As Winston acknowledges when he starts writing his clandestine diary, Nineteen Eighty-Four may not even take place in 1984. To quote one of the book’s most famous lines: “Oceania was at war with Eurasia: therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia.” The result is a society in which nothing is definitively true – not even the date. I was brought up in a house full of books, none of them by George Orwell. The Party’s need to appear utterly consistent and infallible requires ceaseless lying on an industrial scale, to the point where citizens can no longer trust their own memories because they cannot be independently verified. A decade of political chaos shaped George Orwell's vision of a totalitarian future, writes David Aaronovitch. The irony of writing about the deployment of historical facts in Nineteen Eighty-Four is that the book describes a world in which historical facts have ceased to exist and the past is infinitely malleable. After opposing Stalin in the 1920s, he was exiled and erased from the official Soviet records, becoming an 'unperson'. Marxist revolutionary Leon Trotsky (born Lev Bronstein) addresses the Red Guard in 1918 during the Russian Civil War.
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