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 sole

After the ‘capture’, the news broadcaster says, “The search is over, Montag is dead; a crime against society has been avenged.” (Bradbury, pg 149). He uses a very factual tone, yet it holds no truth in it. The real crime against society is the lies the media is telling the people of the society. It makes you question whether what you hear on the news is the actual truth or just a cover-up as it is in this case.

ly 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:

Another example showing this idea more explicitly is the fake capture of Montag. Here, while Montag is safely hiding from the authorities, the rest of the city thinks that he has been captured. The media staged a false capture in order for the authorities to save face. They find a man walking by himself, and decides to use him as a scapegoat. They distorted the image of this man just enough so that nobody could really tell if it was Montag or not. The people just assumed it was Montag, and did not even question what the media was telling them.

Notice how often she says the words, “the army said so”. She believed what she had been told, without any hesitation whatsoever. The army said so, and so it must be true. This attitude shows the complete control that the media, and thus the authorities that control the media, have over society. Is what we hear on the news, or read in the papers, really true, or is it just what the media wants us to believe?

What they were not told however, was the conditions the Germans lived in after the First World War. The German people were living in slums, and they were very poor because of the indemnity they had to pay to the rest of the World. Hitler came and promised them a better way of life; he promised them that they wouldn’t have to pay the entire indemnity, and that

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