memory hole
Where inconveniences vanish
A memory hole is a mechanism for erasing inconvenient facts from the historical record, from George Orwell's novel *1984*, where documents were destroyed by dropping them into pneumatic tubes.
The term now describes any deliberate suppression of information: The scandal went down the memory hole.
To memory-hole something is to make it disappear as if it never existed.
- doublethinkHolding contradictory beliefs simultaneously
- Big BrotherTotalitarian surveillance authority
- thought policeSuppressors of forbidden beliefs
- unpersonPerson erased from existence
- thoughtcrimeProhibited beliefs under authoritarianism
Orwellian · Nineteen Eighty-Four · damnatio memoriae · censorship · totalitarianism · erasure · propaganda · obliteration · expunge · rewriting · historical revisionism · dystopia · forgetting · Ministry of Truth · vaporize · purging · airbrush · chute
- Dystopia1984, Nineteen Eighty-Four, dystopian fiction, totalitarianism, Brave New World
- censorshipbanned books, censored, banned, book banning, book bans
- Orwelliannewspeak, doublethink, Big Brother, thoughtcrime, Ministry of Truth
- free speechfree expression, freedom of speech, protected speech, speech rights, speech protection
- misinformationmisinformation, disinformation, fake news, falsehoods, hoaxes
- persecutionHolocaust, pogrom, genocide, pogroms, ethnic cleansing
memory holearchive
Stored historical records
public record · documentation · preservation · historical record · national archives
memory holetruth commission
Panel investigating past atrocities
historical reckoning · transparency · glasnost · disclosure · whistleblowing
memory holememorial
Thing preserving remembrance
monument · commemoration · remembrance · collective memory · oral history
hole, memory, memorial, memories, memorize, black hole, memorized, memorizing, memorialize