The following report served as the basis for the video below.
C O N T E N T S
Memory Hole, A Definition
Memory Holing in Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm
The Black Memory Hole of the A.I. Cultural Revolution
Modern Examples of Memory Holing
Memory Hole, a Definition
(NOUN, VERB)
The term memory hole is derived from the prophetic dystopian story 1984 by George Orwell as we’ll see. In the culture war, to memory hole (verb) someone or something is to send them down the memory hole (noun) because they are politically incorrect or otherwise problematic. Sometimes memory holing involves replacing problematic facts with alternative facts. In some cases it is a matter of feelings over facts if those facts are triggering1. These problematic things/people are rectified, that is, they are changed, replaced or simply vaporized altogether and the memory hole is used to wipe away the memory. When people are memory holed, one might say they are unpersoned (verb), that is, rendered an unperson (noun).
Note, however, that the actual person’s physical form is not changed in real life when their appearance is changed in photos and film. If all records of their existence are sent down the memory hole they do not cease to exist or to have ever existed. But as far as '“history”, public record, libraries, museums, archives and so on are concerned, the person has been memory holed and the memory that they were memory holed is memory holed and so on.
Thus, it is as if they never existed. If reality is a collective hallucination as the antagonists in George Orwell’s 1984 and as critical theorists, cultural Marxists, postmodernists and others insist, then they never existed indeed. They assert that if people agree that 2 + 2 = 5 then 2 + 2 = 5. But this does not change the fact that 2 + 2 = 4. If I were to hold up 2 fingers and hold up an additional 2 fingers, I would be holding up 4 fingers no matter what anyone thinks or says. In 1984, the protagonist Winston Smith is tortured into agreeing that his torturer is holding up 5 fingers when in fact he is holding up 4. But this is not enough. He is tortured until he hallucinates that there are 5 upright fingers where there are actually 4.
Those who disagree that reality is independent of what the collective believes it is are invited to go for a hike to a cliff and, when no one is there to witness it, to jump off. If they survive, they can, in their anguish, console themselves that their pain does not exist since it is not part of the collective. If that doesn’t make the pain go away, they can re-evaluate their views of reality.
One is reminded of the story of the Zen student who meditates on his nose until it seems to disappear. When he runs to his master and says that he has discovered that his nose is just an illusion, the master punches him in the nose. As the student cries in pain, the master asks him, “If your nose is not there, what hurts?”.
A male with testicles may insist that they are a woman and that to say that he is a male with testicles is to engage in the hate crime of biological essentialism. But if he accidentally gets hit in the nuts, as he doubles over in pain, one might ask him, “If you don’t have testicles, what hurts?”.
All traces of something or someone may be memory holed but their reality remains indominable, free.
Memory Holing in Orwell’s 1984 & Animal Farm
In George Orwell’s novel 1984 (written in 1948, published in 1949), a memory hole is where things such as books, works of art, newspaper articles, documents, photographs and other records on archive are sent to be destroyed in fire along with the paper trail that would show that they were destroyed.
With this fiction, Orwell was warning readers about these practices being carried out in fact. In his 1984, as in the USSR, Communist China and so on, media such as books, films, records, documents, photos and people were altered or eliminated and records of their existence were erased.
In Orwell’s earlier story, Animal Farm, published in 1945, the animals of a farm carry out a revolution and form a new government with publicly written rules painted broadside on a barn wall for all to see. After some time, some power hungry pigs had these rules altered in secret, under the cover of darkness. For example, “No animal shall drink alcohol” is secretly altered to, “No animal shall drink alcohol to excess”.
“No animal shall kill any other animal” is changed to, “No animal shall kill any other animal without just cause” and “All animals are equal” is changed to, “All animals are equal but some are more equal than others”.
Because they are animals they are not sure if the rule had been different. Soon enough, any memories of any changes cease to exist. This was Orwell’s way of expressing how stupidly cattle-minded people are and how easily they forget the wrong-doings of authority unless they are reminded of it by people whom they try to memory hole for doing so (see Julian Assange, Alex Jones, Edward Snowden).
