“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” This is one of the most memorable quotes from George Orwell’s 1984 and what came to my mind as I attended this week’s Rose Cafe on ‘fake news’ led by Professor Schwarz.

FAKE NEWS!!! is Donald Trump’s favourite exclamation at anything that doesn’t show him in a favourable light. Yet he is the biggest propagator of ‘fake news’ or more bluntly said, lies. It is also concerning to witness how he tries to rewrite history so that he can never be wrong. Most recently, he deleted his tweets supporting the Alabama primary senate candidate who lost. Trump’s attempt to rewrite the past will probably work with his base but luckily, once something is on the internet, it’s definitely still in existence somewhere. I’m afraid of the time when an authority figure will be able to do things like this to try and change history in a society where people will unthinkingly accept everything they see and hear, a truly Orwellian concept.

However, this is not to say this type of falsities from the government is a new concept. Throughout history, the truth has been bent or neglected in order for a group to push forward their own agenda. Some of the events mentioned in the talk included the vilification of Japanese-Americans in World War II, McCarthyism and the red scare, and the government’s clandestine motivations for the Vietnam War.

What I got out of the talk was the importance of citizens to be engaged politically as well as for news outlets to keep their integrity and report unequivocal truths. The bottom line is that there does exist an objective truth that transcends the human mind, no matter how hard certain groups try misconstrue it. We as the next generation of citizens should try our best to not lose the meaning of truth.