He Who Controls the Past Controls the Present; He Who Controls the Present Controls the Future:
This is a paraphrase of a saying in 1984, a story of a futuristic society in which the world has been divided into three superpowers made up of the Soviet Union along with continental Europe and northern Africa; China and the rest of eastern Asia; and the combined Americas and British Empire. Supposedly, these are all Socialistic societies, which were modeled after the Soviet Union and China as of 1948 when George Orwell wrote the book. By extrapolating upon the way things were in the world at the time, this looked like the direction our future was heading.
As it turned out, the superpowers of 1984 had about as much to do with Socialism as the Soviet Union and China had to do with it as of 1948. Rather than being societies where everyone was equal, they were societies in which small groups of people controlled all the resources, brainwashed the public into obeying them, and dragged dissenters away to secret prisons they would never be released from.
My god, why do you keep looking at me like that? I’m not talking about current events! I’m not even talking about history anymore. Now I’m talking about fiction, for Christ’s sake!
Anyway, Winston, the main character, works for the Ministry of Truth. He helps publish the state-run newspaper, and the only newspaper anyone’s allowed to read. At some point during the story, someone realizes they’ve made a mistake in their predictions for the next month’s chocolate rationing. So soldiers and police and government agents have to be sent out all over the country to round up all the newspapers that were printed that day, and they bring them back to the Ministry of Truth to be reprinted, and Winston and everyone else who works for the Ministry of Truth has to work 20 hour shifts for two weeks straight to reprint new versions of that day’s paper along with continuing to print the regular copies of the daily paper. Then when the new papers for June 18th or whatever day it was are finished, the police and the military and all those government agents load them up on trucks and take the new papers back to everyone whose papers were confiscated.
The plan was that whoever controlled the information the public had access to also controlled how that information would affect their perceptions of the world. Whoever controlled the flow of information also controlled the decisions people would be able to make based on that information. By reprinting all the papers from June 18th to say that everyone’s chocolate rations for the following month were going to be decreased instead of increased, the government was spreading information packages that the government never made mistakes. And just in case that wasn’t enough to convince everyone that the government was always right, at the same time the government would be distributing an information package about how the government had lots of soldiers and police and government agents who were ready to come haul away any sources of information that the government didn’t approve of, at a moment’s notice…
Something very similar to this happened in Germany and Japan following World War II. Japanese school officials downplayed the war seriously. If the Japanese killed 300,000 people in Korea, the Japanese school officials would get their history textbooks printed to say something like, “Japanese soldiers killed over 6,000 people in Korea.” Meanwhile, in Germany, the school officials omitted the war from their history books almost completely, and said something about, “It was a really big war,” and then moved on to 1946. People had been having wars in Europe for centuries, so if German school children heard about another war, they could pretty well imagine what happened in this one. Or so they thought…
In this case, there weren’t police and soldiers and government officials marching through the streets to drag away every piece of dissenting information they could find—newspapers and people alike. But a whole lot of people from the generation that lived through the war and then had children after it was over felt like they’d all just made the biggest mistakes of their lives, so they felt that the best way to move on was to not tell their children what had happened and let their children start over from scratch.
But then, some years later, German and Japanese children born after the war got to high school and started traveling abroad on foreign exchange programs. They’d go to other countries to live for a year and go to high school there. There they would learn about World War II, and all the millions of people the Germans and Japanese slaughtered. Then they’d buy books about World War II in their host countries, and take them home and show them to their parents and teachers and say, “What the f*ck is this?!?!”
In the last book I told the story about the five guys who survive the hurricane in Florida, and then someone makes a TV movie about it, and suddenly five White guys turn into two White guys, a Black, an Asian, and a Hispanic, and suddenly they’re all different ages and have all different jobs, and their heroic police officer leader suddenly meets up with a completely fictitious woman who just so happens to be single and about his age, and I told you how all this is necessary to convey the meaning of the story in a two-hour movie. Then earlier in this chapter I told you how all communication always involves some amount of artistic license, because no matter what words you say, your audience is never going to interpret your words exactly the way you meant them.
(For the record, this happens in science too, but not nearly as much as it happens anywhere else. Scientists identified this problem long ago, and ever since then have been very careful to define every single word in their vocabulary as referring to one specific idea or another. Essentially when anyone else communicates in words, they’re trying to paint a picture of an idea in the other person’s mind by anticipating what’s already in the other person’s mind well enough to get the picture the other person sees to come out pretty close to what they had in their own minds. Scientists basically turn their brains into machine shops, and then send each other machine parts with specific instructions of how they’re supposed to be assembled. I could’ve figured out how to write the last book in very specific scientific terms, but I realized there was no point to it, because it would’ve been boring as f*ck and you wouldn’t’ve read it. So if you’d care to take my books to an official scientist and ask whether or not I’m conveying these scientific ideas adequately well, I’m willing to be that he’d tell you that I’m pretty close, and I’m only off by a fairly small margin of error. I’m betting that margin of error is less than you’d care about. So as long as a lot of people understand science a lot better than they did before, and official scientists can’t teach hardly any of those people to within a closer margin of error anyway, my mission will have been a success. Anyway…)
Were the German and Japanese school officials trying to brainwash everyone in their countries into believing that World War II never happened? Or were they trying to do the same thing the parents were trying to do, to get their countries moving in new directions by letting their kids start out with a blank slate? The population of Germany was about 70 million people in 1939, and the land area is about the size of the state of Montana. All told, Hitler is responsible for the deaths of about 45 million people. And I suppose I should add that the population of the world during World War II was less than 3 billion people. And when everyone else in the world ganged up on you and finally bombed your industrial superpower of Montana into submission, it made a real mess of the place. So in 1954, if you drove out to the countryside with your six-year-old son and your four-year-old daughter, and they asked why there were so many bomb craters everywhere, what would you tell them? Some vague response about, “Oh, there was a war and a bunch of things got blown up,” or something like, “Well, kids, right before you were born, an evil dictator figured out how to seize control of our government before anyone could figure out how to stop him, and then he started a war and killed about 50 million people, and we thought he knew what he was doing at first so we helped him, but by the time we realized he was insane everyone in the world was trying to kill us, so we all had to fight for our lives and keep on helping the evil dictator now because we didn’t know what else to do…”? Yeah, good plan. Now your kids are crying in the back seat of your car, feeling guilty for something they didn’t do and feeling like the whole world is out to get them.
