They Told You to Forget What You Saw

“The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” — George Orwell

I keep returning to that line because it refuses to age. It doesn’t belong to a year, or a regime, or a single country. It belongs to a pattern. A rhythm. A recipe that only ever changes its costumes. When Orwell wrote it, it wasn’t prophecy so much as diagnosis—a clinical description of what happens when power stops bothering with persuasion and starts demanding obedience to unreality. And that’s where we are now. Not teetering on the edge. Not “headed toward.” Here. The people in power have rewritten history and told you to deny what you saw. Not what you heard secondhand. Not what you inferred. What you witnessed. And they are betting—correctly, so far—that fatigue will do the rest.

This is the part everyone wants to skip over. The uncomfortable middle. The moment where denial stops being fringe and starts being institutional. Where the lie isn’t just repeated, but formalized. Where it is printed on official letterhead, hosted on government servers, spoken from podiums that once at least pretended to respect truth. Where violence is reframed as peace, insurrectionists are recast as victims, and those who tried to hold the line—journalists, civil servants, protesters, ordinary people who said “no”—are blamed for the rupture they tried to prevent. We are being told, calmly and confidently, that what we saw did not happen. That what we heard was misinterpreted. That the words spoken that day were never spoken. That the threat was imaginary. That the danger was invented. And if you resist that framing—if you insist on memory—you are positioned as the problem.

I have written about this pattern before. Not once. Not as a one-off reaction piece. Months ago, I tried to map it out as clearly as I could. The way the machine turns. Not all at once. Not with a dramatic flourish. But click by click. The recipe. The rhythm. The rhyme. First the event. Then the noise. Then the reframing. Then the normalization. Then the institutionalization. Then the punishment of those who refuse to forget. I called it what it was because refusing to name a thing doesn’t make it less real—it just makes it easier to swallow. And here we are again, watching the next step lock into place, hearing the sound it makes as it clicks forward. Like a clock striking thirteen.

That image keeps coming back to me because it captures the disorientation so perfectly. Not the chaos people expect, but the calm wrongness. The moment when reality doesn’t shatter—it slides. The moment when the system insists that the impossible has always been normal, and that if you feel unsettled, the fault must be yours. Thirteen. The world insists the clock has always read that way. And if you question it, you are told you’re being dramatic, divisive, hysterical. That you are clinging to the past. That you need to move on. But moving on, in this context, means abandoning memory. It means letting the machine decide what counts as truth and what counts as noise.

The rioters and insurrectionists who tried to overthrow our democracy are now framed as victims. Victims of prosecution. Victims of accountability. Victims of consequences. Meanwhile, those who tried to protect what little freedoms we had left are blamed for the instability, blamed for the anger, blamed for the violence directed at them. The words spoken on that day are being rewritten in real time. “We did not speak of violence, only peace,” they say, while video and audio from that day still exist, still circulate, still contradict them. And this is where the gaslighting becomes explicit—not interpersonal, not subtle, but structural. You are not being asked to debate interpretation. You are being instructed to deny evidence.

This isn’t an accident. It isn’t incompetence. It isn’t a misunderstanding. It’s part of the machine turning. Not a grand turn—no tanks rolling through the streets, no emergency declarations that feel cinematic enough to wake people up. Just the next click in the wheel. A small, precise movement that brings us closer to the end goals that were never hidden if you were willing to read them. Their project 2025. Their “new Reich.” Different language, same architecture. The consolidation of power. The elimination of dissent. The transformation of the state from a shared civic structure into a loyalty test. History rewritten not to heal, but to justify what comes next.

And what comes next is never announced in advance as brutality. It’s announced as order. As stability. As restoration. As strength. The people in power don’t say, “We are coming for those who tell the truth.” They say, “We are restoring trust.” They don’t say, “We will silence you.” They say, “We must combat misinformation.” They don’t say, “We are lying.” They say, “We are correcting the record.” And the lie is powerful not because it is clever, but because it is exhausting to fight. Because every correction requires energy, while every falsehood is cheap. Because memory demands care, and care is the first thing to fatigue.

We must not allow them to gaslight us. We must not allow this history to be rewritten while the footage still exists, while the transcripts still exist, while the bodies and injuries and trials and testimonies still exist. Those with the ability and privilege to speak must speak truth to this “power,” even knowing the quotation marks are doing heavy lifting there. Media companies must not let this fall away the way they keep doing—burying it under the next crisis, the next war, the next manufactured outrage, the next flood of content that makes everything feel equally urgent and therefore equally disposable.

But I’m not naïve. I know what will happen. They will let it fall away. They always do. Because we invaded a country. Because we started another war. Because there are images of suffering elsewhere that demand attention. Because the world is loud and brutal and never stops producing new horrors. Because the zone is flooded, deliberately and efficiently, until no single truth can stay afloat for long. And because compassion, as I’ve written before, is not infinite. It fatigues. It frays. It collapses under the weight of being constantly demanded without being supported.

This is the part that hurts the most—not the cruelty of those in power, which is predictable, but the erosion of the public’s capacity to respond. The way distraction wins. The way outrage becomes cyclical and shallow. The way people who once cared deeply now flinch at the thought of caring again because it feels futile. The machine understands this. It relies on it. It doesn’t need you to believe the lie forever. It only needs you to stop fighting it. To scroll past. To sigh. To say, “I can’t do this again.” And then it keeps eating.

The machine is still hungry. It always is. It feeds on attention, on exhaustion, on the slow trade of memory for relief. And while those who see the patterns know what’s coming next—because the pattern doesn’t improvise, it repeats—most people are just trying to survive their own lives. That’s how this works. Not through mass conversion, but through attrition. Not everyone has to agree. Most people just have to disengage.

I don’t write this because I think I’m immune. I’m not. I feel the fatigue too. I feel the pull toward silence, toward focusing smaller, toward protecting what little emotional bandwidth I have left. But silence has never been neutral, and disengagement has never been safe. The chapters I wrote about the machine, about the clock striking thirteen, about the slow normalization of cruelty—those weren’t metaphors meant to be admired. They were warnings meant to be remembered. Not because remembering fixes everything, but because forgetting guarantees nothing ever will.

This is not about nostalgia. It’s not about clinging to a past that was already broken. It’s about refusing to let the present be rewritten into something unrecognizable without protest. It’s about insisting that truth still matters even when it’s inconvenient, even when it’s drowned out, even when it costs you comfort. It’s about understanding that authoritarianism doesn’t arrive fully formed—it accretes. Layer by layer. Lie by lie. Click by click.

The clock has struck thirteen before. It always does right before people tell you it’s normal. And every time, there are those who see it and say nothing because they are tired, because they are scared, because they assume someone else will speak. And every time, the machine counts on that assumption.

I don’t know how this ends. I only know how it continues if we do nothing. And I know that history is not kind to those who claimed they didn’t see it coming when the evidence was everywhere. The evidence of our eyes and ears. Still here. Still accessible. Still undeniable—unless we let them tell us otherwise.

The machine turns. The clock strikes thirteen. And the question, as always, is not whether it’s happening—but whether we will remember that we are allowed to say so out loud.

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Note: I reject violence in all its forms.

Nothing I write here is a call to arms, or a celebration of harm. These posts are warnings, not endorsements-an attempt to trace the patterns of power and propaganda so we might break the cycle, not fuel it. My writing is rooted in grief, in clarity, and in a stubborn refusal to give in to nihilism, cruelty, anger, or resentment. My love is for all people in this world-even those who would wish me harm.