Mike Henry
December 25th 07, 09:55 PM
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. And the Ministry had not only to supply the
multifarious needs of the party, but also to repeat the whole operation at
a lower level for the benefit of the proletariat. There was a whole chain
of separate departments dealing with proletarian literature, music, drama,
and entertainment generally. Here were produced rubbishy newspapers
containing almost n
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. And the Ministry had not only to supply the
multifarious needs of the party, but also to repeat the whole operation at
a lower level for the benefit of the proletariat. There was a whole chain
of separate departments dealing with proletarian literature, music, drama,
and entertainment generally. Here were produced rubbishy newspapers
containing almost n