Reviso wrote:Orwell's passage is ambiguous. If you read the preceding paragraph, you will see that Orwell presents systematic doubt as a means used by "nationalists" to accredit a view of history that absolves them. Now, Orwell may have had ideas behind the head, I don't know.
Indeed he says something like that:
Every nationalist is haunted by the belief that the past can be altered. He spends part of his time in a fantasy world in which things happen as they should — in which, for example, the Spanish Armada was a success or the Russian Revolution was crushed in 1918 — and he will transfer fragments of this world to the history books whenever possible. Much of the propagandist writing of our time amounts to plain forgery. Material facts are suppressed, dates altered, quotations removed from their context and doctored so as to change their meaning. Events which it is felt ought not to have happened are left unmentioned and ultimately denied(6). In 1927 Chiang Kai Shek boiled hundreds of Communists alive, and yet within ten years he had become one of the heroes of the Left. The re-alignment of world politics had brought him into the anti-Fascist camp, and so it was felt that the boiling of the Communists ‘didn't count’, or perhaps had not happened. The primary aim of propaganda is, of course, to influence contemporary opinion, but those who rewrite history do probably believe with part of their minds that they are actually thrusting facts into the past. When one considers the elaborate forgeries that have been committed in order to show that Trotsky did not play a valuable part in the Russian civil war, it is difficult to feel that the people responsible are merely lying. More probably they feel that their own version was what happened in the sight of God, and that one is justified in rearranging the records accordingly.
'Nationalist History' is often an idealized version of history, since they want to use historiography for the purpose of 'teaching the people something' and build a 'positive identity'. So. it may be sanitized at times. But then there is a higher standard of proof for accusations being made. And accusations are often fueled by envy and dislike for opposing and competing figures and groups. That standard has been removed in the case of NS-Germany. And it is being removed for any Western Nation. Accusation serve also as a distraction, there.
What it means is that a 'negative identity' is build, which leads to distancing and disorientation of people. And that may exactly be what is intended by this.
The tactics of a thought-reform program are organized to:
* Destabilize a person's
sense of self,
* Get the person to
drastically reinterpret his or her life's history and radically alter his or her worldview and accept a new version of reality and causality,
* Develop in the person a dependence on the organization, and thereby turn the person into a deployable agent of the organization.
https://culteducation.com/cults-in-our-midst2.html
If biographic information is attacked, people can defend more easily, since they have memory of those events.
With historical information this is more difficult, since people have no memories of their own or only very selective, subjective memories. The info is in books and people believe based on repetition, reputation, authority.
The attack on history is also more indirect, people try to evade it. It's attack on a collective and that can also be split this way getting one part to attack another part. With the Germans the ordinary people were turned against the NSDAP. The Wehrmacht against the SS. One part of the NS-members against the others. It was a collective unfreezing. 1945-1960 most Germans probably thought this would only be a phase. That the Allies and their own quarrelers would leave it after a while. That turned out to be a miscalculations. The "Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit" steeped up afterwards. Eichmann-Trial, which was obviously a propaganda coup. And then the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial. And even the statutes of limitation were dropped to be able to have more trials in the future. The Historikerstreit was settled via the disparagement of Ernst Nolte. Academia did not come up with a repetition of this. And Nolte did put things rather mildly, then.
There were similar attempts via 'truth commissions' in other countries as well. The standards of evidence are lowered in such proceedings. Almost exclusively testimony (story-telling) is used there. And accusations put in circulation are essentially 'irrefutable', which is why burden of proof is on accusers, but this has been dropped now for political cases. With the Holocaust Narratives the 'guilt' is assumed and if they can't even show the remotest evidence, they simply insist that 'the Nazis made it vanish'. At the same time they insist that 'the Nazis were meticulous record keepers'. It's so insane, it is unbelievable that they can get through with this. But it works, because people are cooperating with this. This is power of Myth in action.
