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:

While Perkins-Valdez merely wrote a foreword bearing the stamp of approval of the Orwell estate, author Sandra Newman in 2023 wrote a whole book at the estate’s request: Julia, a “masterful feminist re-telling of the dystopian classic.” 1984’s male-centric focus apparently irked many, and the estate had been looking “for some time” to tell the story from the perspective of Winston Smith’s lover. Newman, a Bailey Women’s Prize for Fiction winner from my hometown of Boston, was chosen.

In Julia, Winston’s lover re-tells the story from a less problematic perspective, as announced in the opening chapter. “It was the man from Records who began it,” Julia narrates, “him all unknowing in his prim, grim way, his above-it-all oldthink way.” In an effort to expunge 1984 of its real oldthink — Winston’s misogyny, loose use of terms like “jewess,” lack of attention to race or gender, and the identity of its perhaps-cancelable author — Julia had to be rewritten without a protagonist infected with fictional oldthink. As the publisher Granta explained upon the book’s release, Julia understands Oceania “far better than Winston and is essentially happy with her life.”

Before and after.

I wish I could report Julia is something other than unintentional parody that betrays on almost every page how much the original text irritated Newman and how much she yearned to fix it (“It was a treacherous job, reading oldthink all day,” Julia muses). The nutty paranoia the left has always had about 1984 (because conservatives appreciate the implied critique of a deserving Soviet communist target) comes out in the form of a book no conservative could like. It even seems Newman didn’t grasp that Orwell’s “IngSoc,” or English Socialism, was just a nonsense moniker pasted on totalitarianism, and felt a need to defend the “socialism” part. Instead of the bloodthirsty hell of 1984 in which the only non-sociopathic person Winston meets is his lover, Julia is peopled everywhere with well-meaning Oceanians showing their comradely sides.

Take “monitor Atkins,” a “middle-aged Party stalwart” who presides over the “Women’s 21” dormitory and is a “nationality” whose “face was a very deep brown, which fascinated Julia at first” (like a Netflix series, Julia introduces a black woman as a primary positive character within the first nine entertainment minutes). When discussing the rumor that “nationalities” were “merciless at squeezing bribes” from their “white charges,” Julia notes, “Monitor Atkins was nothing like that. She took little gifts with grace, but never ill-treated girls who had nothing to give. She worshipped the Party.”

In this manner Julia plods through rectifying the wrongs of 1984, which lacks such positive role models, replacing oldthink terms like “Negroes” with “nationalities” while depicting racism, LGBT+ themes (a lesbian love interest also clocks in under those first nine minutes), and sexism (demobbed soldiers menace girls on the street, while residential guards are all “blokes” who don’t understand menstruation). Unlike 1984, Julia and Atkins can have conversations questioning the Party without consequence in front of the telescreen, whose “snoops” seem more interested in leering at naked women than hunting thoughtcrime. (Julia is more uncomfortable disrobing in front of the telescreen than betraying her thoughts, which says a lot.) It suggests a kinder, gentler Oceania within which survival or even happiness is possible. At this rate, in twenty years a next-generation Newman will write an Oceania office rom-com about two gender-fluid coverall-wearers called Ministry of Love.

I chuckled at all this, but the Los Angeles Times was blown away. “A feminist take on Orwell’s ‘1984’ reads like the original — only better,” gushed the paper, suggesting the story should be “the new required text on those high-school curricula.” The reviewer noted the book’s last line (“Yes, I will. Yes”) recalls Molly Bloom’s soliloquy from Ulysses, making for an “homage to a different (and truly great) author whose approach to women and sex was utterly unlike Orwell’s.” In 2017, during the peak of the #MeToo era, a book called Wifedom* was published depicting Orwell as a monster who attempted multiple rapes and mistreated his ill and perenially uncredited wife. With such an unsavory author, musn’t we replace or rewrite his book?

I thought it was weird enough that the Orwell estate failed to spot the problem with commissioning a more modern take on a book about the dangers of revising history, but it gets weirder: Julia is written by a censorship advocate. After its release, Newman wrote a Guardian essay about her project that wondered unironically when “satire is dangerous” and speculated on what one might call the proper standard for sifting goodthink from oldspeak. At one point she mentions how much history would have benefited from turning off the infamous Rwandan radio station RTLM, which issued directions for murdering Tutsis:

Even the most passionate free-speech absolutist would find it hard to oppose such a decision – especially with hindsight. But how can we know if a media outlet will ever become this dangerous? When it comes to free speech, where do we draw the line?

