1984 by George Orwell, the Inner Party,

¶ … 1984 by George Orwell, the Inner Party, those who are in charge, live very well, thanks to the fruits of a constant war. And they want to keep it that way. The method they use is keeping absolute control of everyone else through the almost daily changing of history and the suppression of individual memory.

An example of the daily changing of history is the announcement of a false event that happened in the past. All records are immediately changed to show that it did happen; nowhere (except perhaps in the minds of the citizens) is there any evidence that the event never happened at all. Every record suddenly shows that the event did take place. The result is that people begin to mistrust their own memories. They come to believe everything they're told because, after all, it's in writing. Manipulation can, and does, run rampant when people don't have an accurate memory of their past, or when they have no memory at all: It changes the present and the future.

When history is repressed or changed there is no written memory of the existence of a democratic society, for example. People who don't remember it can't begin to think about (and want) liberties and freedoms. Or when the chocolate ration is reduced from 30 to 20, and the announcement is made that people are celebrating because the ration was raised to twenty, or when the target of the constant war is suddenly changed overnight, the individual comes to understand that he can't trust his own memory; therefore he must trust what he is told by the Party.

Suppressing an individual's past and his memory also suppresses his imagination. If you have no past, and if information changes on a daily basis, you have no frame of reference for comparison. If you have no imagination and no frame of reference, you cannot create, at least in your own mind, a better world or different way of being. And if you cannot create it in your own mind, you can't speak it to others. Suppressing an individual's past also leads to conformity: "A nation of warriors and fanatics, marching forward in perfect unity, all thinking the same thoughts and shouting the same slogans...." (77)

By keeping people afraid of speaking openly to others, and taking away the means to spread the seed of thought (which begins with imagination), the Party runs less of a risk of mutiny. If you can't imagine, and if you're stuck with the increasingly narrow vocabulary allowed in Newspeak, you're unable to utter any words that are against the Party. "It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words," says Symes. (46) And when the allowed words are only variations on the same theme, there is no vehicle for imagination.

But the biggest reason for the Party wanting to control imagination is because with imagination comes emotion... And with emotion can come actions. By suppressing imagination (which includes thought, which had lead to emotion) the Party controls action.

The Party's slogan was, "Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past." (37)