Orwellian

George Orwell was a heck of a writer, but unfortunately for all of us he was an even better futurist. In his 1949 novel 1984, Orwell pre-documented many of the things we're living through today. One of them was the memory hole, a place where inconvenient historical documents are sent to disappear once they've been superseded by the new political truth.

It seem that the Junta hasn't just been spying on Americans without a court order, they've been building their own Texas-sized memory hole in the National Archives. According to today's New York Times:

"In a seven-year-old secret program at the National Archives, intelligence agencies have been removing from public access thousands of historical documents that were available for years, including some already published by the State Department and others photocopied years ago by private historians."

So, this must have been dynamite stuff, right? Plots to egg Khrushchev's house or 'pants' Mao Tse-Tung? Actually, not so much.

"The stuff they pulled should never have been removed," he [historian Matthew Aid] said. "Some of it is mundane, and some of it is outright ridiculous."

Among the 50 withdrawn documents that Mr. Aid found in his own files is a 1948 memorandum on a C.I.A. scheme to float balloons over countries behind the Iron Curtain and drop propaganda leaflets. It was reclassified in 2001 even though it had been published by the State Department in 1996.

Another historian, William Burr, found a dozen documents he had copied years ago whose reclassification he considers "silly," including a 1962 telegram from George F. Kennan, then ambassador to Yugoslavia, containing an English translation of a Belgrade newspaper article on China's nuclear weapons program."

But that's what it's all about: taking the mundane and ridiculous details of history out of circulation, leaving behind only the 'truth' of what the Junta political masters want known. To them, there is only their own power, and to prop up that power, they must lie and conceal.

Look at what the Nazis and the communists did when they took power: they re-wrote history. It's a powerful weapon to use against people - by erasing and re-writing their history, you can change people's perceptions of the world - and of themselves.

So they've spent over a million bucks building a secret room, and they've paid 30 staff to go over the files every day for seven years. In the end, odd bits and pieces of history will have disappeared down the memory hole, probably for good.

Oh, and the law that says anything removed to be re-classified must be listed? That's just another inconvenient law that can be ignored. See, the theory is - and this is not an intentional joke, it's just the way they think - that since it shouldn't have been declassified in the first place, it doesn't have to be listed as re-classified (even though it actually, in reality, was reclassified).

So yes, there is a real functioning memory hole in today's US of A. And your executive branch secret police are spending years and millions of dollars to erase the history of your nation to serve the most narrow and ugly political considerations.

Anna K. Nelson, a foreign policy historian at American University, said she and other researchers had been puzzled in recent years by the number of documents pulled from the archives with little explanation.

"I think this is a travesty," said Dr. Nelson, who said she believed that some reclassified material was in her files. "I think the public is being deprived of what history is really about: facts."

Exactly.