'Who controls the present controls the past':

What Orwell's '1984' explains about the twisting of history to control the public

- BY LAURA BEERS Professor of History, American University

When people use the term “Orwellian,” it’s not a good sign. It usually characterises an action, an individual or a society that is suppressing freedom, particularly the freedom of expression.

It can also describe something perverted by tyrannical power.

It’s a term used primarily to describe the present, but whose implications inevitably connect to both the future and the past.

In his second term, President Donald Trump has revealed his ambitions to rewrite America’s official history to, in the words of the Organization of American Historians, “reflect a glorified narrative ... while suppressing the voices of historically excluded groups.”

Such ambitions are deeply Orwellian. Here’s how.

Author George Orwell believed in objective, historical truth. Writing in 1946, he attributed his youthful desire to become an author in part to a “historical impulse,” or “the desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.”

But while Orwell believed in the existence of an objective truth about history, he did not necessarily believe that truth would prevail.

Winners write the history

During World War II, the Nazis broadcast reports on German radio describing nonexistent air raids over Britain.

Orwell knew about those reports and wrote: “Now, we are aware that those raids did not happen. But what use would our knowledge be if the Germans conquered Britain? For the purposes of a future historian, did those raids happen, or didn’t they?”