Age five, the vegetables on your plate must be eaten and you can not cross the street on your own. Age thirteen, you must do all your homework and must go to bed by twelve. Age thirty-one, you must follow the rules of the society, no murder, no robbery, and pay taxes. In this way, we are always living in a world with regulations and censorship that restricts us from total freedom. Although it might seem that we get more freedom and choice as we get older, still we live in a censored world. If we had no censorship, the world would be much more chaotic since it would be hard to draw the lines where our freedom ends and another’s start. However, this does not mean that censorship should come to the point of becoming chains that will hinder the society’s free minds from expressing and developing. The small flame of censorship can always result in a massive conflagration of dictatorship if not cautious.
George Orwell’s novel, Animal Farm, is actually a satirical allegory of the soviet totalitarianism, the result of censorship going overboard. In the novel, the animals don’t like the way that the humans treat them and decide to live in a farm for, by, and of animals. However a pig called Napoleon slowly but surely takes total control of the far,. By extreme censorship, the pig is now regarded as the superiors. Except for the fact of having a tail and a snout, the pigs have become the new human. Only the name is “Animal Farm” and the farm has become a palace for the pigs, ruling with absolute dictatorship with censoring.
According to North Korean news, North Korea has never suffered famine or poverty. Families jump into exploding buildings not to save their family members but to save the holy portrait of their “beloved leader.” North Korea, a country that is currently under the absolute power of Kim Jeong Il with the fusion of Confucian with Stalinist authoritarian communist, was ranked the number one most censored country. All the information that the citizens receive, the radios, newspaper, and internet (if hey have them) is the result of what is left after the filtration by the government. The censorship in this country did not stop at the point of preventing frictions among citizens but eventually brainwashed the citizens, making them unable to make decisions on their own but only follow their one leader.
In “The Lord of the Flies,” there was no censorship on the island and the boys went wild. We can not ignore the importance of censorship to a society. However, censorship should not be abused as a way to conceal the truth or maintaining power as a tyrant.
