On 8/26/07, Daniel R. Tobias dan@tobias.name wrote:
On 26 Aug 2007 at 09:54:09 -0700, William Pietri william@scissor.com wrote:
I think this is mainly a historical artifact. It's only very recently that articles were even conceivably changeable, and newspapers see themselves as mainly about the new. What has changed here is that access to archives is now orders of magnitude easier. What took hours or days before now takes seconds.
Though, George Orwell anticipated rewritable history when he had the Party in 1984 go through old newspaper archives and actually reprint the old issues with articles conforming to today's party line.
-- == Dan ==
Was this anticipation on Orwell's part? Stalin personally ordered my grandfather disappeared from history archives (grandpa really personally pissed him off, and it escalated over the years) long before Orwell wrote the book, which is, after all about Stalin's Soviet Unioin. And, yes, the Soviets reprinted the old rewritten newspapers and distributed them to the stacks--not that anybody has access to them, anyhow.
KP