The catastrophic results of the Tiananmen Square protests in China which occurred in 1989 were oddly similar to those of the events which occured in the book “1984” by George Orwell. To begin, after the protests, the Chinese government tried to erase the events from everyone’s memories; essentially pretending that they never actually happened. The government did this by erasing all online articles which had anything to do with the events, and taking any information about them out of history textbooks so that children would not learn about them in schools. Also, the news reporters weren’t allowed to speak about the events, and when they wore black to honour those who died, the government went as far as to fire one of them from their job. As mentioned earlier, very similar things occurred in the story of “1984”. The whole premise is that the government is trying to take over everyone’s lives, and rewrite history. The government in the story does very similar things such as changing the information in articles and textbooks, and getting rid of people that have done something unhelpful to them. In the book Winston thinks about how the government gets rid of people and he says, “Your name was removed from the registers, every record of everything you had ever done was wiped out, your one-time existence was denied and then forgotten. You were abolished, annihilated: vaporized was the usual word” (Orwell 21). The book was written in 1949 and is set in 1984 (at that time that year was the future). When it was written everyone thought that the ideas in the story were very far off and none of them would ever happen, but a while later it became clear that some of the things in the book really did happen in parts of the world, almost as if the story predicted the future. The fact that the protests occurred in the year 1989 shows how accurate parts of the book were as it’s set in 1984, only five years before 1989. Overall, the protests clearly connect quite well with the book, and it’s frightening to hear about what governments are capable of doing when people want to oppose them.
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