Rewriting History
George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), part 3
Last week, in ‘Language, Autocracy, and Resistance’, I said I’d say more this week about how Winston uses Newspeak when he rewrites news articles to suit the Party. I’ll start by just unpacking that sentence.
It is Winston’s job to rewrite records, like newspaper articles, so they always reflect the Party in a good light. For example, in Part I, chapter 4, he must rewrite an article in the Times to make it look like Big Brother correctly predicted the next move in the current war. In the original version, Big Brother
predicted that the South Indian front would remain quiet but that a Eurasian offensive would shortly be launched in North Africa. As it happened the Eurasian Higher Command had launched its offensive in South India and left North Africa alone. It was therefore necessary to rewrite a paragraph of Big Brother’s speech, in such a way as to make him predict the thing that had actually happened. (p. 41)
In other words, Winston writes lies for a living.
His job is dangerous because he is aware of both, or in cases where he repeatedly rewrites something, all versions of every account. Officially, it is his duty to forget the unsanctioned versions of events.
The trouble for Winston, and eventually the Party, is that he can’t forget.
The world is in a state of perpetual war, but the alliances shift regularly. Each time they shift, the people are told that things have always been as they are right now. Winston knows that though Oceania is currently ‘at war with Eurasia and in alliance with Eastasia’, that has not always been the case (p. 36).
Most people accept what they are told, which is good news for the Party:
‘Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’ (p. 37)
So long as the Party controls the present narrative about the distant and the recent past, it will control the future. For the Party, power and control are all. That is why Big Brother cannot ever be seen to be wrong about anything.
This need for control isn’t just about big issues like world war. It also applies to smaller, more localised things like the chocolate ration.
In part I, chapter 5, there are ‘demonstrations to thank Big Brother for raising the chocolate ration to twenty grammes a week’ (p. 61). The problem, for Winston, with this is that he remembered that only the day before
it had been announced that the ration was to be reduced to twenty grammes a week. Was it possible that they could swallow that, after only twenty-four hours? Yes, they swallowed it. Parsons swallowed it easily with the stupidity of an animal. The eyeless creature at the other table swallowed it fanatically, passionately, with a furious desire to track down, denounce and vaporize anyone who should suggest that last week the ration had been thirty grammes. Syme, too – in some more complex way, involving doublethink – Syme swallowed it. Was he, then, alone in the possession of a memory? (pp. 61–2)
Winston values truth. He resents the Party for its insistence that he swallow lies. He despises people like his neighbour, Parsons, who easily swallow lies because they are too stupid to remember the very recent past and trust the accuracy of their memory of their own experience over what the Party tells them.
Winston cannot question the celebrations about the chocolate rations being ‘raised’ to twenty grammes because doing so would put his life at risk, quite literally. Some gung-ho Party member, like ‘the eyeless creature at the other table’, would report his insubordination and he would be disappeared, tortured, and then killed.
Winston’s feelings towards more intelligent people who accept the lies, like Syme, are more complicated because he understands the intellectual gymnastics they had to perform in order to do so.
Doublethink: 2 + 2 = 5
In Part II, chapter 8, at a meeting at which O’Brien appears to agree with Winston and Julia’s desire to revolt against the Party, he tells Winston he will send him ‘a copy of the book’ (p. 184). The Book is The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism by Emmanuel Goldstein.
Goldstein is used by the Party as a figure of hate for his traitorous beliefs. Receiving this book helps to convince Winston that O’Brien is on his side. In Part II, chapter 9 Winston starts reading the book and long ‘excerpts’ from it are given in the text of the novel.
Over the years, many readers have complained about how these ‘excerpts’ break the flow of the novel. They are qualitatively different because in them Orwell is writing a political text in Goldstein’s voice, not the novel in which the book is being read by Winston.
The Goldstein ‘excerpts’ probably aren’t anyone’s favourite part of Nineteen Eighty-Four, but they serve a purpose. They allow Orwell to explain in plain terms how power works without having to worry too much about how that explanation fits into the broader narrative of the novel.
For example, Goldstein explains how intelligent Party members like Syme can swallow the lie that the chocolate ration has been raised to twenty grammes per week when he knows it has been lowered from thirty grammes:
In Oldspeak it is called, quite frankly, ‘reality control’. In Newspeak it is called doublethink, though doublethink comprises much else as well.
Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. The Party intellectual knows in which direction his memories must be altered; he therefore knows that he is playing tricks with reality; but by the exercise of doublethink he also satisfies himself that reality is not violated. The process has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt. Doublethink lies at the very heart of Ingsoc, since the essential act of the Party is to use conscious deception while retaining the firmness of purpose that goes with complete honesty. To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies—all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth. Ultimately it is by means of doublethink that the Party has been able – and may, for all we know, continue to be able for thousands of years – to arrest the course of history. (p. 223)
Ingsoc is English Socialism – the government of Oceania. The Party stays in power by controlling the narrative. It does this both through having government functionaries like Winston rewrite inconvenient passages in news articles, books, and other records (and by confiscating and destroying old versions), and through the cooperation of good Party members who regularly use doublethink to make their thoughts and memories conform to what the Party wants.
