Newspeak – The Original Fake News

“If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, it never happened — that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death? … But where did that knowledge exist? Only in his consciousness, which in any case must soon be annihilated.

“And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed — if all records told the same tale — then the lie passed into history and became truth.

‘Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’ And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered.

Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple.

All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. ‘Reality control,’ they called it in Newspeak, ‘doublethink.’

—George Orwell, in 1984