How Does 1984 Who Control The Past Controls The Future

“Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past” (K34). By manipulating and controlling reality, totalitarian regimes such as the Party in 1984 are able to maintain power by stopping the development of history and leaving the people without a precedent to which they can compare their current condition.
In the novel, Winston Smith’s job is to rewrite documents in order to make sure they agree with the views of the party in that specific moment of time. Through this destruction of documented evidence of the past, “every prediction made by the Party could be shown … to have been correct” (K39). For example, half-way through the Hate Week, Oceania changes its enemy from Eurasia to Eastasia. Since the Party needs to have one constant enemy, this switch leads to the need to rewrite all of the documents that go against this change, making sure that they now support the Party’s position. Despite this constant falsification, Winston states that “... it was not forgery. It was merely the substitution of one piece of nonsense for another” (K40). By altering history so much that “it was never possible nowadays to pin

For Winston, this reality control was truly terrifying, for “if the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say … it never happened - that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture or death?” (K34). All of Winston’s suspicions are confirmed when he reads the book. In this book, it explains how, as a result of the three separate world systems with minimal contact between the three and with the past, “the citizen of Oceania is like a man in interstellar space, who has no way of knowing which is direction is up or down” (K198). Just like with falsification of the past, by having nothing to compare their conditions with, the people living in Oceania can thus be convinced that their lifestyle is better off than that of