The Ministry of Truth

The Ministry of Truth is where the protagonist of the novel 1984, Winston works. The name of the ministry is ironic because the whole purpose of the ministry itself is to hide the truth from the people in the society. The Ministries role is to go back to old documents and alter information and history essentially to match the claims and actions of Big Brother and the Party. This is done so that no one is able to question the actions of the Party, there is no concrete evidence in order to make a claim against what they say is truth, so therefore the Party's truth is the only possible truth and the people just come to accept it because there is nothing they can do about it. In chapter four we are given an example of what the ministry of truth does exactly. Winston goes to work and is tasked with altering a speech made in the previous year which referred to Comrade Withers. Withers used to be an official of the party but has since been vaporized because he was seen as an enemy of the Party, therefore there must not be any record that praises him as a loyal member. Winston replaces Comrade Withers with a made up person, Comrade Oglivy. Comrade Withers is then referred to as a "unperson" since he no longer exists. 

The Ministry of Truth is deceitful and cunning. It creates lies so that people will not be able to start controversy and start an uprising against Big Brother and the Party. It is act of complete control and takes away basic human rights. This is critiquing Orwell's society by truly showing the dystopian essence of it. It reveals how powerful the Party and Big Brother are and how they do not allow anyone basic rights even as small as the truth. The ministry of truth is just another way for the party to gain power and control yet another aspect of its citizens lives, leaving them to be blind. In the end no one can really remember the originally truth since so many lies have built up over the years and therefore they just accept the Party's truth as reality and learn not to question it. 

It is also critiquing our society, it is showing how corrupt society is and how generally we focus on what we did right and tend to overlook what we did wrong. In our society if we are to succeed once we will often ignore the multiple failures that we went through getting up to that point, only focusing on where we were in the end, and when we look back we will remember that we succeeded because that is what our society has taught us. When we look back on history we tend to remember our victories over all of the bad things that happened because we have been thought to remember the good and push out the bad. The Ministry of Truth is kind of like that, it continues to go back and change history, rewriting its mistakes so that it always appears to be correct. It attempts to create a perfect world by essentially erasing its failures.