Censorship of History and Destruction of Cultural Heritage

The World State’s censorship of history and destruction of cultural heritage make the past an object of deliberate political control: museums close, monuments are destroyed, and old books are suppressed, while the state teaches citizens that history is worthless. Mustapha Mond’s account traces this order to the Nine Years’ War and shows how control over historical memory supports a society organized around stability and universal happiness.

Policy and Historical Rupture

The regime’s rejection of history follows a crisis rather than an inevitable march of progress. Mustapha Mond says that the Nine Years’ War began in A.F. 141 and recalls the choice between World Control and destruction, between stability and its collapse. The war’s violence changed the grounds on which authority could justify itself: as he explains, people confronted by anthrax bombs became willing to have even their appetites controlled in exchange for a quiet life. Science, too, came under state control after the war, with inquiry limited to problems the regime considered immediate.

Mond describes the resulting cultural policy as a campaign against the past. Museums were closed, historical monuments were blown up, and books published before A.F. 150 were suppressed. He notes that many monuments had already been destroyed during the Nine Years’ War, so official policy both followed material devastation and extended it through deliberate censorship. The cutoff for books makes the policy systematic: rather than simply neglecting particular works, the state restricts access to an entire historical inheritance.

Teaching History as Worthless

The regime does not rely on suppression alone; it also teaches citizens to dismiss the past. Speaking to students, Mond invokes the maxim “History is bunk.” He then makes the slogan vivid with a series of imaginary erasures: ancient cities, religious figures, classical literature, churches, and music vanish with the gesture of brushing away dust. The catalogue moves from places such as Harappa, Ur, Thebes, and Babylon to works and figures including King Lear, Pascal, and Odysseus. History is presented not as a contested record but as irrelevant residue that can be swept aside.

That dismissal is reinforced from childhood by sleep-teaching. A recorded class-consciousness lesson rehearses distinctions among Alphas, Betas, Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons, presenting caste hierarchy as a child’s own settled preference. Mond explains the process through an image of repeated drops of sealing wax that adhere until they cover the rock: suggestions become the child’s mind, and later the adult’s judgments and desires. His claim that these are the State’s suggestions makes the connection explicit between habitual instruction and political power. The proverb “But every one belongs to every one else” similarly becomes axiomatic through more than sixty-two thousand repetitions in the dark. Alongside these lessons, children are taught to welcome flying, new clothes, and throwing away old clothes; “Ending is better than mending” turns a consumer rule into an apparently natural belief. Together, these examples show how the state’s management of memory belongs to a wider effort to shape what citizens accept as common sense.

Stability, Happiness, and What Is Sacrificed

Mond justifies control by placing mass happiness above truth and beauty. He explains that mass production required a shift in values: “Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning; truth and beauty can't.” The Nine Years’ War, in his account, demonstrated the danger of leaving scientific and political forces unrestricted, and censorship becomes one part of the containment that followed. By closing access to the past and limiting knowledge, the regime protects an equilibrium it regards as more important than intellectual freedom.

His explanation also reveals a cost that the state’s slogans conceal. Mond admits that truth and science interest him, and that he once chose a place on the Controllers’ Council over exile to an island where he could pursue pure science. He says he sometimes regrets the science he gave up, while insisting that unrestricted research is a public danger and that happiness has to be paid for. The policy therefore rests not simply on ignorance, but on a conscious hierarchy of values: cultural memory, knowledge, and beauty are sacrificed to social stability. The novel’s account of that bargain makes the suppression of history both a practical instrument of rule and a way of narrowing what citizens can imagine as a different social order.