Winston Smith was not the only party member that knew about the changing of the past. People from all types of social status understood and obliged by that element in their society. In part two of 1984, Orwell showed the audience how easy it was to change the population’s minds and opinions. During Hate Week, an orator of the Inner Party, who was giving a rousing speech to the people, was handed a sheet of paper informing him that Oceania was now at war with Eastasia, not Eurasia. “He unrolled and read it without pausing in his speech. Nothing altered in his voice or manner, or in the content of what he was saying, but suddenly the names were different. Without words said, a wave of understanding rippled through the crowd. Oceania was at war with Eastasia! The next moment there was …show more content…
This is why Winston is so paranoid about the journal to write in. All he could think about what would happen if he was caught, because the Thought Police would come in the night and he would be vaporized. One way for the Party to prevent these occurrences from happening is to create an easy way to dispose of the documents. Everyone in Oceania is taught at an early age to put all documents into a slot in the wall called a memory hole. Those slots supposedly take the papers to giant furnaces under the buildings to burn them. It could have just been a lie though, because while Winston is being interrogated, O’Brien brings up something that Winston threw in the hole so there was no way O’Brien could have known about that. The Party has flaws like this that are obvious to the reader, but everyone in Orwell’s novel is too afraid to speak up because of fear of being caught. Once again, the Party is in control. Moreover, this regulation shows that the government of Oceania can control the memory of the population by destroying evidence that could substantiate that