Russian Image Censorship OR History is what is Written

watty

Since history is mostly writing and lately pictures and very lately video, what if you edit them?

This thread is for discussion of the Russian censorship outlined below, so that it won't interfere with the discussion of the kindle/1984 thread
-Sir Digby

watty

People think 1984 was about the Future. It and Animal Farm were in a measure written in reaction to Spanish Civil War.

In a letter to Francis A. Henson of the United Automobile Workers, dated 16 June 1949 (seven months before he died), excerpts from which were reproduced in Life (25 July 1949) and The New York Times Book Review (31 July 1949), Orwell stated the following:

"My recent novel [Nineteen Eighty-Four] is NOT intended as an attack on Socialism or on the British Labour Party (of which I am a supporter) but as a show-up of the perversions ... which have already been partly realized in Communism and Fascism. ...The scene of the book is laid in Britain in order to emphasize that the English-speaking races are not innately better than anyone else and that totalitarianism, if not fought against, could triumph anywhere."

1984 may have been a reversal of the date written, 1948.

I think there are many Consipracies "out there" and most by Goverments and Big Corporations. Mostly the result is to reduce your freedom and Aim is consildate Power, Control and perhaps Profit. (Control & Empire rather than Absolute Profit becomes the prime motivation of large Multinationals).

The "Real" Conspiracies are not the obvious ones. Some Governments may even like those as a distraction from the real Conspiracies.

Winston Smith works as a clerk in the Records Department of the Ministry of Truth, where his job is to rewrite historical documents so they match the constantly changing current party line. This involves revising newspaper articles and doctoring photographs — mostly to remove "unpersons," people who have fallen foul of the party

See http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8166020.stm
Russia has been doing this since 1918!

Natalia Narochnitskaya, a former deputy in the Russian parliament and now a member of the new Historical Truth Commission, says that she is surprised by what she terms the "almost hysterical reaction" in the West.

There is a photo of Lenin with Trotsky "painted out". It was in that BBC article originally and now it's gone!

See http://www.tc.umn.edu/~hick0088/classes/csci_2101/false.html

The above examples illustrate how alteration of images can change history. Unwanted persons are removed from photographs and are thus also removed from history. Their connections to other historical persons(in this case Lenin and Stalin) are literally erased. Fortunately we have access to the original photographs, but who is to say that what we deem to be originals really are authentic? After all, if we had not known about the original photographs, we would have naturally assumed that the falsifications were authentic.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_images_in_the_Soviet_Union

People are Editing history TODAY, in the Real world. You have to ask why?

stevejazzx

watty wrote: »

People think 1984 was about the Future. It and Animal Farm were in a measure written in reaction to Spanish Civil War.


1984 may have been a reversal of the date written, 1948.

I think there are many Consipracies "out there" and most by Goverments and Big Corporations. Mostly the result is to reduce your freedom and Aim is consildate Power, Control and perhaps Profit. (Control & Empire rather than Absolute Profit becomes the prime motivation of large Multinationals).

The "Real" Conspiracies are not the obvious ones. Some Governments may even like those as a distraction from the real Conspiracies.



See http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8166020.stm
Russia has been doing this since 1918!

There is a photo of Lenin with Trotsky "painted out". It was in that BBC article originally and now it's gone!

See http://www.tc.umn.edu/~hick0088/classes/csci_2101/false.html

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_images_in_the_Soviet_Union

People are Editing history TODAY, in the Real world. You have to ask why?

I like the bit about amazon and google.
The Russian bit however is incorrect.
The article says that the main reason for history commision is becasue of the Red Armys atrocities during WW2 and that they were occupiers as much as liberators. This is rubbish frankly. 20 million russians died in WW2. They don't occupy Germany, Poland Czech today and without their 20 million dead solidiers we may all be speaking German.
And the bit about Trotsky beinbg airbrushed out is just more western proporganda. They did far worst things than airbrush people out of photos! What use is it anyway if we have archived recordings of the real photographs? Orwell is one of my heroes however but reading thorugh his letters and memoirs it seems that he wasn't immune to his own countries propoganda.

watty

I think Orwell was a Communist in the 1930s but the Spanish Civil War cured him (The Communists in Spain used the Civil war also as a "cover" for Purges). I think the last page of Animal Farm says in the end there was no difference between the sides of the Civil War.

I'd agree that the Russians, Not the Americans, won the War in Europe.

And 20 Million Russian deaths is a conservative estimate. But how many killed by the Soviet Machine?

There ARE some things the Russians rather we didn't talk about,
But and this deserves threads of its own:
Molotov–Ribbentrop
Ask the Polish about Katyn.
Ask the Finns about Karelia.
Or Berliners about The Wall
Berlin in 1945,
Berlin Airbridge.
1948 Uprising in East Germany
1956 Uprising in Hungry
1968 Uprising in Czechslovakia
The Gulags.
The Mental Hospitals.
The Yalta Agreement.
The Stalin era POW Camps.
How many of their own soldiers they shot or exiled of Returing POW?

Not all Western Propaganda. A lot has changed since 1989. The Russian stuff was just making the point that to Orwell, 1984 was not pure fiction or about the distant future. It was a contemporary warning. A few years later we had McCarthy in USA, a worse disease than "Communism" which had the seeds of its own destruction built in anyway.

However the main point is about Amazon and Google and What Is Happening In The World Of Books.

stevejazzx

Well now this thread is titled 'Russain image censorship' but I don 't see anyone really providing much evidence that any Russian government has employed this method of historical cover up to any large extent.
As I said in previous post becasue of the digital age there are too many records available at the click of a button for anyone to be seriously interested in undertaking the role of airbrushing history. For a start they would need poseession of all copies which is impossible and without this they would just look ridiculous. It seems more likely that some examples of removing people from photgraphs has been blown up (excuse the pun) into a propoganda headline of "Russians try to rewrite history".

By the way if Orwell (who is one of my heros!) was alive I think he'd change his tune a little. I think he'd be equally worked up against commusnism as he would against our supposed democracies here. The UK are as close to his big borther state as Russian or China are. The Chinese are certainly dictatorial and merciless in their rule and they famously have their 'great firewall of china' but their regeime is more restrictive than underhand. The Russians government of course controls nearly all their media but this equalled by the United states which peope forget this becasue there is open broadcasting there. Fox news and Skys news are really just political business machines no different to eastern friends.
Having been many times to Russia I find the peple there a lot more conspiratorial and skeptical about authoirty than your mainstream fmaily is the Uk or Ireland. The Uk however gets closer to the famous novel each year with more repressive yet decidely underhand ways of resticting the movement of people and monitoring their actions.

Anyone else think 1984 wasn't particularly well written?...i read it when i was maybe 16 or 17...read it again there a year or two ago, and wasn't particularly impressed by the style of writing..

And 1st one to comment on my grammer/punctuation is a vegetarian..

watty

This isn't about Orwell. I do think he'd be pretty upset with NuLab. I've read a lot of his books years ago, and he'd not even make my list of favourite Authors, but some of his books did have something worthwhile to say. Some of my favourite books really say nothing

I think the Soviets stopped editing Images already published around the 1950s.

Now people edit Images before publishing. There was some recent ones of extra smoke photoshopped into it (Lebanon?).

Also faked Iranian missile launches to make it look as if there were more that there really was.

How long can you trust the Wayback Machine or Google Cache. DO a File -> Save _> Webpage complete. (Not as MS Web archive). It's amazing the things that get published on Web and then are gone next day apart from Yahoo deleting Geocities.