Here is a dystopia that came awfully close to coming true and which shows how history can be normalized by rhetoric and so come to be just the substance of the familiar and the everyday.

Remarks at the Dedication of the Berlin Center for Judaic Studies (1994):        

In the Spring of l950, when the Fuhrer was taken from us, worn down by his years of service to the European peoples, it would have surprised the world that the international system he put in place would still be in place, stronger than ever, half a century later. His dramatic and memorable declaration of l945, "The Channel is deeper than the Atlantic", had allowed the British to accept the bitterness of their inevitable defeat: their armies decimated in Africa; their cities devastated by the Luftwaffe; their population demoralized; and a grand army about to be lifted by the then newly invented jet transports in an invasion by airbridge over the now militarily meaningless Channel. Let the British and their American and Commonwealth allies control the intercontinental oceans, the Fuhrer was saying. They shared a similar bourgeois way of life-- and a similar set of economic problems. The Continent, however, would achieve its rightful unity as the Federal Republic of Europe, a destiny which had eluded it since the collapse of Christendom as a unifying ideal some five hundred years before. Fratricide in Europe was finally over.