1949

WAR IS PEACE

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

Those were the terrifying slogans of the all-powerful, all-seeing Party in George Orwell's grim, grey totalitarian world of Nineteen-Eighty-Four (TIME, June 20). But the news often brings evidence that Orwell is less a satirist-prophet than a chronicler of the present. In Finland last week, on the tenth anniversary of the country's invasion by Soviet Russia, the Communist Party spoke through Professor Vladimir Kemenov, a visiting. Russian "cultural" delegate. Said Kemenov in Helsinki's Communist Tyoekansan Sanomat:

"Allow me to express my astonishment at seeing in theaters and other places marble tablets and bronze plates immortalizing Finnish soldiers and officers fallen in wars against Soviet Russia. These memorials are inscribed 'Pro Patria.' This is contrary to the truth.

"These men fell in a war of conquest started by the Finnish policy of conquest . . . This is the historical truth."

The past was erased, wrote Orwell, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth.

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