As Orwell tries to tell us in 1984, people’s minds are filled with trivial distractions like sports, sex and alcohol, leaving no room to question authority or to remember the blatant impeachable violations committed by the government. We all know that Jeffrey Epstein didn’t kill himself and we all know why he was murdered and what sort of sick practices are thereby allowed to continue. Who was brought to justice for this? Who even mentions it on TV? Who marches into the halls of power to demand justice? Who even remembers it happened? In forgetting this, we are allowing children to go on being raped.
Who remembers what Trump actually said about the white supremacists at the Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville? Who ever knew anything other than what he seems to have said in the edited clips that were aired on TV relentlessly? The same applies to endless other things Trump said (see Ivermectin, UV light).
Who remembers what happened at Wounded Knee? The Trail of Tears? Who ever knew about the incident at Oglala? The pre-meditated murders the government committed at Ruby Ridge? The White Water scandal? The Black Water scandal? What about Obama using drones to kill innocent people? Who even knows who Chris Dorner was, let alone what was done to him?
Who remembers COINTELPRO? Union Carbide? The Iran-Contra scandal? Who knows what really happened in the JFK assassination in the Jonestown Massacre, in the Waco massacre? Ben Ghazi? Was Pearl Harbor a false flag? What about 911?
Here are some excerpts from 1984, Section One, IV wherein the memory hole comes into play. The main character, Winston Smith, works in a cubicle at records department of at the Ministry of Truth which was, of course, a branch of government that existed to deceive and manipulate the public.
In the walls of the cubicle there were three orifices. To the right of the speakwrite, a small pneumatic tube for written messages, to the left, a larger one for newspapers; and in the side wall, within easy reach of Winston’s arm, a large oblong slit protected by a wire grating. This last was for the disposal of waste paper. Similar slits existed in thousands or tens of thousands throughout the building, not only in every room but at short intervals in every corridor. For some reason they were nicknamed memory holes. When one knew that any document was due for destruction, or even when one saw a scrap of waste paper lying about, it was an automatic action to lift the flap of the nearest memory hole and drop it in, whereupon it would be whirled away on a current of warm air to the enormous furnaces which were hidden somewhere in the recesses of the building.
…
Winston dialed ‘back numbers’ on the telescreen and called for the appropriate issues of ‘The Times’, which slid out of the pneumatic tube after only a few minutes’ delay. The messages he had received referred to articles or news items which for one reason or another it was thought necessary to alter, or, as the official phrase had it, to rectify. For example, it appeared from the Times of the seventeenth of March that Big Brother, in his speech of the previous day, had predicted that the South Indian front would remain quiet but that a Eurasian offensive would shortly be launched in North Africa. As it happened, the Eurasian Higher Command had launched its offensive in South India and left North Africa alone. It was therefore necessary to rewrite a paragraph of Big Brother’s speech, in such a way as to make him predict the thing that had actually happened…
…
As soon as Winston had dealt with each of the messages, he clipped his speakwritten corrections to the appropriate copy of the Times and pushed them into the pneumatic tube. Then, with a movement which was as nearly as possible unconscious, he crumpled up the original message and any notes that he himself had made, and dropped them into the memory hole to be devoured by the flames.