Their control of the narrative extends to controlling or destroying culture that might foster independent thought. In Winston’s conversation with Syme, in Part I, chapter 5, Syme says:
By 2050 – earlier probably – all real knowledge of Oldspeak will have disappeared. The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron – they’ll exist only in Newspeak versions, not merely changed into something different, but actually changed into something contradictory of what they used to be. (p. 56)
The Party cannot leave any trace of other ways of living or thinking. Rewriting literary works in Newspeak isn’t like translating them from one language to another. Even that benign act requires nuance – as anyone who has studied a foreign language knows, it’s not a matter of learning new words for everything; different languages require different linguistic structures and structures of thought. It takes great skill to retain the original meaning in the new language. However, when rewriting an Oldspeak English text in Newspeak, what is required is a firm grasp of the Party line and a willingness to destroy the original.
Before this conversation with Syme and long before reading Goldstein’s book, Winston is well aware of how power works in his world, and it terrifies him. In part I, chapter 3, while he’s submitting to his daily physical fitness, supervised by an instructor via the surveillance screen in his home, Winston worries over his ability to remember things and the Party’s power to obliterate truth:
If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, it never happened – that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death? (p. 37)
Among the events the Party can say ‘it never happened’ are wars with current allies and births of individuals who have been disappeared.
The discord between what Winston knows to be true and what the Party says is true makes him doubt his sanity: ‘He wondered, as he had many times wondered before whether he himself was a lunatic. Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one’ (p. 83).
Nevertheless, Winston knows trying to resist the Party is futile:
In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? […] The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command. (pp. 83–4)
The logic of the Party’s position is that they must be able to compel members to believe anything, no matter how ridiculously illogical it is, simply because they have ordered them to do so. Winston wants to hold onto the idea that external reality exists and that natural laws are immutable, but he feels powerless against the Party, as he is intended to feel. Despite the futility of his position, he carries on writing axioms in his notebook:
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows. (p. 84)
Of course, that truth will not be granted. The Party seeks to maintain power and control at all costs. Even before executing dissenters, they torture them into agreement.
The Party cannot tolerate disagreement.
Truth and history in 2025 America
If you’re thinking the Party sounds as fragile as any modern autocrat, you’re right. I’ve often wondered if any of the people who call for Nineteen Eighty-Four to be banned have an inkling that their real problem with it is that it reveals the inner workings of power. It exposes the true nature of their anti-democratic impulses.
Unlike the Party, the current US administration does not have millions of citizens ready and willing to use doublethink to contort their beliefs to fit, but they have enough to start rewriting history. Quite literally.
In March, Trump issued an executive order (EO) called ‘Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History’. As you might expect, the order is far less concerned with anything most of us would recognise as truth or sanity, and more concerned with promoting a whitewashed American fantasy.
It didn’t take long to find out that ‘a negative light’ means any narrative that doesn’t present European Americans as the saviours of America. The administration doesn’t want talk of how unspeakably horrific chattel slavery was or of how many Native Americans died at the hands of white settlers (in battle, from starvation, or from smallpox spread by deliberately infected blankets). They certainly don’t want to hear anything about heroic efforts (in any field) by women, people of colour, or members of the LGBTQIA+ community.
While I hope plenty who visit the National Parks this year complain about any attempt to whitewash the history presented in them, I know that many will be all too willing to help Trump in his efforts.
The white fragility behind this EO is similar to what prompted Arlington National Cemetery, in March, to scrub ‘from its website information and educational materials about the history of black and female service members’. And it’s why Hegseth’s military is intent on renaming ships and military bases to erase any mention of people of colour, women, and members of the LGBTQIA+ community; see this story on his renaming of the USS Harvey Milk.
White fragility is also behind Trump’s recent calls for professional sports teams in DC and Clevland to revert to their old, racist names.
These clumsy attempts to control the narrative aren’t nearly as effective as what the Party achieves in Oceania. At the rally where Winston is given a copy of Goldstein’s book, the speaker is told, mid-sentence, that the country has switched sides in the war. At the beginning, Eastasia is the ally and Eurasia the enemy, at the end, their positions have reversed: ‘[w]ithout words said, a wave of understanding rippled through the crowd’ and the people accept their new reality (pp. 188–9).
Trump has not elicited that level of obedience from the American people, or even from the legacy media. That doesn’t mean he won’t keep trying or that his and his administration’s lies aren’t damaging.
As Rebecca Solnit argues in ‘Some Notes on the City of Angels and the Nature of Violence ‘ (published in early June, after Trump deployed the National Guard in LA, but before he had Hegseth send in the Marines):
lies are also a kind of violence, violence against the truth, against the compact we have that words describe realities, and we live in a shared reality. Lies are also thefts of our right to know what the speaker knows, sabotage of that shared reality, of meaning itself.
Since we live by ‘the compact we have that words describe realities’, the damage autocrats do to our shared history, our shared reality, is inextricably intertwined with the damage they do to our language.
I’ll end this edition by repeating the lesson from Chapter 9 of Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny: ‘Be kind to our language’. Read, write, and think for yourself. Grant that two and two make four.