Tolerance for we but not for thee.
Via Daily Mail:
George Orwell devised the word ‘unperson’ to describe someone who had so offended official thought, he or she was vaporised — not just liquidated but wiped from the record for eternity.
That way the unperson couldn’t set a bad example.
All memory of the impertinence would be forgotten, Comrades!
Orwell was satirising Stalin’s Russia, where such practices were all too common.When a Politburo member called Nikolai Yezhov, People’s Commissar for Water Transport, fell out of favour with Joseph Stalin in 1940, he was not just killed.
A photograph of him beside Stalin in happier days was doctored to remove all trace of the unfortunate Yezhov. It was as though he had never existed.