THE MEMORY HOLE

In an earlier piece, “Coming to America”, I finished thus:

Four years ago, I watched treason being enacted at the Capitol and knew that retribution would be swift. Not only would the cannon-fodder be identified, tried, and imprisoned but so would their instigator and his minions. Republicans in Congress, just like they did in response to Nixon, would put country before party. The traitors would swiftly, in full accordance with the law, and with the overwhelming support of the people, be punished.

Now I remember something else I knew for sure. I knew for sure that America would never compromise in its fight against Communism. When I applied for citizenship I had to assert, truthfully, that I had never been a member of the Communist Party (for those who know the difference, I align with democratic socialism). I knew, above all, that no democratically elected American president would cosy up with any Russian dictator. That sound you hear is Ronald Reagan turning in his grave.

OK, let’s be serious. The current state of geopolitics, time and again, takes me back to George Orwell’s “1984”, published in 1949. If you haven’t read it, please do, or at least the Wikipedia entry. Today, Big Brother is indeed watching us. The “hate hour” Orwell described has morphed into the State of the Union address. There are four ministries, and the parallels to now are uncanny:

Ministry of Truth (Truth Social): They tell people what to think. They also make all of the country's art.

Ministry of Peace: They run the military (now called Defense Ministry, responsible for administering shock and awe).

Ministry of Plenty (Department of Government Efficiency): They run the economy.

Ministry of Love: A prison in which people are tortured. Here the protagonist, Winston Smith, betrays the woman he loves, and she does the same for him. He is persuaded to do so by exploiting his greatest fear, placing some hungry rats next to his face. Finally, he loves Big Brother.

Above all, there’s “The Memory Hole”. Orwell sees a world dominated by three superpowers. Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia. The first includes The Americas, southern Africa, the UK, Australia and New Zealand. The Middle East and North Africa and other parts of the world are not part of any of the three mega-countries, as Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia are always fighting over those places. From time to time, there is a major shift in alliances among the superpowers, at which point history needs to be rewritten. Winston Smith’s job is going through old newspaper files and rewriting them. Creating “unpersons” through eliminating references to them and their images in photographs was standard practice under Stalin. Alternatively, figures from the past can be reconstructed, as is currently happening to Gandhi, embraced and remodeled by Modi in the service of Hindu Supremacy.

The same purposes can be served by education. In “Lies my teacher told me” and its follow-up “Lies across America” by James Loewen, he analyses the teaching of history in American schools. It is, indeed, full of lies and the teachers can be as polluted by them as the students — though teachers are capable of agency and many of them exercise it. Among the main problems, beyond endemic racism and white supremacy, are the preference for myth over carefully researched history, the binary classification of heroes and villains, the isolationist denial that the rest of the world matters. Over all rests a shroud of intellectual laziness.

The book “History on Trial” (2005) relates how a broad coalition of historians and educators attempted to revise history teaching towards a more global perspective. The proposal was disappeared politically, with a major role being taken by Liz Cheney, who in retrospect may be seen as doing more lasting harm through her attacks on education, including “fuzzy math”, than her husband, Dick, did through his pursuit of “a new American century”.

Given the intellectual apathy and proud ignorance of so many Americans, it might even be asked if Trump’s America needs a memory hole. Nevertheless, just to be sure, something well beyond Orwell’s wildest nightmares is unfolding. The thought police are everywhere. Language is being eliminated, words are being redefined (if you want to know if an organization is extremely right-wing, just look for the word “freedom” in the title). In Florida, right now, a long list of words is being purged from university websites — including, of course, “diversity”, “equity”, and “inclusion”. There are combinations of letters that look like words, but are not. Pre-eminent in this category is “woke”, which is akin to a rabbit thumping the ground to alert others to the presence of a predator.

Black and Native American history is being shoveled into the Memory Hole; the Constitution will soon follow.

In 1984 2025:

War is peace.

Freedom is slavery.

Ignorance is strength.