What the f*ck are elementary school age children supposed to do with information like that? Having that information or not having it isn’t going to affect any decisions they’ll be able to make in elementary school. Withholding that information from them gave them the chance to grow up with a sense of what the world was like now, not of what the world used to be like. Maybe that information was withheld from them too much, or for too long. I don’t know exactly because I wasn’t there. But today, Germany and Japan are models of peaceful countries, so evidently whatever they did worked out.
But what if the information people learned about in a situation like that did affect their decision-making as adults? What if information like that was withheld from people for their entire lives? What if a lot of them didn’t go away to foreign countries and learn from other people about what their country had done? And what if they hadn’t been defeated in a huge war, so they hadn’t been beaten into submission, and they still posed a threat to other people? Would adults who never learned the information of their past simply repeat the mistakes of their ancestors instead of evolving into a peaceful society?
Terrorism is the act of killing civilians in order to drive their group’s political decision-making through fear. Genocide is the act of killing of people for who they are—not for anything they’ve done. A weapon of mass destruction is a weapon that kills huge numbers of people indiscriminately.
One of my Native American cousins teaches humanities at a Native American high school. So one time I asked him if history classes today were any different than they were when we’d been in school.
“A little bit,” he said. “We are allowed to talk about the Massacre at Wounded Knee now, but we aren’t allowed to talk about it as part of a two hundred year campaign of genocide, which it was.”
As a public school teacher who’s certified by the State of California, he isn’t allowed to put the words “United States” and “genocide” into the same sentence. He can say, “Genocide is the act of killing people because of who they are. People from the United States killed a lot of Native Americans because of who they were.” But he isn’t allowed to put the words any closer together than that.
One trick Colonial Americans used to get rid of Native Americans was to offer to trade good woolen blankets to Native Americans for whatever the Native Americans had to trade. They’d trade lots of blankets to the Native Americans. To the Native Americans, it looked like a great deal. And it was a great deal. For the Colonial Americans, anyway…
The blankets were infected with small pox. These Native American traders took them home to their villages and traded them with the other people there. Pretty soon, everyone in their tribe was dying of small pox. It was the perfect trade for the Colonial Americans, because it saved them a whole lot of soldiers and bullets.
If you give a person a blanket that you know is infected with a terminal disease, specifically for the purpose of killing him and as many others of his people as possible, you are using a biological weapon. You are using a weapon of mass destruction.
But wait a second! Aren’t weapons of mass destruction supposed to be used by evil people from other countries? Of course they are! Of course that’s what you’re supposed to think! It’s really easy to look at someone from another country who supposedly poses a threat to your country and say that his supposed possession of weapons of mass destruction and willingness to use them makes him a threat. But when you’re looking back on your own country’s history, at what your own cultural ancestors did, suddenly it’s a whole different story, ain’t it?
Remember what I said in the last book, how the United States bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki to make the Japanese not dare to fight us any more? And do you remember what I said, about how at least 200,000 Americans were expected to die in the forthcoming land invasion of Japan? Well…
That 200,000 Americans dead number was the number released to the public, and the number people have been quoting ever since. It’s also the number of people who died in Hiroshima instead. In my last book it made a good reference to the fact that the worldwide AIDS epidemic kills as many people as the Hiroshima bomb did, every three weeks.
But was the land invasion or the atom bomb necessary to end the war? Considering the Germans had already surrendered, and the Japanese were the only Axis power left in the war, and that the Soviet Union had announced that it would be joining in the war against Japan, and the United States was bringing most of its military over from Europe to fight the Japanese, and Japan was an island nation with a huge population that depended on importing a lot of supplies from elsewhere and would’ve been easy to surround with a naval blockade, and that the United States was already bombing military targets in Japan and would’ve been able to bomb them a lot more if they had surrounded Japan with a naval blockade, and—oh yeah…
THE JAPANESE HAD ALREADY BEGUN TRYING TO NEGOTIATE A TRUCE THREE MONTHS BEFORE HIROSHIMA AND NAGASAKI WERE BOMBED…
…There are some people in the world who believe that the war could’ve ended differently.
I’ve got a lot more to say about the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but I’ll save it for the next book. For now, let me just say that out of all the ways the Americans had to end the war, they decided to end the war by killing a whole lot of civilians in order to make the Japanese not dare to fight them anymore. When Arabs kill lots of American civilians to try to drive American political decision-making through fear, or Palestinians kill Israeli civilians to try to drive Israeli political decision-making through fear, what’s that called?…
If a country is still a superpower, and its leaders use its public school system to blind its children to the mistakes their ancestors made, will those children grow up to repeat the mistakes of their country’s past?
I guess we’re going to find out, eh?