Welcome to 1984.

Miranda Devine comments on what is happening under current Federal Government policies:

 It’s about using language to correct people’s thoughts.

For instance, a friend studying education was astonished to find in a textbook that the new national history curriculum is to require people to use the term “BP”, rather than the traditional “BC”.

BC, of course, was the historical term used to denote the time “before Christ”. This is now deemed an offensive idea, which must be erased from the minds of Australian children. So instead we are to replace it with the nonsensical BP, which stands for “before present”, in an effort to stamp out Christ in the curriculum.

History is ripe for politically correct redesign, as we saw in Sydney City Council’s rewriting of all its official documents to insert the term “invasion”.

And, as the 10th anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks looms, there is even a quarrel over whether Muslims should be mentioned.

Never mind that the men who flew planes into New York’s twin towers were Islamist terrorists bent on jihad against the satanic West. Those inconvenient facts must be sanitised from a colouring book for children, which has drawn the ire of America’s PC brigade.

Nearly sixty two years ago George Orwell wrote this:

“This process of continuous alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films, sound-tracks, cartoons, photographs-to every kind of literature or documentation which might conceivably hold any political or ideological significance. Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct; nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and re-inscribed exactly as often as was necessary.” (p 42)