What happened in the unseen labyrinth to which the pneumatic tubes led, he did not know in detail, but he did know in general terms. As soon as all the corrections which happened to be necessary in any particular number of the Times had been assembled and collated, that number would be reprinted, the original copy destroyed, and the corrected copy placed on the files in its stead. This process of continuous alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films, sound-tracks, cartoons, photographs—to every kind of literature or documentation which might conceivably hold any political or ideological significance. Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct, nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary. In no case would it have been possible, once the deed was done, to prove that any falsification had taken place. The largest section of the Records Department, far larger than the one on which Winston worked, consisted simply of persons whose duty it was to track down and collect all copies of books, newspapers, and other documents which had been superseded and were due for destruction. A number of the Times which might, because of changes in political alignment, or mistaken prophecies uttered by Big Brother, have been rewritten a dozen times still stood on the files bearing its original date, and no other copy existed to contradict it. Books, also, were recalled and rewritten again and again, and were invariably reissued without any admission that any alteration had been made. Even the written instructions which Winston received, and which he invariably got rid of as soon as he had dealt with them, never stated or implied that an act of forgery was to be committed: always the reference was to slips, errors, misprints, or misquotations which it was necessary to put right in the interests of accuracy…
…
Everything faded away into a shadow-world in which, finally, even the date of the year had become uncertain…
…
…in the cubicle next to him the little woman with sandy hair toiled day in day out, simply at tracking down and deleting from the Press the names of people who had been vaporized and were therefore considered never to have existed. There was a certain fitness in this, since her own husband had been vaporized a couple of years earlier. And a few cubicles away…Ampleforth…was engaged in producing garbled versions—definitive texts, they were called—of poems which had become ideologically offensive, but which for one reason or another were to be retained in the anthologies. And this hall, with its fifty workers or thereabouts, was only one sub-section, a single cell, as it were, in the huge complexity of the Records Department. Beyond, above, below, were other swarms of workers engaged in an unimaginable multitude of jobs. There were the huge printingshops with their sub-editors, their typography experts, and their elaborately equipped studios for the faking of photographs. There was the tele-programmes section with its engineers, its producers, and its teams of actors specially chosen for their skill in imitating voices. There were the armies of reference clerks whose job was simply to draw up lists of books and periodicals which were due for recall. There were the vast repositories where the corrected documents were stored, and the hidden furnaces where the original copies were destroyed. And somewhere or other, quite anonymous, there were the directing brains who co-ordinated the whole effort and laid down the lines of policy which made it necessary that this fragment of the past should be preserved, that one falsified, and the other rubbed out of existence.
And the Records Department, after all, was itself only a single branch of the Ministry of Truth, whose primary job was not to reconstruct the past but to supply the citizens of Oceania with newspapers, films, textbooks, telescreen programmes, plays, novels—with every conceivable kind of information, instruction, or entertainment, from a statue to a slogan, from a lyric poem to a biological treatise, and from a child’s spelling-book to a Newspeak dictionary... Here were produced rubbishy newspapers containing almost nothing except sport, crime and astrology, sensational five-cent novelettes, films oozing with sex, and sentimental songs which were composed entirely by mechanical means...
…
…Winston read through the offending article. Big Brother’s Order for the Day, it seemed, had been chiefly devoted to praising the work of an organization known as FFCC…
…
FFCC had suddenly been dissolved with no reasons given…
…
…there had been no report of the matter in the Press or on the telescreen…
…
…people who had incurred the displeasure of the Party simply disappeared and were never heard of again. One never had the smallest clue as to what had happened to them. In some cases they might not even be dead…
…
…some master brain in the Inner Party would select this version or that, would re-edit it and set in motion the complex processes of cross-referencing that would be required, and then the chosen lie would pass into the permanent records and become truth.
On the website, Rare Historical Photos, in How Stalin’s propaganda machine erased people from photographs, 1922-1953, it is written,
Stalin didn’t have Photoshop, but that didn’t keep him from wiping the traces of his enemies from the history books. Using tools that now seem impossibly primitive, Soviet proto-Photoshoppers made “once-famous personalities vanish” and crafted photographs representing Stalin “as the only true friend, comrade, and successor to Lenin, the leader of the Bolshevik Revolution and founder of the USSR.”
One day a politician may have been in favor, the next he could be facing the firing squad as an enemy of the people. In the Soviet Union, people were literally written out of the history books by using photo manipulation techniques.
After he came to power in 1929, Stalin declared war on the Soviets he considered tainted by their connections to the political movements that had come before him.
