This paper will critically discuss George Orwell’s book, 1984, as a dystopian text that highlights the function of a particular language: propaganda. Used in a horizon of perpetual war, propaganda alters the narrative of reality, but it is functional to achieve certain specific ethical-normative purposes, such as social control, the reduction of all forms of freedom, the elimination of people’s rights. Instead, it favours the homologation of the behaviour of each member of society and proposes war itself as a positive value. The novel 1984 will therefore serve as a literary starting point for an ethical-philosophical analysis of war and its typical language of manipulation. These elements, in fact, as in the novel, are everyday realities present in many contemporary contexts.
