1984 #2

         Life under Big Brother is a continual process of writing, rewriting, and effacing history.  This includes personal history, political history, and social history.  Winston Smith participates in the "rectifying" of the official history of Oceania.  His job in the Ministry of Truth entails altering articles and pieces of media that Big Brother feels necessary to correct, or as Big Brother's government calls it rectifying.  History is something that never changes, the past can never be adjusted.  Under Big Brother's regime; "Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date.   In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct; nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record.   All history was palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary.  In no case would it have been possible, once the deed was done, to prove that any falsification had taken place" (Orwell 40).   This eerie description of how history can be micro-managed and controlled is very disturbing.  At any point in time the national history of a nation is "reinscribed exactly as [is] necessary".  History is supposed to be truth.  History is immutable fact.  Yet in this totalitarian regime history is recreated to fit the needs of the government.  The official history can never be verified as the truth  due to the destruction of all other records created before.  The constant bringing of history to date serves the government well.  With official documentation of history the way Big Brother wants it to be, citizens are kept subservient.  The Party systematically creates an uninformed society.  Citizens are essentially vulnerable to the government and the government's written word.  Truth is relative to what the regime wants the truth to be at the given time.  In general people look to the written word in order to find out the truth. Written word is assumed infallible.  Facts are supposed to be indisputable. The facts that the Ministry of Truth puts out are assumed indisputable because it is documented history.  When people constantly hear one an official history from a source of authority the truth is easily forgotten, and lies believed.   This also brings to mind the question of whether or not official histories are actually truth.  If the Party is able to rewrite history continuously and publish it in text while keeping those who may have known the truth silent, is it so far fetched to believe that today's governments could not also do the same?  In this passage Orwell inadvertently states that it is necessary for humans to keep record of history themselves.  Otherwise humankind might find immutable facts found within textbooks to be the fabrications of a government working to keep its citizens submissive.