1 The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon.
2 We, the Party, control all records, and we control all memories.
3 And so it was with every class of recorded fact, great or small.
4 They were executed, and their fate was recorded in the Party histories, a warning to posterity.
5 To make sure that all written records agree with the orthodoxy of the moment is merely a mechanical act.
6 When there were no external records that you could refer to, even the outline of your own life lost its sharpness.
7 Past events, it is argued, have no objective existence, but survive only in written records and in human memories.
8 And if it is necessary to rearrange one's memories or to tamper with written records, then it is necessary to FORGET that one has done so.
9 Reports and records of all kinds, newspapers, books, pamphlets, films, sound-tracks, photographs--all had to be rectified at lightning speed.
10 And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed--if all records told the same tale--then the lie passed into history and became truth.
11 Throughout recorded time, and probably since the end of the Neolithic Age, there have been three kinds of people in the world, the High, the Middle, and the Low.
12 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.
13 It is not merely that speeches, statistics, and records of every kind must be constantly brought up to date in order to show that the predictions of the Party were in all cases right.
14 It was curious that the fact of having held it in his fingers seemed to him to make a difference even now, when the photograph itself, as well as the event it recorded, was only memory.
15 He might turn the speech into the usual denunciation of traitors and thought-criminals, but that was a little too obvious, while to invent a victory at the front, or some triumph of over-production in the Ninth Three-Year Plan, might complicate the records too much.
16 And presently some master brain in the Inner Party would select this version or that, would re-edit it and set in motion the complex processes of cross-referencing that would be required, and then the chosen lie would pass into the permanent records and become truth.
17 And when memory failed and written records were falsified--when that happened, the claim of the Party to have improved the conditions of human life had got to be accepted, because there did not exist, and never again could exist, any standard against which it could be tested.
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