Chatham House buckles to pressure, revises landmark kleptocracy report
MEMORY HOLE
In the George Orwell novel 1984, Winston Smith’s job is to rewrite articles from old newspapers to make sure that political predictions came true and inconvenient “unpersons” no longer feature, before destroying the old versions. He starts to doubt the truth of what he’s reading when he sees a forgotten scrap of paper, which clearly proves that three supposed criminals had been innocent.
I occasionally wonder if there isn’t a vague parallel between his job and the work done by defamation lawyers who craft versions of the truth that are acceptable to their rich clients, thereby erasing what was previously considered to be true. It would be fun to demonstrate this by having an entire bookcase of the different editions of Catherine Belton’s Putin’s People, each one subtly different to the last, each one affected by a different wealthy person’s representative.
We now have a new demonstration of the power of the memory hole. You might think you remember a reference to Dmitry Leus in this ground-breaking report from British think tank Chatham House (called the U.K.’s Kleptocracy Problem), which was published in December 2021, but your memory is tricking you. Look for yourself, he’s not mentioned once. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.
Leus is a businessman of ex-Soviet origin who came to the U.K. in 2015, and has donated generously to a number of causes, including to the Conservative Party.