When people use the term “Orwellian”, it is not a good sign.
It usually characterizes an action, an individual or a society that suppresses freedom, in particular freedom of expression. You can also describe something perverted by tyrannical power.
It is a term mainly used to describe the present, but whose implications are inevitably connected with both the future and the past.
In his second term, President Donald Trump has revealed his ambitions to rewrite the official history of the United States to, in the words of the organization of American historians, “reflect a glorified narrative … while the voices of historically excluded groups are suppressed.”
Such ambitions are deeply Orwellianas. Here is why.
The author George Orwell believed in objective historical truth. In 1946, he wrote that his youthful desire to become a writer was partly due to a “historical impulse,” or “the desire to see things as they are, to discover true facts and store them for posterity.”
But, although Orwell believed in the existence of an objective truth about history, he did not necessarily believe that the truth would prevail.
The winners write the story
During World War II, the Nazis transmitted reports on the German radio that described non -existent air attacks on Great Britain.
Orwell knew those reports and wrote: «Now, we know that these incursions did not happen. But what would our knowledge be of if the Germans had conquered Britain? For a future historian, did those incursions occur or not?
The answer, Orwell wrote, was: «If Hitler survives, they occurred; And if it falls, they did not happen. The same goes for countless other events of the last ten or twenty years … In no case is a universally accepted response obtained by being true: in each case several totally incompatible responses are obtained, one of which is finally adopted as a result of a physical struggle. The story is written by the victors ».
As Orwell wrote in “1984,” his latest dystopian novel: “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past ».
Orwell appreciated that power allowed those who possessed it to create their own historical narrative. It also allowed those who had the power to silence or censor the opposite narratives, annulling the possibility of a productive dialogue about history that, ultimately, allowed the truth to come to light.
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The Ministry of Truth
The desire to eradicate narratives promotes Winston Smith’s work in the ironically called the Ministry of Truth in 1984.
The novel is set in Oceania, a geographical entity that covers North America and the British Isles, and that governs much of the global south.
Oceania is an absolute tyranny governed by the Big Brother, the leader of a political party whose sole objective is to perpetuate his own power. In this society, the truth is what the Big Brother and the party say it is.
The regime imposes almost total censorship, so that not only is the dissident expression pursued, but also subversive private reflection, or “crime of thought.” In this way, it controls the present.
But also controls the past. As the changing policy of the party evolves, Smith and his colleagues have the task of systematically destroying any historical record that contradicts the current version of the story. Smith literally discard artifacts of inoportuna history by throwing them to “memory holes”, where they are “erased … of existence and memory.”
At a key moment in the novel, Smith remembers briefly preserved a newspaper cut that showed that an enemy of the regime had not committed the crime he was accused. Smith recognizes the power that this cuts grants to the regime, but at the same time fears that this power will make it target of attacks. In the end, the fear of reprisals leads him to drop the cut in a hole in memory.
The contemporary United States is far from Orwell’s Oceania. However, the Trump administration is doing everything possible to control the present and the past.
For the hole of memory
The Trump administration has taken unprecedented measures to rewrite the official history of the nation, trying to purge parts of the historical narrative through orwellian memory holes.
Interestingly, these measures included the temporary elimination of information about the enola gay, the plane that launched the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, of the government websites.
The plane, unintentionally, was involved in a massive purge of references to “gay” and LGBTQ+ content on government websites.
*Laura Beers She is a history teacher at the American University.
This article was originally published in The Conversation
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