Now, the reason this bothers me is thatI just went back and re-read '1984' recently. WHat a fabulous book...and how scary is it that I'm watching things happen in our government that reflect what I'm reading there? It's bad enough that Dubya seems to want to keep us in one conflict or another (Afghanistan, slide right into Iraq, and now he's getting involved in the Isreali/Palestine argument while eyeballing Iran), but, what, is he now trying to play with the mutability of the past that the Party did? I know some of this is just the way the news media in this country likes to play around and look good, but come on, blatantly changing the facts, or just misreporting them, is sad.
And just like Orwell's negative Utopia, the average person is just going along with it, blindly and fervently, accepting whatever thin gruel of lies and stupidity that they are fed and washing it down with a big glass of apathy. As long as they have their telescreen, they're fine...and that telescreen can tell them whatever it likes, because they believe it. "Who controls the future, controls the past; who controls the past, controls the present."
Don't accept, don't settle, and above all DON'T FORGET.