Is history real(part 2)?
The third and most alarming of Orwell’s messages was that of the Ministry of truth. This was where the protagonist of “Nineteen Eighty Four” worked. It was his job to update all newspapers so they would not conflict with the message of the day. Any information that made the state look bad was simply rewritten to make it look like progress was always making things better. If the politics changed and the government allied with a previous enemy, and now call an old ally our enemy, then history was rewritten to make it look like it was always this way. Now people have memories of their own, but in the novel they just took the government’s word for it. I can see that happening now. Look at all of the hysteria we saw earlier this decade wrapped up in the Taliban and Iraq. After 9/11 happened, people had an outright hatred for these regimes, but less than 20 years prior, they saved us in the battle against the Soviet Union. (Rambo 3 was dedicated to the Taliban freedom fighters). Now that we had reason to hate them, it was as if we had always been at war with them. No one cared that we supported and armed Hussein while he committed the atrocities that we damned him for, or that the School of America taught Bin Laden how to train and arm his people. All we cared about was retribution against the brown people who believed in another god. There was evidence everywhere of this blatant scapegoating, but the nationalistic frenzy overtook the masses, and the only thing that mattered was patriotism. History meant nothing. This runamuck patriotism actually convinced people that the American way was best served by taking away our rights. This is in complete opposition to American principals, yet the jingoistic masses would have allowed any regime to come along, so long as they were waving an American flag high enough. In times of fear, history becomes meaningless. This practice of revising history is now overwhelmingly possible, as most of us get our information off of the internet. Most news stories run for a couple of days, and then are deleted. Any good journalist used to spend countless hours pouring over old newspapers that tie in with their story. Now, with the failure of newspapers, there will no longer be hard copies of our history from the time it was happening. It can all be modified and updated. The news organizations of our day play along with this behavior. The news as i see it today, is basically the same thing as The Two Minutes Hate. In the book, citizens were ordered to spend two minutes per day looking at their telescreens, and physically and emotionally hate Emmanual Goldstien, the party’s enemy. This went on until Big brother’s image came on the screen and then people rejoyced, and cried thankful tears of relief. In the book however, Goldstein and Big Brother were the same person. Is it possible that this is happening in the real world? We always have someone to hate. For a while it was OJ, and then it was Michael Jackson, then it Bin Laden, Sadam Huissein, Kruchev, Brittany Spears, Rob Blagoyovich, Berny Madoff, etc… The list goes on forever, and we see about two minutes of the news cycle dedicated to at least one of them every day.
Orwell’s final point came in the middle of the book saying that all revolutionary movements contain their opposite. The revolution that was meant to free the people from tyranny lead to deeper enslavement. It created a system that as Orwell put it “was like a boot stomping on the face of humanity for all time.”
Sorry for the long winded setup, but I feel it is necessary to establish my perspective before I get to my point. My real question does pertain to our reading on truth. How can we know that history is correct? How can I take any statement about what happened before I came along, or was outside of my presence as a factual account? The lecture said that George Washington was president, and this was a fact. How can this be true? If history is written by the victors, then how can we call it fact. By this same rationale I should believe that the great flood happened. It is written down in several history books, so it must be true right? But it is contrary to logic. If the earth was at one time covered by water, then where did it all go? Where did it come from? If one version of history is not true, then doesn’t that make all history suspect? There is no way to be sure, so why should we pay attention to it?
Let’s apply this problem to World War Two. In World War Two, we fought the only real threat that America has ever faced. Hitler’s regime came very close to actually conquering the world. This man and his party are seen as the epitome of evil, and rightly so. The concept of eugenics and ethnic cleansing are among the worst kind of thinking possible, but they are not unique to the Nazi party. Right now, the same thing is happening in Africa and we don’t care. If we are so high minded as to still be pissed off at Hitler and his war machine, then shouldn’t we be up in arms about about the same thing happening in Africa? No, because these groups don’t pose a threat to us. If this is true, then it wasn’t Hitler’s actions that bother us so much, but the fact that he posed a threat. Even now, 60 years after the end of the war, any time we want to call a person evil, we compare them to the Nazis and Hitler. Hitler wasn’t the worst. Stalin killed more people than Hitler did, and most of them were citizens under his rule. Why then don’t we have the same deep rooted hatred for Stalin? After all, Communism was just as great a threat to us as was the Nazi Party. Where does all of this hatred come from? It can’t be his politics. The politics of Nationalist Socialism are in practice in the United States today. Look at Native American tribes. They argue that since they were here first, and had their land taken away, that they are entitled to special rights, and have been granted sovereignty within our own borders. This is Nationalist Socialism, and it is the same argument that the Nazis used.
Another thing that bothers me is our view of the Holocaust. It is seen as criminal to question the account of it that the victors wrote. It is a crime to deny that it happened in many places. We are allowed to question everything. In your class, you have pushed us to question our own existence and the existence of others, but it is not okay to question the Holocaust? Why is this the one thing we have to just take their word for? Any time you even ask a question about the validity of the account, hatred comes out. Severe hatred, and people think you are the worst. This confuses me, because none of the people I talk to were directly effected by the war, but this hatred is so ingrained into our national character that it has become a reaction, rather than a thought or a feeling. Where does the compartmentalize thinking come from that allows us to have such extreme hatred for one group, and let us be arbitrary to the exact same conditions happening in another place?
Do we think for our selves, or are all of our opinions and reactions carefully crafted by outside forces?
Thanks for reading this long winded diatribe. I eagerly await your responses, as these questions/issues have been bothering me for some time.
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