The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.

Although widely circulated under Orwell’s name, this sentence encapsulates a theme strongly associated with his anti-totalitarian writing: political domination is secured not only by force but by control of memory, records, and the stories a society tells about itself. The idea aligns with Orwell’s recurring warnings that when a regime can rewrite the past—through propaganda, censorship, and the destruction of archives—it can weaken a people’s capacity to judge the present, organize resistance, or even articulate what has been lost. In that sense, “destroy” refers to eroding collective identity and agency by severing a community from its historical self-understanding.