The Monster Kid tells me he is writing a dystopian alternate history, beginning in 2012, where there is perpetual war. “You know, like in the book where we have always been at war with Eastasia but then they change the news.”
In case you aren’t familiar with it, this is a reference to George Orwell’s 1984, in which the main character works in the “Ministry of Truth,” destroying or rewriting past news that doesn’t reflect the current reality the government wants people to buy into (in this case, an ongoing war with Eurasia ends and a new one with Eastasia begins, and history has to be rewritten to erase the war with Eurasia). Creepy, but in a fictional way, right?
Reality is so much worse. In M.T. Anderson’s YA biography of composer Dmitri Shostakovich, Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad, Anderson has to return to the reader again and again, to explain that there is no good way to untangle the contradictions in the stories about Shostakovich’s life, even the ones he told himself, because of the contortions the truth had to go through to be acceptable to the Stalinist regime and prevent him from suffering a truly horrific ending. Reading this, I realized that 1984 is a pale shadow of the reality of repression and brutality under the Soviet regime and its effects on the arts, literature, and the press, especially under Stalin (and that doesn’t even begin to cover the horrors of the siege of Leningrad). I can’t recommend this book highly enough– it’s an outstanding, if horrific, book for both older teens and adults.
In The Infernal Library, Daniel Kalder asserts that dictators have not only repressed the press and the arts, in some places they even managed to completely erase history. Many of the little provinces and countries that were drawn in to the U.S.S.R. at the beginning of the 20th century had a limited number of literate people, and when the U.S.S.R. dissolved, the president of Turkmenistan completely invented a history and religion for his country, complete with his own cult of personality, and with no press and few additional books available for comparison (I don’t recommend this one for purchase, but the chapters on dictator literature from some of the lesser-known dictators are fascinating, so see if your library has it. Did you know Saddam Hussein wrote romance novels?)
So how can we keep this erasure and rewriting of history from happening, especially in our era of “fake news”? Honestly, it’s pretty hard to do. History usually gets written by the winners, and, just like in 1984, it’s not that difficult to destroy and rewrite the version you want, or to make it impossible to report on anything that could make you look bad. In Future-Proofing the News: Preserving the First Draft of History, Kathleen Hansen and Nora Paul report that even when nobody is deliberately trying to prevent the news from being accurately reported, time and environmental conditions can destroy it. Many of the formats news has been recorded were ephemeral or are now obsolete. Newspapers and magnetic tapes get brittle, hyperlinks break, devices used to record and play back break down. And there is such a quantity of news that many places are unable to store it or make it accessible. Just as a concerted effort needs to be made to repress the press, concerted efforts need to be made to save the news of the past for the present and future. If you are a historian, journalist, archivist, librarian, or otherwise interested citizen, this is worth reading.
We can’t guarantee that primary sources will always be accurate in their reporting. Both in the past and present there have been a multiplicity of sources and points of view, although I’d say that’s truer today than ever before. But sometimes there is only fear shaping the reported facts, as was the case under Stalin, or there is nothing there at all, as in Turkmenistan, and that is terrifying. The free press is not an enemy: it is essential to keeping civic discourse, the arts and literature, and democracy, alive. When you vote tomorrow, keep that in mind.
And please, do vote. Regardless of what you think, your vote matters.
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