“I know it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies anyway. I am willing to believe that history is for the most part inaccurate and biased, but what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully written. In the past people deliberately lied, or they unconsciously coloured what they wrote, or they struggled after the truth, well knowing that they must make many mistakes; but in each case they believed that ‘the facts’ existed and were more or less discoverable.”*
George Orwell wrote these words in 1943 during the middle of World War II. We can see Orwell developing the ideas that would be central to his famous novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, in his writings. He wrote that before this time most people agreed upon a ‘considerable body of fact’ and describes how the Encyclopedia Britannica‘s article on World War I used material from British and German sources. Despite strong interpretive disagreements, British and German historians could agree that neutral facts existed. Now (in 1943) Orwell argued totalitarianism has done away with this. He explained:
“Nazi theory indeed specifically denies that such a thing as ‘the truth’ exists. There is, for instance, no such a thing as ‘science’. There is only a ‘German science’, ‘Jewish science’, etc. The implied objective of this line of thought is a nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future but the past. If the Leader says of such and such an event, ‘It never happened’—well it never happened. If he says that two and two are five—well, two and two are five. This prospect frightens me much more than bombs—and after our experiences of the last few years that is not a frivolous statement.”**
If studying history is the not search for “truth” then what is it? What good is ‘science’ if it’s not based on agreed upon data and evidence which different scientists can debate? Who will decide what is ‘real’ history and what is the accurate science? Consensus alone cannot be the way to determine this. Consensus can be bought, cajoled, and even enforced with the barrel of a gun. Most newly-accepted interpretations of historical events once were considered false or even dangerous. Orwell gave an ominous warning:
“Before writing off the totalitarian world as a nightmare that can’t come true, just remember that in 1925 the world of today would have seemed a nightmare that couldn’t come true. Against that shifting phantasmagoric world in which black may be white tomorrow and yesterday’s weather can be changed by decree, there are in reality only two safeguards. One is that however much you deny the truth, the truth goes on existing, as it were, behind your back, and you consequently can’t violate it in ways that impair military efficiency. The other is that so long as some parts of the earth remain unconquered, the liberal tradition can be kept alive. Let Fascism, or possibly even a combination of several Fascisms, conquer the whole world, and those two conditions no longer exist. We in England underrate the danger of this kind of thing, because our traditions and our past security have given us a sentimental belief that it all comes right in the end and the thing you most fear never really happens. Nourished for hundreds of years on a literature in which Right invariably triumphs in the last chapter, we believe half-instinctively that evil always defeats itself in the the long run. Pacifism, for instance, is founded largely on this belief. Don’t resist evil, and it will somehow destroy itself. But why should it? What evidence is there that it does?”***
*George Orwell, ‘Looking Back on the Spanish War’ (1943) in Orwell on Truth (Boston, 2019), p. 83. [Emphasis added]
** Ibid., p. 84. [Emphasis added]
***Ibid., pp. 85-86. [Emphasis added]