It’s probably clear that mockery, however savage, isn’t the red flag we’re looking for. People make nasty jokes all the time. You might laugh while saying you’d like to see your boss thrown into a tank of piranhas, when in reality you would find it harrowing if it really occurred. One distinction that has been widely embraced on the left is that between punching up and punching down…

Punch up good, punch down bad! An easy enough formula, one Orwell failed to heed but Newman tried to follow, both in Julia and her preceding book, The Men. In the latter story, all people on earth with a Y chromosome disappear, leaving “a world of lambs with no wolves.” If Julia is a feminist 1984, The Men is Avengers: Endgame.

One guesses that if a man were to write a novel in which all women disappeared and things suddenly became awesome (for future reference, I just got an idea), it would likely be criticized for the removing-women part. Not The Men. Newman was criticized, but for creating a “terf” fantasy that excluded trans women. “With everyone with a Y chromosome disappearing, those remaining include cis women and trans men, which leaves the novel open to criticism for its focus on biology,” wrote one reviewer.

Newman was among the voices of a movement to drop the word “Orwellian” down the memory hole. When writers like me started describing behaviors like mass surveillance, digital censorship, and canceling as “Orwellian,” it was initially tolerated. The red line was crossed, though, when Senator Josh Hawley invoked the term “Orwellian” after the cancelation of a publishing deal for his book Tyranny of Big Tech, and when Donald Trump, Jr. did it in response to his father being removed from the Internet. Overnight (this was in early 2021) an aggressive backlash campaign against “Orwellian” came. Vox explained “the right made the word an empty cliché.” The New York Times ran “How ‘Orwellian’ Became an All-Purpose Insult,” CNN put out “What Josh Hawley Doesn’t Get About George Orwell,” and Slate published “Orwell Would Be Horrified by the Right Wing’s Use of Orwellian,” among others.

One of my favorites was the Vanderbilt Political Review, which in another unintentionally ironic title (“Why You Should Stop Using The Word ‘Orwellian’”) lashed out against people invoking the term in response to censorship and word-policing:

Book deal cut? Orwellian. Gender neutral language? Orwellian. Curbing the spread of conspiracy theories through policing of content? Orwellian.

With the possible exception of the Hawley episode, each of the instances complained about were obvious examples of 1984-style behavior. When Nancy Pelosi’s new House of Representative rules on gender-neutral language from that same January 2021 period switched out words like “father, mother, son, daughter, brother, sister, husband, wife, father-in-law, or mother-in-law” in House communications for terms like “sibling” or “parent,” that was classic word-destroying Newspeak. Meanwhile the “online conspiracy theories” the Vanderbilt folk insisted needed “curbing” turned out to be videos of people arguing against lockdowns.

These pieces all made the same argument as Newman, who gave plain instructions about when Orwell should and should not be invoked:

With the single word “Orwellian”, a college’s overreaching speech policy, for example, is framed as an existential threat to the free world. But Nineteen Eighty-Four wasn’t a warning against a university’s inclusivity statement. It was a warning about men like Trump and Putin and the violent mass movements they inspire.

1984 was about “men like Trump”! Digital censorship, canceling/unpersoning, first-person destigmatizing language guides, mass surveillance, dividing the world into things problematic and not, none of that was described in 1984 or by Orwell. Even though anyone with even a passing familiarity of the writer knows he lampooned in all directions and that 1984 was heavily influenced by his experience in the British left, the conventional wisdom on “Orwellian” until about ten minutes ago is that it should not be invoked to describe the current moment.

With Trump back in office, “Orwellian” has been let out of its pen again. “We Are All Living in George Orwell’s World Now,” is how the New York Times put it in March. Again, the fact that no one notices the book predicted exactly this phenomenon of history being re-written, erased, then re-written again when convenient is hilarious.

Meanwhile, humdrum examples of memory-holing are all around, all the time. This is from the New York Times yesterday, in an editorial co-written by (ironically) two historians, called “Poland Just Sent an Ominous Signal to the World”:

On Sunday MAGA won in Poland. After voters rejected Trumpist candidates in recent elections in Canada, Australia and Romania — enough to suggest an international anti-Trump bump — Polish voters went the other way.

