Reversing the process

I do not know if “Ebru Timtik is immortal”, as the crowd shouted in Istanbul on Thursday night on hearing that she had died after 238 days on hunger strike. The first step to make sure that cry is not forgotten is to be aware that the very foundation of power in Istanbul – but not only there – is to reinvent the past in order to impart the future.
So, since it has got to start somewhere, I picked George Orwell’s 1984 up again, a book which talks about the present (that of Orwell when he wrote, and to me it looks like ours). Because it is not about putting a stop to a process. It comes down to reversing it.

David Bidussa, social historian of ideas

Translated by Mattia Stefani, student at the Advanced School of Modern Languages for Interpreting and Translation of Trieste University and intern at the newspaper office of the Union of the Italian Jewish Communities.