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obsession with data boom alongside the ability to convincingly
doctor documents, statistics and photographs. In The Thirties
(1940), a brisk and scathing history of the decade, which was
approvingly reviewed by Orwell, the journalist Malcolm
Muggeridge wrote: “Never before, it may be assumed, have
statistics been so greatly in demand, never before so extrava-
gantly falsified.”
One of Winston’s tasks in the Ministry of Truth is to erase all
trace of the Inner Party member Comrade Withers, now an
unperson, and replace him in the text of one of Big Brother’s
speeches with the entirely fabricated war hero Comrade Ogilvy:
“Comrade Ogilvy, who had never existed in the present, now
existed in the past, and when once the act of forgery was forgot-
ten, he would exist just as authentically, and upon the same
evidence, as Charlemagne or Julius Caesar.” Even lowly Win-
ston, in his own small way, has been granted the power to con-
trol the past and, therefore, the future.uring the 1940s, Orwell believed that the
world was drowning in lies. One way in
which he kept his head above water was to
write a novel that dramatised the ultimate
consequences of totalitarianism’s war on ob-
jective truth. Another was to hold himself to
the highest standards. If he realised that he
had made a factual error in print, then he
was quick to admit it. One small incident epitomises Orwell’s
extraordinary dedication to getting the facts straight, even
when he had no incentive to do so.
In March 1945, Animal Farm was finished and edited, and
Orwell was in Paris, working as a war correspondent. While
he was there, he met Jósef Czapski, a survivor of the Soviet
massacre of tens of thousands of Polish soldiers in the Katyn
forest in 1940. Czapski told him that Stalin’s courage and
leadership had been fundamental to repelling the German in-
vasion of Russia; indeed, the Soviet leader had remained in
Moscow even when he was being urged to flee for his own
safety. In Animal Farm, however, Orwell had made the pig
Napoleon, who represented Stalin, abandon his post during
the Battle of the Windmill. He promptly wrote to his publish-
er, asking for that sentence to be amended: “I just thought the
alteration would be fair to JS.”
Neither Orwell nor Czapski had any reason to be fair to
Stalin. Still, a fact was a fact, and even a fictional porcine ver-
sion of St a l in de ser ved a n ac cu rate ac c ou nt. A s a novel ist, w rit ing
about talking animals or a tyranny of the future, Orwell dis-
played a scrupulous journalist’s commitment to telling the truth.
Abandon that, he
thought, and there’s
no end to what you
could lose.Dorian Lynskey is a journalist and author.
His latest book is The Ministry of Truth : A
Biography of George Orwell’s 1984 (Picador, 2019)imprisoned in Moscow on phony charges of plotting against
Stalin. Winston’s ordeal is thus a hybrid of the experiences of
Orwell, Koestler, Striker and de Beausobre, and probably oth-
er s, too. W hen cit i z en s i n t he S ov iet bloc re ad sa m i z d at c opie s of
Nineteen Eighty-Four, they could not understand how a British
author who had never set foot there could so accurately describe
the society in which they lived. This is how: the careful amalga-
mation of years of research.
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 in-
finitely malleable. 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. To quote one of
the book’s most famous lines: “Oceania was at war with Eura-
sia: therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia.”
The result is a society in which nothing is definitively true – not
even the date. As Winston acknowledges when he starts writing
his clandestine diary, Nineteen Eighty-Four may not even take
place in 1984.
Orwell believed that the status of history itself had been
radically challenged by totalitarianism. In his essay Looking
Back on the Spanish War, written in 1942, he recalled telling
Arthur Koestler that: “History stopped in 1936.” By this he
meant that the Spanish Civil War, as the first conflict of the
totalitarian era, was the first time that rival propaganda ma-
chines made an accurate account of events impossible. “I know
it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies any-
way,” he wrote. “I am willing to believe that history is for the
most part inaccurate and biased, but what is peculiar to our
own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be
truthfully written.”raditionally, historians disagreed about many
things, but there were at least some basic, un-
controversial facts on which they could con-
cur. Totalitarianism, however, sought to
obliterate that neutral territory and make ab-
solutely everything arguable. “The implied
objective of this line of thought,” Orwell
wrote, “is a nightmare world in which the
Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future but
the past. If the Leader says of such and such an event, ‘It never
happened’ – well, it never happened. If he says that two and two
are five – well, two and two are five.”
By anticipating some of Nineteen Eighty-Four’s cr ucia l
phrases and concepts, Looking Back on the Spanish War makes it
clear that the moral impetus for the novel came from the sensa-
tion, first experienced in Spain, that “the ver y concept of objec-
tive truth is fading out of the world”. The 1930s saw a cultural