[chottala.com] Who controls the past, controls the future; who controls the present controls the past. [ShadaKalo]

Who controls the past, controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.

http://shadakalo.blogspot.com/2007/12/who-controls-past-controls-future-who.html

The Ministry of Truth (or Minitrue, in Newspeak) is a ministry in George Orwell's too-close-for-comfort novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. Minitrue's job is to go back and rewrite the history to ensure the party leaders are always correct. Turns out Jamaat is doing just that; since the demand for trial for war-crimes started, people started quoting from Jamaat's newspaper,Shongram, to prove the roles of current Jamaat leaders in 1971. So Minitrue, Jamaat-edition, is going around libraries in the country and copies of 1971 issues of Shongram are disappearing from libraries.

Here is an excerpt from Nineteen Eighty-Four, one of our all-time favorites.

The past is whatever the Party chooses to make it....
If the facts say otherwise then the facts must be altered.
 

The Party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, it never happened. The Party said that Oceania had never been in alliance with Eurasia. He, Winston Smith, knew that Oceania had been in alliance with Eurasia as short a time as four years ago. But where did that knowledge exist? Only in his own consciousness, which in any case must soon be annihilated. And if all others accepted the lie whith the Party imposed -- if all records told the same tale -- then the lie passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past,' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.'

The largest section of the RECORDS DEPARTMENT, far larger than the one on which Winston worked, consisted simply of persons whose duty it was to track down and collect all copies of books, newspapers, and other documents which had been superseded and were due for destruction. The hunting-down and destruction of books had been done with thoroughness and it was very unlikely that there existed anywhere in Oceania a copy of a book printed earlier than 1960. Books were recalled and rewritten again and again, and were invariably re issued without any admission that any alteration had been made. Even the written instructions never stated or implied that an act of forgery was to be committed: always reference was to slips, errors, misprints, or misquotations which it was necessary to put right in the interests of accuracy. But actually it was not even forgery. It was merely the substitution of one piece of nonsense for another. Statistics were just as much a fantasy in their original version as in their rectified version. A great deal of the time you were expected to make them up out of your head.

Sometimes he talked to Julia of the RECORDS DEPARTMENT and the impudent forgeries that he committed there. Such things did not appear to horrify her. She did not feel the abyss opening beneath her feet at the thought of lies becoming truths. He said, "Do you realize that the past, starting from yesterday, has been actually abolished? If it survives anywhere, it's in a few solid objects with no words attached to them, like that lump of glass there. Already we know almost literally nothing about the Revolution and the years before the Revolution. Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except in an endless present in which the Party is always right. I know, of course, that the past is falsified, but it would never be possible for me to prove it, even when I did the falsification myself. After the thing is done, no evidence ever remains. The only evidence is inside my own mind, and I don't know with any cerainty that any other human being shares my memories.

If, for example, Eurasia or Eastasia (whichever it may be) is the enemy to-day, then that country must always have been the enemy. And if the facts say otherwise then the facts must be altered. Thus history is continually rewritten.

The day-to-day falsification of the past, carried out by the Ministry of Truth, is as necessary to the stability of the regime as the work of repression and espionage carried out by the Ministry of Love. The mutability of the past is the central tenet of Ingsoc. Past events, it is argued have no objective existence, but survive only in written records and human memories. The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon. And since the Party is in full control of all records and in equally full control of the minds of its members, it follows that the past is whatever the Party chooses to make it. As often happens, the same event has to be altered out of recognition several times in the course of a year. At all times the Party is in possession of absolute truth. To make sure that all written records agree with the orthodoxy of the moment is merely a mechanical act.

The alteration of the past is necessary for two reasons. To be able to learn from the past meant having a fairly accurate idea of what had happened in the past. One reason is that the Party member, like the proletarian, tolerates present-day conditions partly because he has no standards of comparison. He must be cut off from the past, just as he must be cut off from foreign countries, because it is necessary for him to believe that he is better off than his ancestors and that the average level of material comfort is constantly rising.

But by far the more important reason for the re adjustment of the past is the need to safeguard the infallibility of the Party. It is not merely that speeches, statistics, and records of every kind must be constantly brought up to date in order to show that the predictions of the Party were in all cases right. It is also that no change in doctrine or in political alignment can ever be admitted. For to change one's mind, or even one's policy, is a confession of weakness.

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 a palimpsest, scraped clean and rewritten 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.

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