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.
