Fahrenheit 451

6 Pages 1585 Words

Fahrenheit 451 is a science fiction novel, but not all of its elements and messages are fictional. Some of them are very much at large in today’s world. The biggest example would be media’s control and influence over every society. Throughout history, and in every existent society, media has always played a key role in determining the norm of any given society. Among these similarities are the ways the media is able to censor what we see, the way media portrays and leads people into believing what the media wants them to believe, and the way the media is slowly turning society into mindless zombies.

Fahrenheit 451 was written during a time when there was a widespread fear of communism, more commonly known as the Red Scare. During this time, anything that was thought to be a communist idea, or rather anything that was anti-capitalist was banned or confiscated. The same thing happened in Germany. Any book, any song, anything that was created by a Jew was banned. Only books that were supporting the ideas of Hitler were allowed, and in fact, it was a law to own the book, Mein Kamph, which was written by Hitler himself.

To censor is to remove or ban anything regarded as harmful or of an offending nature. However, it is solely up to the authorities to decide what should be censored and what should not. This censorship is portrayed in the novel by the burning of books. At first it seems that the books are being burnt simply because they believe that knowledge is a bad thing, and the knowledge leads to conflicts and thus unhappiness. Even though this is part of the reason of the burning of books, it is not all of it. Captain Beatty explains that every book, in one way or another put down or insulted one of the many minorities, and the more power each minority gained, the more difficult it was for the author to please everybody:
“Don’t step on the toes of the dog lovers, the cat lovers, doctors, lawyers, merchants, chiefs, Mormo...