“Give Us Our Daily Dread”: Dystopian Traces in the COVID-19 Media Discourse on the Croatian Civil Protection Headquarters

Even before the war in Ukraine delivered the final blow to contemporary semblances of freedom, safety, and democracy in the Western civilized world, the COVID-19 pandemic has since the early 2020 reminded society at large that dystopias, despite being highly imaginative and often futuristic, are never mere fantasy. In fact, repressive social, political, linguistic, media, and other forms of discourse found in fictional dystopias are deeply grounded in reality. In the face of the pronounced individualization, one of the postulates of modern society, individual freedom, has been unmasked as an intensely fragile concept during the pandemic. Introduction of “the new normal”—restriction of movement, suddenly illegal physical contact, police hours, os-tracization of the (potentially) infected, peer pressure—underpinned by a constant and intimidating media rhetoric, has disclosed within an allegedly free society the notable inner workings of a repressive dystopia. Beyond the preventative and safety measures devised to curb the virus spreading, the typical dystopian inequality, political hypocrisy, and fear-mongering can be discerned, disseminated mainly through media. In tracing the social, political, and media discourses of Orwell’s classical dystopia 1984, the aim of this pa-per is to exhibit the ways in which the COVID-19 media discourse on the Croatian Civil Protection Headquarters connects contemporary Croatia with a typical dystopian society.