Monday, January 26, 2015
We Need the Past
Every
year when I would have to take a different history class, there would always be
a student who would ask "why do we have to know this?" and "why
is this relevant now?” the teacher would always answer the same way, "We
need to learn from our mistakes". Learning from your mistakes and not
repeating them is one of the traits of a smart individual. When this is applied
to a country it has an even greater impact. In Oceania, the government is constantly
changing and erasing the past its citizens are not bright enough to realize it.
As this goes on the real past is forgotten even by the officials who ordered
it. Does this make Oceania a smart country?
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This statement is beyond relevant. I've always stood by the saying,"history repeats itself." It does. The reason most of the bad things haven't happened again is because we've learned the outcomes and have done our best to prevent them. Oceania isn't a smart country because they've left the duty of erasing the past to people like Winston, people who will rebel. In their future, more and more people will take similar actions and maybe even go farther. There may be an uprising in Oceania when more people find out the truth and are forced to change it.
ReplyDeleteWhile I agree with Amy's comment, I think that Oceania is an incredibly smart country albeit corrupt and evil. History does repeat itself, and while they change history and falsify the truth in oceania, we can see from the book that the leaders must be sure of precisely what happened in the past. When O'Brien shows Winston the picture of the three criminals that were convicted and confessed to their crimes, the picture proving that those three men were innocent, we can see that nothing is positively destroyed in Oceania. Therefor Big Brother always knows what happened in the past and is therefor able to avoid it in the future, all while feeding the public lies and changing history day after day. We can also see from the book that clearly Oceania's leaders are learning form the past when O'Brien tells Winston the reasons why the Nazi and Soviet Regimes failed, and why Oceania was different, and also how Oceania would, in the end, never be overthrown because they knew why others had failed and they would not make those mistakes in the future. So it is clear that the leaders of Oceania, however corrupt and evil they are, use the past as a stepping stone to their demented success, and they are very meticulous in keeping their country form failing in the ways of the previous "empires." And while the general public cannot learn from the past because they have no history of anything bad ever happening, the central figures in Oceania, whoever they may be, can, and without a doubt do, learn from the past.
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