Rewriting History
The concept of rewriting history is prevalent in 1984. The party changes who they fought wars against and how many boots they made and all sorts of other facts to make it look like the situation is constantly improving. This reminds me of the GM ad that played during the super bowl which claimed that Norway sold more electric cars per capita than the US did, and GM was going to change that. Ignoring that most electric cars sold in both Norway and the US are Teslas, this ad was pretty hypocritical. GM has a long history of sabotaging anything that is not an internal combustion engine car.
In the 90s, California came out with new regulations that forced GM to produce electric cars. GM came out with the EV1, but it only produced 1117 of them, and only leased them to customers. After lobbying to get the regulations repealed, GM recalled all of its EV1s and destroyed them. GM was fearful that electric cars would hurt its business in gas powered cars, and so it intentionally destroyed them.
Now that electric cars have been made fashionable by Tesla, GM has tried to erase its history and re-brand itself. Like the party switching who they are at war against, GM is and has always been an electric car company. Let me know in the comments what instances of corporate revisionism you have noticed.
Along with this, we actually see the opposite a lot too. Usually with actors and the such, where we have a very popular actor everyone loves, then with stuff like the #metoo movement we find out what they actually did. And now instead of once being hated then trying to rewrite history to be loved, we have someone who was greatly loved, and history changes around them to make them hated.
ReplyDeleteKiran, I think that you made a really great point that I had not even considered. It is scary how much we can idolize and look up to public figures without knowing their true backstory or horrendous things that they have done. It is very disappointing to have your idea of someone be completely false from reality. However, I think that it is very important that we are having these conversations today and holding people accountable for their past decisions and words.
DeleteExxonMobil at one point started a campaign to suggest that they were deeply concerned about the environment and had spent at least a thousand dollars or so (haha) making it "even cleaner" (actual lines from a commercial). Yep. Sure.
ReplyDelete