[ExI] 1984 and Orwell's Warnings

[Damien Broderick]

At 09:35 AM 5/21/2008 -0700, Lee wrote:

>[1]   Oh dear, did I offend anyone with the Orwellian remark
>         "He who controls the present controls the past"?   We
>         must go back and change what he wrote, [I just did so, fixing
>Lee's typo--DB] just as people
>         have gone back and changed what E.T.Bell wrote in
>         "Men of Mathematics".  1984 should now read
>         "She who controls the present controls the past."

Nobody would recommend that, I think. More likely, it'd be the slightly stuffy:

"One who controls the present controls the past."

or

"Those who control the present control the past."

But since Nineteen-Eighty Four describes a quintessentially 
male-sexist, hierarchical culture, Orwell knew exactly what he was 
representing/impersonating with those words.

Another way to generalize it is to revert to the Latinate form it mimics:

"Who controls the present controls the past."

Damien Broderick
[who finds "politically correct" usually deployed, as one of my 
editors noted, "to justify every sort of loathsome racist, sexist 
remark, as the journalist Fintan O'Toole once wrote."]