Orwell's Roses

by Rebecca Solnit

In his 1946 essay “The Prevention of Literature,” Orwell writes that lies are “integral to totalitarianism, something that would still continue even if concentration camps and secret police forces had ceased to be necessary.” To have total power is to have power over truth and fact and history and to reach for it over dreams and thoughts and emotions. He continues, “From the totalitarian point of view history is something to be created rather than learned. A totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy, and its ruling caste, in order to keep its position, has to be thought of as infallible. But since, in practice, no one is infallible, it is frequently necessary to rearrange past events in order to show that this or that mistake was not made, or that this or that imaginary triumph actually happened. . . . Totalitarianism demands, in fact, the continuous alteration of the past, and in the long run probably demands a disbelief in the very existence of objective truth.”