Who Controls The Past?
“And 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’.”
George Orwell’s writing was heavily influenced by his observations during the wars of the 20th century. He was ideologically socialist and deeply involved in politics in his youth in the 1930s. During the Spanish Civil War he volunteered with a Marxist militia to fight fascism. Though he was a staunch supporter of workers’ rights and had ideological sympathies with Communist thought, he quickly grew disillusioned with that project. He learned first hand how the Soviet-backed Communists destroyed their fellow leftists when they failed to comply fully with Stalinist doctrine. The use of political officers to enforce ideology was common practice even then, and the war left him deeply embittered and skeptical of grand theories of human nature; there was a belief at the time, even bubbling up in western societies, that you could remake people by remaking society. Orwell spent much of his remaining life asking if you even should.
Orwell's experiences and observations informed his further writing as he penned Animal Farm and 1984 in the aftermath of World War II. While the world was still trying to understand Soviet Communism, he was grappling with existential questions about the human condition, and his feeling that there was some part of the human psyche that could be manipulated to such a degree that people cease to be people. He saw ideological purity and the repression it demands as fundamentally pathological and incompatible with the flourishing of the human being. He saw earlier than most the evils of totalitarianism and its true source.
While history is written by the victor, there has always been a shadow battle to understand and interpret history. It’s a silent war between think tanks, bureaucracies, historians and the courts. The perfect ideas, neat ideologies, and the myths we use to justify them inevitably collide with the imperfect messiness of reality. Like plans, no philosophy or perspective survives contact with the enemy. Instead they compete to determine what feels right to most people; history is not objective—we decide the lessons we are meant to learn from the events that transpired.
But even though history is subjective and every glorious victory for one force is an ignoble defeat and calamity for another, it is still important that we accept some things as truth. America is a great nation and it has made incredible contributions to the human story, but we have done things in the past we should not be proud of. Updating our thinking is difficult and sometimes requires blood and sacrifice, but it can and does happen here, which is more than can be said for many nations. The process of revising history does continue and over time, through sufficient painful self-reflection, we can find marginally better answers to the questions that vex us today.
Every once in a while, however, there is a faction committed to revising history into a dramatically more flattering light for their side. Some people just can’t process the idea that they might be a member of a society that has at one time committed an atrocity. That faction has no interest in truth—only victory—because for them victory is tantamount to affirmation of their identity. If a faction such as this achieves political power, they can choose to overwhelm society with their rosy and romantic version of the past. If done at sufficient volume and with enough frequency, society can be irrevocably changed.
The essence of authoritarianism, which Orwell was prescient enough to see, is not uniforms, or fealty, or even racial supremacy. It’s an attempt at the obliteration and conquest of the truth. What the authoritarian leaders of the 1930s discovered is that you can turn history itself into a tool of the state with sufficient use of new technologies of mass media. From this follows absolute evil incarnate, each and every time, and no matter the ideology, left or right, that pursues it. An imperfect but real commitment to truth is required for a civilization to advance and prosper.
To control the collective memory of a people through history erases everything a people once was and replaces it with an eternal present. A simple adjustment to the “facts” of the day can justify any action, no matter how obviously stupid and cruel. Power becomes unmoored from the systems that balance against baser human instincts and then the world is one where only the corrupt can flourish.
They speak lies behind the presidential seal brazenly in an attempt to remake reality as it fits the moment. The authoritarian is always stuck in the perpetual now, because their instinct is to satisfy whatever immediate need they have with no instruction from the past and no care for the future. The MAGA movement is now beginning its program of persecution, seeking and destroying fiscally or legally anyone they can who has provided meaningful opposition—and the first to be attacked are those that told the truth.
“Animal Farm” by Herblock 1961
The destruction of history is a sinister plan meant to feed the vanity of a weak man near the end of his natural life at an absolutely staggering cost. They want to wipe away the sins of the past through denial; they assert a revised version of history, and if you fail to comply with that version you could lose your job, money, access, or status. This is what happened to the Republican Party over the last eight years, as men of honor like John McCain were slowly boxed out and removed. The party is truly Republican in name only now. Almost nothing of its previous values of fiscal prudence, personal responsibility, free trade, and peace through strength remain. Whatever you thought of them before, it no longer exists as a viable institution.
