This post marks two weeks of uploading a post a day in my “Month of Posts” challenge (outlined in more detail here). Back near the start of April I posted about the end of the War World Cup series, citing the central reason to be my continuing uneasiness at seemingly trivialising wars. But whilst going through the old posts in this series I was presented with a couple of questions:

  1. Should I simply delete all previous posts?
  2. Should I edit previous posts in the form of a new series?

Both of these questions allowed me to reflect on how I wanted to present this old material. The question would provide me with the chance of going back to the drawing-board and re-starting again. Such an approach is always an exciting one, particularly in being able to shape a clear, new direction.

However, I didn’t want to simply discard everything that had gone before. Although the War World Cup series was abolished I still wanted to retain the key points outlined in those previous posts. As such, this line of thinking took me to the second question.

When I started to look at the previous posts and how I could edit them I started feeling a tad uneasy. I haven’t made a habit of going back and editing old posts, as such a process could see me revamping and tinkering beyond my initial intentions. I have always wanted the blog to be a reflection of my thinking, and so far – over the course of three years – it has done a pretty good job of doing that. Furthermore, editing what has gone before – the past – made me think of Orwellian sound-bites:

Who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present, controls the past… The mutability of the past is the central tenet of Ingsoc. Past events, it is argued, have no objective existence, but survive only in written records and in human memories. The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon. And since the Party is in full control of all records, and in equally full control of the minds of its members, it follows that the past is whatever the Party chooses to make it.

Editing past posts would set me as the Ministry of Truth, and although I’m confident that my blog does not have the seeds of an evil Big Brother-esque totalitarian regime, I prefer to keep it above board and transparent.

In the end my resolution is to edit the previous posts in the War World Cup series; references to this “cup” will be removed, whilst retaining the key points and messages. Meanwhile this post and the previous one will remain in order to keep things transparent. Unlike Orwell’s Winston Smith, I will not be discarding these old posts in the furnace in order to remove all record of them! As such, the old series will be blended into a new one – entitled War Zone – which will continue to look at different wars of the past.