“Who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present, controls the past…
“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 control of the minds of its members, it follows that the past is whatever the Party chooses to make it. It also follows that though the past is alterable, it never has been altered in any specific instance. For when it has
been recreated in whatever shape is needed at the moment, then this new version IS the past, and no different past can ever have existed.”
— from George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four”
Photo credit: By Nevil Clavain – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=76575596
Eric Robert Nolan, Author 