Carl%20Sagan%20-%20The%20Demon%20Haunted%20World

Science and Witchcraft
public opinion,' said Josef Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister.
In George Orwell's novel 1984, the 'Big Brother' state
employs an army of bureaucrats whose only job is to alter the
records of the past so they conform to the interests of those
currently in power. 1984 was not just an engaging political fantasy;
it was based on the Stalinist Soviet Union, where the re-writing of
history was institutionalized. Soon after Stalin took power, pictures
of his rival Leon Trotsky - a monumental figure in the 1905
and 1917 revolutions - began to disappear. Heroic and wholly
anhistoric paintings of Stalin and Lenin together directing the
Bolshevik Revolution took their place, with Trotsky, the founder
of the Red Army, nowhere in evidence. These images became
icons of the state. You could see them in every office building, on
outdoor advertising signs sometimes ten storeys high, in museums,
on postage stamps.
New generations grew up believing that was their history. Older
generations began to feel that they remembered something of the
sort, a kind of political false-memory syndrome. Those who made
the accommodation between their real memories and what the
leadership wished them to believe exercised what Orwell
described as 'doublethink'. Those who did not, those old Bolsheviks
who could recall the peripheral role of Stalin in the Revolution
and the central role of Trotsky, were denounced as traitors or
unreconstructed bourgeoisie or 'Trotskyites' or 'Trotsky-fascists',
and were imprisoned, tortured, made to confess their treason in
public, and then executed. It is possible - given absolute control
over the media and the police - to rewrite the memories of
hundreds of millions of people, if you have a generation to
accomplish it in. Almost always, this is done to improve the hold
that the powerful have on power, or to serve the narcissism or
megalomania or paranoia of national leaders. It throws a monkeywrench
into the error-correcting machinery. It works to erase
public memory of profound political mistakes, and thus to guarantee
their eventual repetition.
In our time, with total fabrication of realistic stills, motion
pictures, and videotapes technologically within reach, with television
in every home, and with critical thinking in decline, restructuring
societal memories even without much attention from the
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