by http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=869
In his novel 1984, George Orwell portrayed a future time in which the explanations of recent events and earlier history are continually changed to meet Big Brother’s latest purpose. Previous explanations disappear down “the memory hole.”
Sound familiar? Any American who pays attention can observe the identical phenomenon occurring in the United States today.
Think about the Bush regime’s changing explanations for the failed U.S. occupation of Iraq. Shortly after Bush’s May 2003 announcement of “mission accomplished,” the mission revealed itself to be very much unaccomplished. Americans were told that the cause of the snafu was a small Sunni insurgency of two or three thousand at the most, inspired by “diehard Baath Party remnants.”
Remember the propagandistic deck of cards identifying the most wanted down to the less wanted? Americans were assured that once Saddam Hussein and his relatives and henchmen were rounded up, our troops would be pelted with the promised flowers instead of roadside bombs.
When the roundups, trials and executions failed to fix the problem, the “diehard” explanation disappeared. A new explanation, with no continuity to the old, took its place.The new explanation was that Syria was allowing foreigners to cross its border into Iraq to commit jihad against the American troops. This explanation lasted until it became all too clear, despite the propaganda, that the “foreign fighters” were remarkably well accepted by, and concealed within, the Iraqi communities that were suffering all the collateral damage of the conflict.
When it came time for the United States to create an Iraqi government, it was evident that it would be one dominated by Shi’ites. Then, for a limited time, it was permissible to recognize that the insurgency was popularly based in the Sunnis.
As the insurgency evolved into what the Iraq Study Group described as a Sunni-Shi’ite civil war with U.S. troops unclear on which side they stood, the Bush regime and the captive media began blaming al-Qaida for the escalating violence. Americans were assured by the Ministry of Truth that there wasn’t a civil war, just outsiders stirring up conflict. This enabled Big Brother to deny that there was a civil war and to revive fear of terrorist attacks in the United States and United Kingdom, the new Oceania.
The al-Qaida explanation was soon discarded into the memory hole. The explanation implied that Oceania’s invasion of Iraq had greatly expanded the ranks and strength of al-Qaida, thus contradicting Big Brother’s claim that his war in Iraq was making Oceanians safe by stamping out terrorism. The al-Qaida explanation had to depart for another reason, as well. Dick Cheney, Israel and the neocons, the rulers of the new Oceania, plan to attack Iran, and so the insurgency in Iraq is now being blamed on it.
The Ministry of Truth has accommodated the latest explanation, just as it did all others before, without remarking on the funeral of the previous explanation. All of a sudden, a new explanation appears and is repeated until it, too, goes down the memory hole.
http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/?p=216