In our current age of fake news, myths about the past are taking wider hold

IN A FAMOUS AND OFTEN-QUOTED SCENE IN George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston Smith wakes up one day in the Ministry of Truth and realises the fundamental principle of history: “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” Perhaps less familiar are the words that follow: “Past events... have no objective existence, but survive only in written records and in human memories. The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon. And since the Party is in full control of all records, and in equally full control of the minds of its members, it follows that the past is whatever the Party chooses to make it...”.

It’s a stark warning about the totalitarian control of history, published in 1949, soon after the Nazi terror and during the period of Soviet tyranny. History is always contested, of course. But now, in our current age of fake news, myths about the past are taking wider and wider hold in democracies, too – especially via social media. An estimated 5 billion people use social media, roughly 60 per cent of the planet. These figures would have been unbelievable even 30 years ago. Whatever else history is, it’s certainly dangerous.

That’s obvious in totalitarian societies. When the Nazis wanted to prove their theories of Aryan racial supremacy, they republished the archaeologist Gustav Kosina’s excavations ‘proving’ that Indo-Europeans originated in northern Germany. The book had a preface by Hitler himself. Such ideas underwrote the Nazi genocide. And it’s still very much true today. Take Vladimir Putin’s so-called ‘interview’ with controversial rightwing American commentator Tucker Carlson in February. Russian viewers were encouraged to believe Putin’s jaw-dropping claims about Russian history, which he uses to justify his aggression. The start of the Second World War? You’d never have guessed that it was Poland’s fault, and not a pact made between Stalin and Hitler to carve up Eastern Europe!

But in democracies too, television and social media are increasingly powerful in manipulating opinion through imagined pasts. With hindsight, for example, myths of British history and identity were a major factor in the 2016 Brexit vote. And, with the rise of conspiracy theories such as QAnon, nearly a third of the American people think the 2020 election was stolen.

In Indi