Now they want to destroy the Democratic Party. They fire female generals or LGBT intelligence operatives because they are fearful of their loyalty to the regime that is explicitly bigoted and judgemental. Black History Month is removed from the calendar. The Navajo Code Talkers are deleted from the Pentagon archives. The Kennedy Center as an institution of high arts is co-opted and will no doubt be required to put on performances flattering to the regime. Art and culture is not something to be enjoyed but a tool for the affirmation of a faith. These attacks serve to undermine a traditional strength of the political left—both cultural and moral power.
International students have their visas revoked. Universities and institutions of higher learning cut off from federal resources on which they have built a dependency are drained of resources and forced into costly legal battles. They defund science because it undermines the research economies of ideologically hostile states on the coasts that depend upon knowledge economies. They react against the unknown and make no effort to understand it. Loyalty is all that matters to them, just like the Stalinists Orwell warned us about.
If they succeed in their project, the America that is left will be a much darker nation, one where its demons rather than its angels reign supreme. A nation as powerful as ours could withstand a period of stagnation for many years. The Roman Republic started falling the day Caesar crossed the Rubicon, but it existed as a slowly decaying empire for centuries. What followed was a dark age that lasted centuries as society devolved into feudal domains. It took a renaissance to recover what the Europeans had lost.
We can’t lose this battle, because the consequences are too high. The truth is under assault today. Innocent people and often legal residents are already being threatened with deportation. Governors and Congress operate under threat of arrest. MAGA and its acolytes fabricate lies and ignore the Supreme Court. This is a power grab with a dangerous and escalating level of intensity, and if it is not slowed or stopped, democracy as an institution will die in America—and with it the truth, freedom, and prosperity. The bill for our unresolved contradictions and failings is coming due.
But it is possible to hold this force, as overwhelming as it seems, in abeyance. We can reclaim history from those who would rewrite it, and we can do that by celebrating our successes—by appreciating, maybe for the first time for some of us, that we are a great nation. We are learning that lesson now by negation, as the great works we have constructed over centuries are being burned on the pyre. We will know intimately what we have gained and the value of the legacy we have inherited, by what we are at risk of losing. Doing that doesn’t require ignoring our errors—it just means we can learn from both the good and the evil in the American story.
It’s not about endlessly obsessing over our errors—but we should acknowledge them as objective truth, and celebrate the heroes who lead us from a darker path. We should be wary of those who want to pretend that something like slavery or indigenious genocide doesn’t matter anymore or hasn’t caused some of the problems we still grapple with today. We have the impossible task—making people look at history, reflect on it, understand all the things we failed to do, and still love the country anyway.
You do not need to be a historian to appreciate the wisdom of John Adams’ defense of British troops in the courthouse after the Boston Massacre. You don’t need to be a philosopher to appreciate the Federalist Papers as some of the greatest works of civic philosophy in history. You don’t need to be a scholar to know Fredrick Douglass’s invocation of Constitutional principles in arguments which helped unmake the parts of that Constitution that said a black person was worth three-fifths of a human being.
These lessons are encoded in our national DNA, and the contradictions are our experience. To say a nation is based on something evil or on something good is to misunderstand what a nation is. Nations aren’t a person with a moral valence on their own. They are a story replete with myths, heroes, and dragons, all of which is bound up symbolically in a bold flag of red, white, and blue.
These symbols of the republic that flew on the battlefields of Normandy also fly over every school, church, and stadium across the nation. They are our collective inheritance, and it’s a legacy that 13 generations of patriots bled and died for. Orwell's dystopian nightmare can remain only that—if we have the courage to seize a new narrative and write that new chapter. Our story doesn’t need to end with a rancid and evil regime destroying everything we spent two and half centuries building. It could be a story of us defeating it and reconsecrating the nation as something new, bold, and hopeful.
This is our country, our flag, our sacraments, and our inheritance that we fight for. We fight for it by giving the people a vision of a better tomorrow, informed by the better angels of our past and its painful but sweet victories over its daemons.
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