1984 is now here… we live in a dsytopia… life is meaningless…
I’ve seen plenty of nonfiction books that add some amount of content in the process from the original hard cover release to the eventual paperback release. But apparently Hillary Clinton went the other direction and conveniently excised all of the stuff about her support of the TPP. It’s no secret that, while facing a considerable challenge from Bernie Sanders in the primary contest, Clinton’s views of the TPP flip flopped from supporting it to being against it. She did try to explain away the flip flop by saying that it was about the details, but still, if you’re going to actually change your position, you should own it. Instead, it looks like Clinton and her campaign are simply trying to rewrite history. The Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) first noticed a series of big changes in the paperback edition of Clinton’s book, including excising the support of the TPP — such as two full pages about a conference in El Salvador where she spoke in favor of the agreement.
Source: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160612/08304734689/hillary-clintons-paperback-memoir-deletes-inconvenient-support-tpp-that-was-hard-cover-version.shtml
Okay um sooo… to continue…
…following the assassination of prominent Honduran environmental activist Berta Cáceres in March, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton erased all references to the 2009 coup in Honduras in the paperback edition of her memoirs, “Hard Choices.” Her three-page account of the coup in the original hardcover edition, where she admitted to having sanctioned it, was one of several lengthy sections cut from the paperback, published in April 2015 shortly after she had launched her presidential campaign.
Source: http://cepr.net/blogs/the-americas-blog/hillary-clinton-s-memoir-deletions-in-detail
Okay well first off that’s just all kinds of embarrassing…
Second, who on earth thought that was a good idea? How do you not instantly go “oh geesh if we remove this stuff everybody is going to start talking about how Orwellian that is and oh man what a PR disaster“. Honestly, who thought memory holing this was a good idea???
Third, why is unilaterally editing a published book okay? Isn’t that unethical? I mean here you are presenting a finished work to people and then you’re just unilaterally changing the new copies, removing content, simply because the truth you told earlier is now inconvenient for you…
That is very much like a newspaper changing a story online, altering fundamental facts, without telling users it did that. They are both ethically dubious because they end up distorting the truth (regardless of the editor’s intent, that is the result). It’s like none of these people’s grandfathers ever told them to ‘say what you mean‘.
So for you high schoolers out there, here is your real life example of a ‘memory hole’ from George Orwell’s 1984.
P.S. What I find sad is that it’s an American publisher (Simon & Schuster) that’s enabled Hillary Clinton and company to delete portions of a published work as if it never happened…
P.S.S. Wouldn’t we all selectively edit our lives if we could???
No. We wouldn’t. I’m being facetious. That would be terrible and would erase the entire notion of personal growth. Life would just be a disaster pretending to be wonderful (see we’re back to 1984 again).