Really, it should come as no surprise that George Orwell’s best-known novel, 1984, and Animal Farm are among the many novels that have been banned and fallen victim to censorship in countries around the world.
Animal Farm Censorship
Animal Farm, has often fallen victim to overzealous school boards and the high bar of strict religious or politically oppressive governments. The book has been banned around the world for a variety of reasons, ranging from its anti-communist attitudes (banned in the USSR) and its depiction of taking pigs (banned in the UAE). To this day the book is still banned in Cuba and North Korea for its satiric depiction of communism.
1984 Censorship
1984 has repetitively been banned for two major reasons– obscenity and supposedly pro-communist passages. For anyone who knows anything about the author or has even read the novel, these two reasons are should be striking absurd. Orwell was a self-proclaimed democratic socialist. He spoke out articulately in his novels, non-fiction books, and essays about the failings of Soviet Communism. It is only due to the fact that some segments of the public have been in the past unable to separate communism from socialism that the book has, in some instances, been banned.
One of the best-known challenges to the book was in 1981 in Jackson County, Florida where it was banned for this exact reason.
In addition to the supposed pro-Communist attitudes in 1984, there are the sex scenes, which are far from explicit, between the characters Winston Smith and Julia. There is mention of them going to bed together and passages that declare sex a revolutionary act against the Party.
