Contrary to what one might think if one has not read Orwell's book, the Minister of Truth (Minitrue) in 1984 is not a minister of propaganda but a minister of the past. His job is not to control information but to control memory. The task of his employees is to produce not fake news but fake memories, i.e. to rewrite the archives themselves, so that they correspond to the intentions of the Party.
Thus, according to the needs of government action, a neighbouring country goes from being a hereditary enemy to a lifelong ally or vice versa.
For dictatorship needs amnesia. No one is more malleable than those whose memories are disposed of, whereas the citizen who retains a memory, and is able to see that he is being lied to, is a puppet.
Such is the role of the Minitrue: to boost voluntary servitude by injecting it with the ‘forgetting’ virus, to shore up the prison without bars of a regime which, to spare itself constraint, brainwashes its citizens.
The Minitrue still exists in a democracy, but it has ceased to be the business of the government; now it is the citizens themselves who, under cover of the law, undertake to control the collective memory.
Now, whether volunteers or not, the Minitrue officials are sometimes statue debunkers, sometimes street debunkers, sometimes film censors, sometimes sensitivity readers whose sole function is not to rewrite archives but entire novels.
Unlike its Orwellian counterpart, which openly desired servitude, the democratic Minitrue is motivated by the best of intentions.
But is not the nature of its methods disolvedin the purity of motives?
Does not the fact that tolerance (not slavery) acts a the compass for rewriting the classics, blacklisting writers and deleting 'offensive' paragraphs?
Does not the certainty of fighting hatred by erasing all traces of its occurrences give the officials of the democratic Minitrue the right to cut out everything they don't like?
Since in a democracy the police are not in charge of morality, the Minitrue has to do the policing itself. That is why it sends digital hordes to protect its dictates when necessary. If the Minitrue attacks Roald Dahl and you dare to take exception to it, you will immediately be branded by bleating sheep with all the vices with which the English writer's books have supposedly been purged. With no officer or judge at his disposal, the Minitrue executes without warning: overnight, a book changes its name, an author becomes non grata, a filmmaker becomes invisible, and lynching replaces prison.
But above all, as it obeys only itself, as there is nothing to guide its mission, the Minitrue suffers, in a democracy, from an insatiable appetite. Agatha Christie, Roald Dahl and Ian Fleming were only hors d'oeuvres. Soon it will be Flaubert, Stendhal, Victor Hugo, Shakespeare, the Marquis de Sade, the Bible, the Koran... His scissors are itching. All this infamy... What a mess! There is so much to do to transform the whole of literature into a postcard.