By Roland Elliott Brown, Op-Ed @ ForeignPolicy.com, Feb. 1, 2013

[.....] Orwell provided the world a new vocabulary for modes of oppression. When, in January, Iranian authorities pressured Café Prague, a popular hangout for Tehran's students and intellectuals, to install cameras whose footage the state could access, the cafe's owners protested by closing down their business. Their explanation: "We take comfort in knowing that we at least didn't let Big Brother's glass eyes scan and record our every step, minute, and memory from dawn till dusk."

Meanwhile, on the western side of Orwell's bridge, Iranian journalists working for non-Iranian media -- in particular, BBC Persian -- accused their government of forging websites and Facebook pages in their names, built around salacious themes. Close readers of Nineteen Eighty-Four will recall not only the Party's fabrications and forgeries, but the cheap pornography it distributed to the "proles" of Airstrip One, Orwell's dystopian England.

As if to confirm Iran in its Orwellian moment, Washington-based opposition cartoonist Nikahang Kowsar, well-known for portraying Iran's theocrats as animals, generated fresh controversy by caricaturing Iran's former president, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, as Napoleon, the porcine leader and hypocrite of Animal Farm. "Comparing Orwell's story with the 1979 revolution," Kowsar explains [.....]