I found an article by John Bennett which poses the question, Was Orwell Right? His text, though radical in some paragraphs, lists out many of Orwell's themes in relation to global events. While addressing war, censorship, propaganda, and other issues, Bennett also highlights Orwell's infamous slogan Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.
This helped me return to the basics, in a sense. In all my research, I have been caught up in tangents stemming from China's exploitation of new media to further drug the people with pro-Communist propaganda and weeding out those "radicals" which would use new media as an avenue for human rights. Stemming from propaganda and censorship, however, is a far more basic principle which governs the actions of the Chinese government. Again, Orwell says it best: Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.
For me, the control of history is somewhat distinct from mere censorship; censorship is the way, but the conquest of history is the why. Censorship can erase individuals and events. Entire lifetimes deleted or manipulated. Censorship in China is not to restrict Mr. Chen's privacy or networking space; it is to control Mr. Chen. It is to distort the memory and mind of Mr. Chen, as well as the minds and memories of every other Chinese citizen. When all you hear is support for the government and devotion to the state, what room do you have for complaint? disagreement? rebellion? How can you generate disgusted resentment when, by every account, Tienanmen Square is merely a mausoleum with beautiful grounds?
I don't know if you've seen this but The Congressional-Executive Commission on China, which monitors human rights in China, has a website that talks all about what the Chinese government has done in terms of censorship: http://www.cecc.gov/pages/virtualAcad/exp/
ReplyDeleteIt's pretty thorough. You might be able to find some pretty specific examples to compare to 1984. You can definitely see how they would be able to control thought through censorship.
As I read this post, as well as the first little bit of the Bennett article, my first thought was, well, yes, this is what is done. I took HIST 200, basically a writing class, last semester, and one of the main things I learned was that history is fluid... and not just for other countries. If you trace the Paul Revere story through US history, you find that the presentation of one man was constantly affected by popular intellectual modes of thinking. The Revolutionaries themselves suppressed Revere's role, because they wanted to appear passive, as if they were completely injured victims. It justified their retaliation. I don't know if this helps you, but it is interesting that history is always like this, and not just in China.
ReplyDeleteBy the way, the speaker in Devotional yesterday used that same quote by Orwell. It was the first time I had heard it.