It’s true that on May 18th in Romania, an EU-friendly “centrist” Mayor of Bucharest named Nicusor Dan defeated George Simion, leader of the Alliance for the Unity of Romanians or AUR, frequently described as a far-right party. There were news stories about it:

As Racket readers know, that result only took place after multiple extraordinary interventions to prevent the likely real winner, a former AUR member and NATO critic named Calin Georgescu, from taking office. Romanian courts annulled last year’s initial round of voting won by Georgescu following accusations of foreign interference, then under pressure from the E.U. banned Georgescu from taking part in the new election. When the May 18th vote electing Dan took place, American press accounts felt obligated to mention the previous cancelations, often in the headlines.

Now time has passed, and even historians write that “voters rejected” the populist candidate in Romania (the courts did it), without mentioning the previous “debacle” or “election fiasco.” It’s as flawless a demonstration of the memory hole as you’ll find. It’s also increasingly the standard in how the world is depicted. Scandals are forgotten, everyone from students to adult consumers of popular culture are discouraged from looking to the “problematic” past, and even core meanings of words are reversed when politically necessary.

In December 2021, the Centers for Disease Control made a change to its definition of “vaccine.” The old one read, “A product that stimulates a person’s immune system to produce immunity to a specific disease, protecting the person from that disease.” The new definition removed “immunity,” reading, “A preparation that is used to stimulate the body’s immune response against diseases.”

The change was made just ahead of the widespread administration of a Covid vaccine that did not produce immunity:

More disturbing than the formal change itself (which prompted a new definition in the Merriam-Webster dictionary, among other things) was the CDC’s explanation, culled straight from the “Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia” playbook. As a CDC spokesperson explained to the McClatchy news service, the previous definition always needed to be changed:

[It could be] interpreted to mean that vaccines were 100% effective, which has never been the case for any vaccine, so the current definition is more transparent...

As the New York Times just changed its mind about “Orwellian,” Donald Trump’s CDC just changed the definition of “vaccine” back to the old version, restoring the concept of “immunity.” Going forward, will the definitions of whole ranges of words depend on who sits in the White House?

I published a piece yesterday that was controversial in here about the Ukraine-Russia war. I was struck by how few of the people advocating for continued support of the war effort in Ukraine brought up one of the original arguments for American intervention, that it was a fight to “defend democracy.” Even Volodymyr Zelensky tweeted in 2022 that a new agreement between the Biden administration and Ukraine was for that purpose (the law was called the “Defend Democracy Lend-Lease Act”):

Ukraine’s “democracy” even without its color revolutions has not exactly been vibrant. Not a harsh grader when it comes to U.S. client states, Freedom House in 2021 rated it a “partly free” country and a “transitional or hybrid” state. Once invaded, though, Ukraine became an emblem of democracy. As The Atlantic put it in 2022, in yet another unintentionally ironic headline, “Russia’s Invasion is Making Ukraine More Democratic.”

On November 3, 2023, European Commission President Ursula van der Leyen addressed the Ukrainian Rada by saying, “It is such an honor to address you in this House of Ukrainian democracy.” A few days later, Zelensky announced that “now, in wartime, when there are so many challenges, it is absolutely irresponsible to throw the topic of elections into society in a lighthearted and playful way,” canceling the following year’s elections.

I wondered how this would be handled in the press. It turned out to not be a problem at all, as Foreign Policy demonstrated, in an all-time Orwellian headline:

In the last decade “democracy” became just a brand name, as undemocratic actions (from domestic spying to jailing of political opponents) were regularly justified in the name of putting down the “threat to democracy.” The Trump administration hasn’t yet begun draping itself in “democracy” to the same degree as its predecessors, but it might easily happen. The issue isn’t ideology, but the way making wholesale changes to almost any term is so much easier in the Internet era. No delicate work is required. From “fascism” to “dictator” to “tyranny,” you just evoke and alter as needed. With AI, it will soon be even easier.

Walter called the trigger-warning intro to the 75th anniversary edition of 1984 the “most 1984-ish thing I’ve ever fucking read.” It’s also up there for me. But at least the book got published. Will we even get a 100th anniversary edition?

*A previous version of this story erroneously titled the book Wifehood.