Beginning in 1934 he wiped out an ever-changing group of political “enemies.” Some 750,000 people died during the Great Purge, as it is now known, and more than a million others were banished to remote areas to do hard labor in gulags.
During the purges, many of Stalin’s enemies simply vanished from their homes. Others were executed in public after show trials. And since Stalin knew the value of photographs in both the historical record and his use of mass media to influence the Soviet Union, they often disappeared from photos, too.
This quasi-artisanal work, one of the more enjoyable tasks for the art department of publishing houses during those times, demanded serious dexterity with the scalpel, glue, paint, and airbrush. In this manner, Stalin could order written out of history such comrades he ultimately deemed disloyal (and who usually wound up executed as).
Sometimes, photo doctoring meant going back to the past to change the historical record, as when Stalin ordered Leon Trotsky, who helped create Communism, eliminated from all photos.
After Trotsky was exiled by Stalin for mounting a failed opposition to his leadership, the revolutionary was snipped, airbrushed, and covered up in countless photographs.
Sometimes, Stalin inserted himself in photos at key moments in history or had photo technicians make him look taller or more handsome. Here in this article, we have compiled a photo collection with such examples.
The Black Memory Hole of the A.I. Cultural Revolution
Styxhexenhammer666 says in The Stalinization of Roald Dahl,
It’s only a matter of time before 1984, in the ultimate twist of irony, has it’s own go with this. Someone will stalinize it and release and edition of it in the future.
There’s a reason why Orwell warned us of these things. Referring to the memory holing and unpersoning carried out in the Stalinization of the U.S.S.R., Styxhexenhammer666 adds,
You think they can’t do it now? Control over speech is more absent now than before but it’s also more technologically possible because people have compacted so much of that speech into a handful of websites.
As I write this, the worlds largest internet archive has been shot through with memory holes2. It is inevitable that those in power will seek to wipe away mass amounts of the past out of ideological bigotry. Webpages come and go. Archives are supposed to be forever. The cultural revolution ruins everything it touches The alteration of archives is as final as the infernal memory hole in 1984.
It will soon go beyond this. In 1984, there is the potential of individuals retaining printed books, photographs and other material that were memory holed. With the advent of A.I. designed by small-minded and biased authoritarians3, we can expect them to carry out a digital Inquisition to hunt down and memory hole people and things on a scale that will rival the cultural revolution in red China.
This is why we need paperback physical copies of books, this is why we need to store things digitally, remotely from any interference by others using removable storage, otherwise it can be stalinized just as easy, remotely, by a tech firm, by a government group that’s connected with the tech firm, potentially, etc., etc., etc.
Modern Examples of Memory Holing
The term is also applied to classical or traditional things, timeless classics, holiday films and songs that are removed/replaced to appease political correctness. We’ll look at some. Please leave a comment to call to our attention to cases we have thus far failed to include.
1984
Animal Farm
Apu
Aunt Jemima
“Baby It’s Cold Outside”
Roald Dahl
Doctor Who
Captain Marvel
Little Mermaid
Mrs. Butterworth Syrup
J.K. Rowling
Scooby Doo
Spiderman characters
J.R.R. Tolkien’s fiction
Tinkerbell
Uncle Ben’s Rice
Vampire Lestat
more coming
This is part of the Culture War Encyclopedia.
Thanks,
Justin Trouble
Laughter my Shield ∴ Knowledge my Steed
Wit I may Wield ∴ but Question my Rede
Liberty my Right ∴ Truth my Sword
Love my Life ∴ Honor my Reward
See the sections on A.I. and ChatGPT and see Leftist AI (ChatGPT) Admits that Gender = Sex by Justin Trouble (upcoming)
See
Internet Archive adds fact checks to explain web page takedowns by Endgadget (November 1, 2020)
How to Remove Your Website From The Internet Archive (2020) by Medium (no date, archived, January 19, 2022)
Guide: How to Delete Your Site from the Internet Archive (Wayback Machine / Archive.org) by Joshua Lowcock (2022)
See footnote 1.