Christopher Christley Mrs. Simmons English 12 CP 21 February 2023 Mutability of History History is something we all know about; we learn about history from a very young age, learning about 9/11, the holocaust, etc. What we learn is what we know to be true, but what about what we don’t learn? What hasn’t been taught, what’s been hidden from us in fear of us knowing the truth? George Orwell’s 1984 perfectly encapsulates the dangers of the mutability of our history, manipulating peoples’ perceptions and seeing the effects of it today through USSR/Russian History and even the United States history. Why is history so important to us? We understand the concept of learning from our mistakes, but history also shapes our fundamental beliefs and morals. …show more content…
Not only does it outright say history has been destroyed: “Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten …” (Orwell 128). 1984 shows a unique way history can be manipulated through the speech itself. Newspeak in 1984 was the Party’s way of changing communication to restrict how people could talk. Speech is important; many phrases hold some historical significance, for example: “Never Forget” referencing the tragedy of 9/11, or even simple phrases like “Turn a blind eye” referencing events in the Battle of Copenhagen. Eliminating speech eliminates history, or at the very least, limits our knowledge of …show more content…
The USSR was the worst communist regime in history and even competes with Nazi Germany in terms of death count, but I want to focus on something not many know about, the Holodomor. The Holodomor’s meaning as a word says what happened: “Holodomor literally means ‘death by hunger’” (Mohn). While history is inconclusive, many historians have concluded that the Holodomor was a deliberate genocidal famine caused by Stalin. Ukrainians starved to death; many resorted to eating grass and horsehide to survive, and some went to the extreme of cannibalism; however, this was rare, but people would die in the process due to refusing to take practice it. The United States today seems to recognize the Holodomor as a genocide; opening the Holodomor memorial in 2010 in Washington, D.C. Ukraine today has a holiday to commemorate the tragedy on the fourth Saturday of November. Russia, on the other hand, to this day does not even acknowledge the genocide. The USSR and Russia hold the “belief” that the Holodomor was due to poor harvest. The Holodomor has been widely forgotten among the world and especially Russia, to save face. This is almost the exact scenario 1984 lays out, an authoritarian country hiding its horrors to protect