(excerpt from Up the Memory Hole by Rory O'Connor)
"Like many of us, Winston Smith, the protagonist of George Orwell's classic novel 1984, worked in a cubicle. There were three holes in the walls. The last was for the disposal of documents. "For some reason they were nicknamed memory holes," Orwell wrote. "When one knew that any document was due for destruction, it was an automatic action to lift the flap of the nearest memory hole and drop it in, whereupon it would be whirled away on a current of warm air to the enormous furnaces which were hidden somewhere in the recesses of the building."
Smith's job was to alter history -- or, as the official phrase put it, to 'rectify' it. I was reminded last week when the Pentagon ban on allowing us to see images of dead soldiers' homecomings at military bases was briefly broken, and hundreds of photographs of flag-draped coffins were released on the Internet by a Web site dedicated to battling government secrecy.
The Web site is called the Memory Hole."
The Memory Hole
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