The Pietist Schoolman

The Pietist Schoolman

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The Pietist Schoolman
The Pietist Schoolman
How the Past is Destroyed

How the Past is Destroyed

A dystopian warning about history and totalitarianism

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Chris Gehrz
Mar 06, 2025
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The Pietist Schoolman
The Pietist Schoolman
How the Past is Destroyed
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I was probably in high school the first time I read George Orwell’s 1984. I vaguely remember finding it hard to take seriously dystopian warnings about Big Brother and Thought Police, with Communists losing power across Eastern Europe and Fascists threatening no one other than characters in historical movies. In any event, I was planning to become a lawyer, not a history professor, so I’m sure that I didn’t pay attention to what struck me most clearly while teaching the same book to college students last month:

The practice of history is an essential bulwark against totalitarianism.

For in the world of 1984, “the past… had not merely been altered, it had been actually destroyed. For how could you establish even the most obvious fact when there existed no record outside your memory?” It’s a world that horrifies me, but is becoming easier to imagine again, as an American president with a troubling affinity for foreign dictators seems to take the first steps to bring our nation’s past under his control.

Three chapters into 1984, Winston Smith is dreaming about his mother, who “must evidently have been swallowed up in the one of the first great purges of the Fifties.” Though Orwell’s protagonist can’t be sure: “He could not remember what had happened, but he knew in a dream that in some way the lives of his mother and his sister had been sacrificed to his own.” Awoken from his dreaming by the mandatory morning exercises directed from his all-seeing telescreen, Smith keeps

struggling to think his way backward into the dim period of his early childhood. It was extraordinarily difficult. Beyond the late Fifties everything faded. When there were no external records that you could refer to, even the outline of your own life lost its sharpness. You remembered huge events which had quite probably not happened, you remembered the details of incidents without being able to recapture their atmosphere, and there were long blank periods to which you could assign nothing.

While wars between his country and the two other superpowers had been a constant in Winston’s life, it was hard to know the details with any certainty. His younger lover, Julia, could not even recall that Oceania had been at war with Eastasia and allied to Eurasia just four years only, “a furtive piece of knowledge which [Winston] happened to possess because his memory was not satisfactorily under control.” But “to trace out the history of the whole period, to say who was fighting whom at any given moment, would have been utterly impossible, since no written record, and no spoken word, ever made mention of any other alignment than the existing one.”

There’s no written record because the Party employs bureaucrats like Winston to erase or rewrite it. Winston’s job at the Ministry of Truth is to drop any original documents “into the memory hole to be devoured by the flames,” while he set about drafting false new documents that better reflected what the Party wanted people to know about what had been said or done:

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, history becomes a “palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary.”

Originally a 4th century manuscript of the Greek New Testament, this palimpsest was scraped clean in the 12th century and reused to translate works by the theologian and hymn writer known as Ephrem the Syrian - Bibliothèque Nationale/Wikimedia

“Everything faded into mist,” thanks to the Party’s unrelenting war on the preservation of historical evidence. “The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth. Just once in his life he had possessed—after the event: that was what counted—concrete, unmistakable evidence of an act of falsification.” About eleven years earlier, he had accidentally come into possession of an unaltered photograph that disproved the coerced confessions of supposed traitors among the Party leadership: “it was a fragment of the abolished past, like a fossil bone which turns up in the wrong stratum and destroys a geological theory. It was enough to blow the Party to atoms, if in some way it could have been published to the world and its significance made known.” Instead, he threw it into something called the “memory hole,” where it was incinerated.

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