Thursday, April 26, 2007

Historical Revisionism and the Legacy of George Orwell

by Mark Weber

During the Second World War, George Orwell wrote a weekly radio political commentary, designed to counter German and Japanese propaganda in India, that was broadcast over the BBC overseas service. His wartime work for the BBC was a major inspiration for his monumental novel, 1984. Very few readers of 1984 know, for example, that Orwell's attack against the perverse double-talk language called Newspeak was based on the author's revulsion against Basic English, an artificial language that Churchill's wartime cabinet wanted the BBC to use in its overseas propaganda. Similarly, Orwell's model for the lying Ministry of Truth was the British wartime Ministry of Information, which censored BBC broadcasts. The shorthand form, Minitrue, was taken directly from the Ministry of Information telegraphic address, Miniform.
Throughout his lifetime, the great English writer continually questioned all "official" or "accepted" versions of history. As early as 1945, just after the end of the war in Europe, he expressed doubts about the widespread stories of "gas oven" exterminations (Notes on Nationalism). George Orwell was a revisionist. He detested officially sanctioned atrocity and hate propaganda. If he were alive today he would certainly be nauseated by the pervasive Holocaust propaganda of our times. And as a staunch lifelong supporter of free speech and open historical inquiry, he would undoubtedly defend the right of revisionist historians to present their challenging views to the world.

It is worth noting that last July's devastating fire-bomb attack against the offices of the Institute for Historical Review, the foremost center of dissident historical inquiry, took place during the year made immortal by 1984. The terrorist attack also forced the rescheduling of the revisionist conference dedicated to Orwell's memory. Symbolically, the July fire-bombing of the Institute was an attack against the spirit of George Orwell in our times. More

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