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If the dread visions of George Orwell pertained only to far-off lands suffering under revolutions betrayed, they might be obscure to us now. Orwell's triumph was to bridge the imaginations of East and West by setting his Soviet-inspired satires of political cruelty, control, and deception in familiar England. Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four touch truths so universal that they unsettle the citizens of established democracies. Orwell pertains everywhere, but, even in the absence of the Stalinist superpower that honed his perceptions, a handful of states continue to provide unabashed variations on the "Orwellian" -- particularly Iran.
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More... Orwell provided the world a new vocabulary for modes of oppression. When, in January, Iranian authorities pressured Caf Prague, a popular hangout for Tehran's students and intellectuals, to install came