Marty Levine
February 5, 2025
It’s taken less than a month and I am again fixating on George Orwell’s warning that is his novel “1984”
Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past…
Does the past exist concretely, in space? Is there somewhere or other a place, a world of solid objects, where the past is still happening?’
‘No.’
‘Then where does the past exist, if at all?’
‘In records. It is written down.’
‘In records. And- ?’
‘In the mind. In human memories.
‘In memory. Very well, then. We, the Party, control all records, and we control all memories. Then we control the past, do we not?’
In just a matter of days, Donald Trump has begun to make Orwell’s dark work of fiction the reality of the United States.
The New York Times reported on Sunday that the Trump Administration had shut down access to many web pages and scrubbed them of information they see as not in agreement with their beliefs and policy directions. They did not add information and data that would buttress their alternate views but excised anything that might lead you to question their correctness.
More than 8,000 web pages across more than a dozen U.S. government websites have been taken down since Friday afternoon…
The purges have removed information about vaccines, veterans’ care, hate crimes and scientific research, among many other topics. Doctors, researchers and other professionals often rely on such government data and advisories. Some government agencies appear to have removed entire sections of their websites, while others are missing only a handful of pages.
More than 3,000 pages from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, including a thousand research articles filed under preventing chronic disease, S.T.D. treatment guidelines, information about Alzheimer’s warning signs, overdose prevention training and vaccine guidelines for pregnant people (the use of the phrase “pregnant people” could have contributed to its removal).
On the same day we learned that Center for Disease Control Scientists have been instructed to recall scholarly articles so their new bosses can edit them for political correctness. Here’s how Julie Steenhuysen and Nancy Lapid reporting for Reuters described what is now in process.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is seeking to withdraw all papers involving its researchers that are being considered for publication by external scientific journals to allow for a review by the Trump administration, a federal official told Reuters.
The sweeping order came in an email from the CDC’s chief science officer on Friday addressed to all division heads at the agency, the official, who has seen the email, told Reuters.
Inside Medicine published a list of specific words targeted for removal in the communications review, including gender, transgender, LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) and nonbinary. The federal official said that such a list went out from CDC to its divisions.
The Friday withdrawal order involves all manuscripts written or co-written by CDC scientists. If CDC scientists are co-authors on a paper that originated outside of the agency, they are asked to take their names off the paper, the official said.
Just as the disastrous LA wildfires were contained, wildfires that were disastrous because of the impact of the climate changes we have helped bring on, the Trump Administration has chosen to hide what we know from the public
Website managers from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) have ordered staff at multiple agencies to alter or remove pages on their websites that include discussion of the climate crisis, a move that will affect dozens of programs across the department.
Among the programs affected by the changes will be the U.S. Forest Service, which previously included a page on their website about how the climate crisis is contributing to an increase in the frequency and intensity of wildfires.
Try searching on the Department of Justice’s website for Special Prosecutor Jack Smith’s final report on his investigation of Donald Trump’s role in the January 6, 2021 insurrection (Final Report of the Special Counsel Under 28 C.F.R. § 600.8) and you will not find it. It seems to have been removed. As far as your government is concerned history has been forgotten and expunged.
The loss of this information and knowledge has immediate consequences but they are threats with much deeper and longer term meaning.
Individuals face direct harm as the ability to treat their specific ailments may become more difficult. “Public health experts said the removal of such terms threatens their ability to address all kinds of medical needs as they affect different groups, including those with HIV and sexually transmitted diseases.”
The longer-term consequences are even more dire.
When knowledge is erased and begins to be shaped to fit a political ideology, disaster is waiting to happen.
At the height of Josef Stalin’s tyrannical reign in the Soviet Union a quack scientist by the name of Tsofim Lysenko caused starvation and mass death as he wrecked a nation’s agricultural system because of his erroneous view of how living organisms changed and evolved to fit the political line of the Soviet leadership. Here’s how Sam Kean described this bitter picture in a 2017 Atlantic article
Lysenko promoted the Marxist idea that the environment alone shapes plants and animals. Put them in the proper setting and expose them to the right stimuli, he declared, and you can remake them to an almost infinite degree.
To this end, Lysenko began to “educate” Soviet crops to sprout at different times of year by soaking them in freezing water, among other practices. He then claimed that future generations of crops would remember these environmental cues and, even without being treated themselves, would inherit the beneficial traits. According to traditional genetics, this is impossible: It’s akin to cutting the tail off a cat and expecting her to give birth to tailless kittens. Lysenko, undeterred, was soon bragging about growing orange trees in Siberia, according to Hungry Ghosts. He also promised to boost crop yields nationwide and convert the empty Russian interior into vast farms.
Such claims were exactly what Soviet leaders wanted to hear. In the late 1920s and early 1930s Joseph Stalin—with Lysenko’s backing—had instituted a catastrophic scheme to “modernize” Soviet agriculture, forcing millions of people to join collective, state-run farms. Widespread crop failure and famine resulted. Stalin refused to change course, however, and ordered Lysenko to remedy the disaster with methods based on his radical new ideas. Lysenko forced farmers to plant seeds very close together, for instance, since according to his “law of the life of species,” plants from the same “class” never compete with one another. He also forbade all use of fertilizers and pesticides.
Wheat, rye, potatoes, beets—most everything grown according to Lysenko’s methods died or rotted…
Lysenko’s practices prolonged and exacerbated the food shortages. (Deaths from the famines peaked around 1932 to 1933, but four years later, after a 163-fold increase in farmland cultivated using Lysenko’s methods, food production was actually lower than before.) The Soviet Union’s allies suffered under Lysenkoism, too. Communist China adopted his methods in the late 1950s and endured even bigger famines. Peasants were reduced to eating tree bark and bird droppings and the occasional family member. At least 30 million died of starvation.
While this was going on, agricultural productivity, relying on the science that Stalin ignored, in the US was growing. According to the US Department of Agriculture, “total farm production nearly tripled between 1948 and 2017. Even as land and labor used in farming declined, innovations in animal and crop genetics, chemicals, equipment, and farm organization have enabled continuing growth in farm output.”
The assault on reality that has marked the days since January 20th makes this bit of Soviet history no longer a quaint story about how bad Stalin’s dictatorship was. In light of what we are seeing take place around in the rapid, drastic, and dictatorial reshaping of the federal government, Stalin and Lysenko should be a warning to us all.
Making reality fit our personal beliefs makes no sense. Shaping knowledge so it does not challenge our thinking does not give us a better chance of being successful.
Yet the news media reports on this insanity with relative comfort. Our political leaders seem to share with Trump and his crowd a belief that they will be immune from the consequences of their actions. If there are people who will die from a disease that could have been prevented by following the science that is being wiped away, it will certainly not be them. They believe they are immune to climate change or racism or poverty.
And we, indeed, must avoid being deluded into believing that the harm they are doing will not impact us in our comfortable lives. We need to yell, march, and protest in every way we can. To lose reality is too big a price to pay for their desire for power.
