Literature and Media Series Entry #4


The disaster of information control in this blog series has now begun. As Winston Smith is employed to rewrite historical documents for The Party, later trained to ‘doublethink’ his reality into accordance with their authority, a dystopia is formed: one where Orwell’s fear about the fading of objective truth has been realised. But it is only this one scenario, and its scale, that are fictional. Such repression of memory has already been enacted: Stalin famously cut people from his photos in his ‘Great Purge’ – something that preceded Orwell’s writing and doubtlessly influenced him. But since then there have been other examples: French filmmakers were only recently unbanned from making films about The Algerian War (1954-62), even though Hollywood had long since gotten to work making films about Iraq. This is a less extreme example, more based on shame than autocracy, but the longevity of the taboo, and the fact that it persisted in tourist-rich Western society, is notable. What is comparable to Stalin’s photo doctoring is China’s ongoing denial of the Tiananmen Square Massacre. Censorship has dug its claws in over decades, but recently we face a new problem: context.

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