In 1984, the Party’s Ministry of Truth has systematically rewritten history so thoroughly that no one can contend with its lies. “All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary. In no case would it have been possible, once the deed was done, to prove that any falsification had taken place.” It’s no exaggeration to say that exactly this process is happening, right before our eyes.
Take, for example, the so-called ‘Massacre Map’, which has been given pride of place on the Australian Museum website. Never mind that the map is riddled with provable historical inaccuracies and downright lies. Simply by virtue of the imprimatur of Australia’s oldest museum, it’s now a certifiable (in every sense of the word) ‘academic source’. From there, it gets cited in academic papers.
“If all records told the same tale – then the lie passed into history and became truth.”
Another lie that’s become ‘truth’ is the so-called ‘Islamic Golden Age’. When this oddity first started to pop up about two decades ago, it seemed like a joke. Despite having a pretty good (indeed university-educated) grasp on the history of science, I’d never heard of it, nor of the myriad of supposed inventions and innovations it attributed to mediaeval Islam. Even the then-recent textbooks on the history of science made no mention of Islam, nor distinctly Arabic names.
It’s defenders would argue that it’s because of ‘the victors writing history’. As it turns out, they’re right – but not in the way they intended. Because, after decades of the Long March through the Institutions, the Marxist left are the victors: and they’re re-writing history like there’s no tomorrow.
But, unlike life in Airstrip One, it’s still possible to prove the falsification had taken place, In this case, the Ground Zero of the lie is, it should surprise no one, Wikipedia. The astonishing zealousness of a single editor has seen more than 87,000 Wikipedia entries altered, falsified and downright fabricated, in the span of just seven years. Like all scientific hoaxes, confecting the hoax is easy – dismantling it far harder. Especially when there’s little will to do so.
And so the tens of thousands of lies remain – and ultimately pass into the ‘academic record’, where, like the ‘Massacre Map’, they get transmuted into a ‘truth’, which is nothing more than a digital tissue of damnable lies.
The editor in question was the pseudonymous ‘Jagged85’, whose systematic rewriting extended from minor trivia to genuinely preposterous claims about the Muslim Middle Ages. According to the investigation, the scale of the vandalism was extraordinary: 87,000 edits over seven years, with bogus claims sometimes accompanied by citations that appeared to support them but did not remotely do so.
His inventions included funnels and sieves, cheese glue, sublimation, flow regulators, feedback control, telescopes, microscopic organisms and even elliptical planetary orbits. Muhammad ibn Musa, it was confidently announced, had discovered gravity between planets. Al-Battani had beaten Einstein to relativity by a millennium. The Brethren of Purity had proposed a heliocentric universe centuries before Copernicus, while Avicenna had formulated momentum as weight multiplied by velocity.
The procedure was simple enough to reproduce elsewhere, which is precisely why it should alarm us. First, propose something that people want to believe. Next, attach a citation that is at least superficially relevant. Then wait for somebody in the media, a textbook, an academic paper or a museum website to copy it without checking. Finally, let Wikipedia editors treat repetition as independent verification and the thing becomes ‘truth’.
The Islamic Golden Age is the perfect example because it flatters both sides. It allows progressives to portray the Muslim world as the great scientific engine of the medieval age while recasting any inconvenient geographical complexity as evidence of Muslim ingenuity. Except that’s about as truthful as assigning the invention of the atomic bomb to Protestantism because the legion of Jewish scientists who made it possible just happened to live in North America.
The inventions of Baghdad, Persia, Jewish communities and the conquered peoples of Syria, Iraq and North Africa are placed beneath a broad Islamic banner. Indian mathematics is appropriated by its Muslim conquerors, who take all the credit. One imagines the Persian scholar Al-Biruni being congratulated in Arabic for inventions made in a thoroughly Persian intellectual milieu. Crediting an ‘Islamic Golden Age’ is not the same as crediting Islam, and certainly not the same as crediting every accomplishment within Muslim-ruled territories to an ethnic or religious uniformity that did not exist.
And yet the false claims remain remarkably durable. One rogue editor need only make the initial insertion, then thousands of subsequent repetitions then give the fabrication the appearance of consensus. This is how the claim that one swallows eight spiders a year became entrenched: it began as an item in a 1993 newspaper columnist’s invented list of urban myths, yet it was repeated so often that checking became socially awkward. And what was deliberately created to be a myth is now cited as ‘fact’.
Wikipedia is the world’s great research convenience, the first and often final stop for students, journalists and increasingly AI systems. Its anonymous custodians make no claim to infallibility, yet its authority is borrowed from an infinitude of sources and its appearance of consensus carries enormous weight.
A fabricated claim needs only one prestigious citation. One official webpage. One academic paper. One television documentary. Then repetition supplies the illusion of confirmation.
And there lies the real victory. Not the invention of an Arabic Einstein, but the creation of a historical record in which evidence of the fraud becomes harder to recover than evidence of the fraud’s victims.
The Ministry of Truth is not merely rewriting history.
It is deleting the receipts.
