Who Controls The Past In George Orwell's 1984

Winston works in the Records Department in the Ministry of Truth, where his job is to rewrite history according to Party’s agenda. Winston’s job is to “track down and collect all copies of books, newspapers, and other documents which had been superseded and were due for destruction” (). If the Party is able to control history they can eliminate any previous events that may prove harmful to the Party and their agenda. Winston states “if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed— if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’ And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered” (). The Party alters the history of the past so that the altered past is no factually correct and the people living under the Party’s rule will have to perceive the past as true.
When Winston saw “the sight or even the thought of Goldstein produced fear and anger automatically,”() but he does not know why. Winston admitted that it is strange “that although Goldstein was hated and despised by everybody, although every day and a thousand times a day, on platforms, on the telescreen, in newspapers, in books, his theories were refuted, smashed, ridiculed, held up to the general gaze for the pitiful rubbish that they were—in spite of all this, his influence never seemed to grow less ().” He doesn’t even know why his society has the two-minute hate and why he has this great hatred for