The Memory-Holing of Everything, Even George Orwell

From democracy to vaccines to election results to Orwell himself, the rewriting of the past to fit current attitudes has become an incurable mania

Clockwise from top left: problematic oldthinker George Orwell, a vaccine*, the leader of a democracy, a disappeared candidate

On Monday’s America This Week Walter Kirn read from a bizarre introduction to his 75th Anniversary edition paperback edition of 1984. Written by Harvard-educated author Dolen Perkins-Valdez, it came with a trigger warning:

I had to go looking for the foreword by Perkins-Valdez, a black female writer whose Twitter page features a line from the “discussion questions” portion of her book Take My Hand: “History repeats what we don’t remember.”

In Take My Hand Perkins-Valdez stressed the importance of remembering episodes like the Tuskegee syphilis experiments and the use of the Henrietta Lacks cell line. Her essay about 1984 argues at length that Orwell’s fictional dystopia is misremembered malinformation. She takes issue with this passage:

Nor is there any racial discrimination, or any marked domination of one province by another. Jews, Negroes, South Americans of pure Indian blood are to be found in the highest ranks of the Party, and the administrators of any area are always drawn from the inhabitants of that area. In no part of Oceania do the inhabitants have the feeling that they are a colonial population…

“When I read this,” Perkins-Valdez wrote, “I can’t help but think of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and its publication in the United States just a year after 1984 was published in Britain. In Ellison’s novel, whites don’t see blacks, while in Orwell’s novel, there are no black characters at all. As a contemporary reader, I find myself self-pausing.”

Orwell was a great satirist, but he’d have had a tough time inventing something as clever as a reviewer of 1984, whose protagonist is a professional history-fixer, not seeing the irony in asking for more references to race or colonialism or misogyny to better fit modern political attitudes.

I thought the trigger-warning-introduction was one of those outliers from beyond-wokeville that are good for a laugh but aren’t representative. Wrong! In preparation for the next America This Week I spent much of the week trying to count ideas, words, and people Americans have dropped in the memory-hole in the last 5-10 years. It’s an incredibly long list, beginning with Orwell himself: