Hey, Where Did Trotsky Go? Time Magazine is Hiring Stalin's Editors?

Remember learning in grade school how under Stalin -- the murderous Soviet and ruthless pogromist -- those Bolsheviks, when confronted with an inconvenient fact in their history, or a face in a picture of a murdered colleague, would simply change the fact, and airbrush out the picture? "Does their insanity know no bounds?" your 7th grade history teacher might have said. "You cannot simply re-color history to suit the politics of the moment. It is a dishonesty, which does not end at being a lie. It is an attempt to control the population by making it appear that history has always backed the present regime, and so, therefore, should you."

The political linguist Orwell thought enough of the grotesque dangers of re-writing of history that he made his protagonist Winston Smith of 1984 a bureaucrat in the Ministry of Information, where he would excise those nettlesome little double-plus-ungood passages containing that Information which conflicted with the politics of the moment.

Well, step back Stalin and Big Brother, because Time Magazine is on the job.

The Memory Hole writes that an essay which appeared in Time's 2 March 1998 issue by George Bush, Sr. and Brent Scowcroft has disappeared in totality from their website, and has been scrubbed from that issue's on-line table of contents. In this essay, the former President and his National Security Advisor (what's a past tense verb for "to give the reasons which are now politically inconvenient?") delineated their reasons for not removing Saddam from power -- many of which would apply to Bush the Younger's invasion. (Here is another on-line archived copy at a political blog , the Time article is also excerpted in the San Jose Mercury News , and in the Minnesota Daily .)

So what is this? A mistake? Would such a visible national magazine want to re-write its pages to suit the politics of the moment? Even if they wanted to, who in journalism -- even in the McDonald's journalism of Time Magazine -- would think that you can simply unwrite essays? Could it be there's a legal issue, since Bush and Scowcroft's essay excerpted from their Knopf book?

Let's watch.