[Paul van der Vlis]

and which is known in Newspeak as
doublethink.
The alteration of the past is necessary for two reasons, one of which
is subsidiary and, so to speak, precautionary. The subsidiary reason is
that the Party member, like the proletarian, tolerates present-day
conditions partly because he has no standards of comparison. He must be cut
off from the past, just as he must be cut off from foreign countries,
because it is necessary for him to believe that he is better off than his
ancestors and that the average level of material comfort is constantly
rising. But by far the more important reason for the readjustment of the
past is the need to safeguard the infallibility of the Party. It is not
merely that speeches, statistics, and records of every kind must be
constantly brought up to date in order to show that the predictions of the
Party were in all cases right. It is also that no change in doctrine or in
political alignment can ever be admitted. For to change one's mind, or even
one's policy, is a confession of weakness. If, for example, Eurasia or
Eastasia (whichever it may be) is the enemy today, then that country must
always have been the enemy. And if the facts say otherwise then the facts
must be altered. Thus history is continuously rewritten. This day-to-day
falsification of the past, carried out by the Ministry of Truth, is as
necessary to the stability of the regime as the work of repression and
espionage carried out by the Ministry of Love.
The mutability of the past is the central tenet of Ingsoc. Past
events, it is argued, have no objective existence, but survive only in
written records and in human memories. The past is whatever the records and
the memories agree upon. And since the Party is in full control of all
records and in equally full con