"History is written by the winners"
- George Orwell
"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.
-George Orwell
Looking at the past 3+ years of the current administration, I am appauled at the extent and pervasiveness of the lying and disinformation. Now, I know that in politics, shading the truth and hiding things is pretty standard fare, but when a person consistently says one thing and the opposite is what happens, how long does it take for the broad base of the public to catch on? I know that there is the constant drumbeat of the Republican media machine, with "reporters" who are little more than PR agents and who constatly present the illusion of the truth while playing down any evidence that might suggest otherwise.
I often look at my fellow citizens of the United States and feel that they are living in a specially scripted fictional novel that bears little resemblance to any thing real. The history we studied in school in the U.S. really did conform to George Orwell's famous quote. The fundamental problem, it seems to me, is at the very core of our system of government. I refer to the pervasive system of secrecy that has existed within the government mostly since World War II. The current administration has used this system to make secret anything that it doesn't want known. But the fact is that the system has grown to such a degree that we do not even know our own history. The history of the past 50 years cannot even be written, because so much information is bound up in secrecy. This to me is of such a drastic and fundamental problem that it dwarfs the abuses of the current administration. For a country that does not even know it's own history, how can there be any kind of future. The realm of history has been removed from public debate and with it the debate on our future and the future of the world.
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