on terrorism’ and its resemblance to George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. The monitoring idea running through this work is that the U.S media, after the 9/11 attacks, launched a series of hysterical coverage overwhelmed by an orientalist rhetoric whose target was to spread fear-mongering in the American public and paint every Arab and Muslim with the same “terrorist” brush. Otherising Middle Easterners facilitated the task for the Bush administration to push their war agenda. Similarly, in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, the totalitarian government, the Party, employs the same tactics of demonising the ‘other’. The abuse of language by the media is a major theme in the novel. That is why the comparison between Bush’s ‘war on terror’ policy and the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four is worthwhile dealing with. The present study will be basically divided into three main chapters. The first chapter will focus on George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and analyse it through a postcolonial lens, namely Edward Said’s work Orientalism. The second chapter will shed light on the background of the 9/11 attacks and the attempts made by the Bush administration to overlook that history for the sake of fighting an obscure enemy labelled as ‘terror’. This is all done through a comparison between Nineteen Eighty-Four and the ‘war on terror’. The third chapter will explore the abuse of language by the media during the war on terror and in Nineteen Eighty-Four.