Ministry of Truth

The Ministry of Truth
In George Orwell’s dystopian novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, there is a ‘Ministry of Truth’ which is responsible for propaganda, historical revisionism, culture and entertainment. Of course, as with the other ministries in ‘Oceania’, the name is a misnomer as the Ministry’s main purpose is misinformation and falsifying historical events so that they agree with Big Brother – it's the place where lies are manufactured.[1]
If Big Brother makes a prediction that turns out to be wrong, the employees of the Ministry correct the record to make it 'accurate' — the intention is to maintain the illusion that the Party is right / absolute. The Party cannot ever seem to change its mind or make a mistake as that would imply weakness; so the Ministry controls the news media by changing history, and changing words in articles about current and past events so that Big Brother and his government are always seen in a good light.
Winston Smith, Orwell’s main character,  has his office, in the Records Department in the Ministry. In the cubicle next to Winston’s is a woman whose sole job it is to track down and delete from the Press the names of people who had been 'vaporized' and are therefore considered never to have existed. The Ministry also has a Fiction Department, with huge printing shops and elaborately equipped studios for faking photographs; and there is a Tele-Programmes Department, with teams of actors specially chosen for their skill in imitating voices, and clerks whose job it is to draw up lists of books and periodicals which are due for recall. There are also vast repositories where the corrected documents are stored (the originals are destroyed); and there are other workers whose task it is to remove as many words as possible from the English language “to reduce people’s ability to think”. And there is a Pornography Section, whose output is solely for the Prols (the proletariat).
The Ministry of Truth is an enormous pyramidal structure of “glittering white concrete rising 300 metres into the air” containing over 3,000 rooms above ground and a similar number below, along with huge incinerators, where documents are destroyed after they are put down ‘memory holes’.[2] On the outside wall there are the three slogans of the Party: ‘WAR IS PEACE’, ‘FREEDOM IS SLAVERY’ and ‘IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH’.

The size of the Ministry of Truth is a testament to the resources that the Government of Oceania puts into manufacturing its own version of reality. Its main role is to help control the population through misinformation, outright lies and lack of information so that the state can maintain total power over the people. [3]
 [Source: Adapted from Wikipedia]

China's 'Ministry of Truth'
Former Chinese censor, Liu Lipeng says that before defecting[4] he worked at the Chinese microblogging site Sina Weibo and later became the head of the censorship department at one of China’s largest online video companies. He estimates that “China’s private sector employs 1-2 million web censors which is almost as many as the CCP [Chinese Community Party] web commentators known as the 50 Cent Army”.
Lipeng says that “collectively these censors and the 50 Cent Army work to suppress free speech by deleting posts authorities don’t want people to see and spreading fake or distorted news." While the 50 Cent Army is paid by the regime, he says that private internet companies have to hire their own web censors to abide by China’s censorship regulations.


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Notes
1    Big Brother is the leader and symbolic figurehead of Oceania, a totalitarian state wherein the ruling Party wields total power over the inhabitants ‘for its own sake’ — the maxim ‘Big Brother is watching you’ is on display everywhere. Big Brother is a synonym for abuse of government power, particularly in respect to mass surveillance and civil liberties. Orwell’s creation of a Ministry of Truth that alters history / misinforms its people mirrors the actions of people like Napoleon and Stalin: upon his conquest of a country, Napoleon would immediately take control of the newspapers; and Stalin set up a vast machine to rewrite history by eg altering photographs and censoring many things in print, and by murdering those considered to be enemies of the state.

2    Senate House at the University of London is said to be Orwell’s model for the Ministry of Truth. During World War II this was where the Ministry of Information was housed, and is where Orwell's wife worked.

3     There a more detailed discussion of Lies & Lying here.

4     Liu Lipeng worked for many years as a Chinese internet censor before defecting to America. He has recently spoken out about how the CCP’s complex system of internet censorship is infiltrating the free world.
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