Winston’s position in the Ministry of Truth is that of forging the past into something unrecognizable to any person with an accurate memory, so that each forgery “becomes” historic fact. One moment, Oceania is and always has been at war with one enemy, the next moment it is and has always been at war with another, and the people of Oceania accept the information as true. It is an exaggeration of a phenomenon that Orwell observed in his own time and reported with true clarity in 1984, that people most readily believe that which they can believe most conveniently.
The novel makes the distinction between truth, the actual issues and circumstances of an event, and fact, what are believed to be the issues and circumstances of an event, and then explores the manipulation of facts in order to control societies for political gain. Orwell was concerned that the concept of truth was fading out of the world. After all, in the arena of human thought processing, what is believed is much more powerful than what is actual. If the leaders of nations are the people dictating the what, where, when, who, and how of history, it is obvious that lies will find their way into the history books, that those lies will be taught to school children, and that they eventually become historical fact.
This concern is quite obvious in 1984. During Orwell’s time as a resistance fighter in Spain, he experienced this rewriting of history first-hand. He noticed that newspaper stories were often inaccurate. There were often reports of battles where no fighting had occurred or no report at all of battles where hundreds of men had died. Orwell conceded that much of history was lies, and he was frustrated by the fact that he believed that history could be accurately written.
This “rewriting” of events is not reserved for totalitarian governments. Even in our own time, politicians for all levels of government, “remember” things differently, and politicians’ nationwide attempt to put their “spin” on events that affect us all. It is as if an event can be stricken from history if the population does not remember it. So in essence, history, if interpreted as being “fact” can be changed. As our culture and our ideology change, history changes. Sometimes these distortions are innocent and innocuous differences of perspective, while at other times, they are extremely deceptive and dangerous.