ABSTRACT
Orwell was writing decades ago, but again it has taken time for the rest of us to catch up, or to grasp his point in the quotation above. That point now rings true in postmodernity, for it has taken postmodernism finally to make clear that any talk of historical ‘truth’, as implying some exact correspondence between historical narratives and the past events that they purport to describe, is meaningless – that any claims to such absolute historical truth are as foundationless as pre-Nietzschean claims to uniquely privileged perspectives. Nietzsche’s insistence on the need to take account of alternative perspectives already implies the conclusion drawn by Orwell – that no history or historical truth can be claimed as uniquely privileged; so that the very idea of any one history being ‘truthfully written’ (in the sense of it accurately mirroring ‘the past’) has to be abandoned.
