In Colors to the Mast, Wretchard notes that politicians and leaders have to stand by their statements, now that everything gets recorded and indexed on-line:
The emergence of the Internet has closed down the ‘memory hole’ within which the former apologists of Joseph Stalin, Kim Il Sung, Fidel Castro and Saddam Hussein could hide their bad advance and from which they could emerge at whiles to offer new sage advice. The term ‘memory hole’ itself was coined by George Orwell who used it to describe the mechanism through which the media manipulated historical memory. One of the tenets of the Party in Orwell’s 1984 was that ‘Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past’, and the key to achieving mastery over history was the liberal use of the ‘memory hole’.