Orwell, the 'truth' and a troubling trend

Ronald Reagan famously joked that “the trouble with our liberal friends is not that they're ignorant; it's just that they know so much that isn't so.”

Unfortunately, these days the joke is starting to sound like a broken record  — and it doesn’t just apply to “our liberal friends” either. More and more, we ALL know (or repeat as if we know) so much that isn’t so that I have to wonder whether many of us haven’t fallen victim to what George Orwell called “doublethink,” the ability to substitute one reality for another because it is politically expedient to do so.

As described by Orwell in his famous novel “1984,” the Ministry of Truth works constantly to update the past to bring it into alignment with the ruling party’s current propaganda. They do this through a massive campaign to falsify public records and to delete opposing ideas.

Anything that no longer corresponded with the official version of reality was discarded by employees of the Ministry of Truth by sending it down a chute to “enormous furnaces which were hidden somewhere in the recesses of the building.” These chutes that led to collective amnesia were known as “memory holes,” and if you are starting to have the feeling that what you read and hear in the news no longer corresponds to what you remember, it may be because your old truths have gone down Orwell’s Memory Hole.

Winston Smith, the hero of “1984,” works at the Ministry of Truth, editing newspaper articles so they conform with the needs of the Party. Mind you, he does not work on the articles that will appear in tomorrow’s paper, but the ones that appeared in yesterday’s paper, or last year’s. It is his job to tidy up the past to make the world look like a place where nothing would work without the absolute control of Big Brother to guide us and protect us. And as a faithful apparatchik, Winston Smith is expected to edit history and then promptly forget that he has done so because to recognize his own deceit would mean disloyalty to the Party.

As Orwell explains, "Doublethink lies at the very heart of the Party, 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 them and 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.”

If that doesn’t describe the state of modern political discourse, I don’t know what does.

It is virtually impossible that educated people could sincerely believe some of the things they routinely say, but they sincerely believe they believe it. A case in point from recent history is the lead-up to the Iraq War.

After the Ministry of Truth also known as the Democratic Party got through with it, there has been a common acceptance of the “fact” that President Bush claimed Iraq was responsible for the 9/11 attacks and used that as a justification for war. He didn’t, and yet almost no one bothers to go back and examine the printed record to verify what really happened. Instead, we just listen to the repeated mantra of the major media that “Bush lied and people died,” and start to assume it is true.

This is an ominous national occurrence of doublethink. Millions of people who lived through the same traumatic experience were somehow convinced to shed their collective memory of what happened, and substitute a plausible, yet totally manufactured narrative that better fitted the needs of a political agenda.

In the world of “1984,” such a massive manipulation of reality involved a dedicated bureaucracy in the Ministry of Truth, where workers like Winston Smith located “embarrassing” realities and changed them into “encouraging” falsities. It also had to be understood by the reader to be metaphoric only. There was no way to completely “alter, or, as the official phrase had it, to rectify” everything in print. Yet that was what Orwell, through the genius of his paranoia, was able to convince us took place in the fictional nation-state of Oceania.

“This process of continuous alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films, sound-tracks, cartoons, photographs — to every kind of literature or documentation which might conceivably hold any political or ideological significance. 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.”

In other words, the Ministry of Truth was a fictional version of the Internet, or more specifically, of “Wikipedia” — that ever-changing truth machine that has conveniently replaced the bulky multi-volume “Encyclopedia Britannica” as everyman’s source of established knowledge. And because Wikipedia is entirely digital it actually allows Orwell’s worst nightmare of total information control to come true.

Wikipedia has already insinuated itself into our lives as the main source of information for schoolchildren, casual searchers and yes even newspeople. An instance of a journalist using doublethink can be seen with Soledad O’Brien’s infamous CNN interview with breitbart.com editor Joel Pollak about the critical race theory, Professor Derrick Bell and Harvard Law student Barack Obama.

O’Brien said Obama’s championing of Bell was no big deal because Bell’s critical race theory was just a harmless academic theory about the “intersection of race and politics and the law.” She also denied adamantly that the theory had anything to do with “white supremacy,” as Pollak insisted.

It’s suspected now that her producer was whispering in her ear with the definition she rattled off after Pollak had challenged her. The actual entry at Wikipedia says that critical race theory “is an academic discipline focused upon the intersection of race, law and power.” Not an exact match to O’Brien’s words, but close enough to raise suspicion.

More interestingly, soon after the interview took place, the Wikipedia article on critical race theory was edited to remove a reference to white supremacy and thus to conform with the claims of O’Brien, the media champion of President Obama. It was an interesting example of the “intersection” of media, politics and propaganda, and should make everyone wary of everything they hear reported on CNN, at the very least

Meanwhile, because of the vigilance of conservatives who are wary of Wikipedia, the transparent attempt to alter or “rectify” the Critical Race Theory entry was quickly spotted. The entry was later frozen back to its original content, but how many other transformations of reality on Wikipedia go unnoticed, unacknowledged, and unsuspected?

Frankly, this is a problem that is only going to get worse.

As long as there are “paper” newspapers in hand, someone like me can fact-check the false assertions of the national propaganda machine that George Bush had linked Saddam Hussein to the attacks of 9/11. But once information goes entirely digital, then there is almost no way to assure that the “facts” there today will still be there tomorrow, nor that the yesterday you read about today resembles the yesterday that you yourself lived. Doublethink is about to become doublelife. Everything can be re-invented, and everything inconvenient can be deleted.   

Maybe it already has. As I was researching this column by studying digitized microfilm images of newspapers at www.newspaperarchive.com in search of any claims of “links between Iraq and al-Qaida,” I noticed that I often got the following message:

“We apologize for the inconvenience but the page you are trying to view is not available. When possible, missing or corrupted page files will be replaced as resources allow. Unfortunately we are not able to give a timeframe regarding individual page replacements.”

Could that page have disappeared down the Memory Hole? Only Big Brother knows for sure, and he isn’t talking.