Who controls the past, controls the future

Peter Hitchens, Mail on Sunday

"At first I thought this habit, of portraying the past through a politically correct and generally radical lens, was mildly annoying. Various aspects of it couldn’t be criticised without risking stupid, false accusations of bigotry. So weird things, way out of their right time and place, which would normally have been mentionable became unmentionable. But now I have begun to think it sinister, another aspect of a fast-accelerating cultural revolution in which almost everything I value in this country is being wiped out of existence and memory. Most of our history is simply not taught to most children, so it is easy to introduce rubbish into their minds. 

As George Orwell wrote in words often only partially quoted from 1984: ‘If all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed – if all records told the same tale – then the lie passed into history and became truth. “Who controls the past,” ran the Party slogan, “controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” ’ 

More painfully, he also described his hero, Winston Smith, despairing ‘within twenty years at the most… the huge and simple question, “Was life better before the Revolution than it is now?” would have ceased once and for all to be answerable’ and the new revolutionary rulers could insist that they had improved life ‘because there did not exist, and never again could exist, any standard against which it could be tested…’ 

That is what comes to mind when I see dramas that portray a Britain that never existed, and when important books that I know well, such as War Of The Worlds, are altered and edited to wipe out all memory that the past was different from now. This is what is going on. It is not as trivial as it looks."