“We dwell in a present-tense culture that somehow, significantly, decided to employ the telling expression “You’re history” as a choice reprobation or insult, and thus elected to speak forgotten volumes about itself.  By that standard, the forbidding dystopia of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four already belongs, both as text and as date, with Ur and Mycenae, while the hedonistic nihilism of Huxley still beckons toward a painless, amusement-sodden, and stress-free consensus.   …For true blissed-out and vacant servitude, though, you need an otherwise sophisticated society where no serious history is taught at all.”

Christopher Hitchens, Harper’s Magazine, June, 1999