In George Orwell's 1984, Winston Smith works at the Ministry of Truth, correcting inconvenient news reports and sending the originals down the memory hole. Once the record is gone, the correction becomes the only past people are allowed to remember. What makes it frightening is how ordinary the ritual looks. History doesn't always vanish in a bonfire. Sometimes it goes through a small slot beside a desk.
We don't live in Orwell's world. But some days the distance feels smaller than it should.
A report gets pulled after political pressure. A website quietly deletes an old story. An editor decides an investigation is better left unpublished. An archive stays technically intact while being practically unreachable to anyone trying to actually use it. Lately there's a newer version of this: reporting on AI training has described old, out-of-print books being bought, cut apart, scanned, and thrown away so the text can become machine-readable data. The words might survive somewhere on a server. The book that carried them doesn't.
Bangladesh has its own versions of this. Reports have been suppressed, websites pressured, journalists have told of stories killed inside newsrooms before they ever ran. For years, the newspaper archives from 1972 to 1975 at the Dhaka University Central Library were effectively off-limits to ordinary researchers. They became accessible again after August 2024. Whatever explanation is offered for shutting off access, the effect on scholarship is the same: a period of history gets harder to study and easier to narrate however someone wants.
Then there's the quieter kind of disappearance: link rot.
I've been collecting and organizing reports of human-rights violations in Bangladesh since 2017. Going back to my own notes years later, I kept running into the same small shock. The incident was still there. The publication, date and headline remained. The source itself was gone.
Click.
Page not found.
A broken link looks like a small thing. It isn't. Years pass, search results shift, sites get redesigned, and millions of new pages bury what came before. A story that was reported once can start to look like a story that was never reported at all, not because anyone erased it, but because it just stopped being findable. If you only search what's still online, you get a thinner pattern than what the reporting actually showed at the time.
Chronicles of Tyranny came out of not wanting to accept that.
The documentation work itself goes back to 2016, through human-rights training. Over the years that followed, reports, fact-finding materials, screenshots, photographs, old newspaper files, and my own notes piled up across folders and spreadsheets. By 2022 the idea had a clearer shape: not just another pile of files, but something built to last: a documentation and public-memory project that could connect an incident to its source, its category, its date, the larger event it belonged to. In 2023 the work turned into an almost daily, unpaid habit of collecting, sorting, comparing, and trying to picture what an archive at this scale would look like once it was actually usable.
For more than five years, this project had no public face. It lived in hard drives, cloud folders, spreadsheets, screenshots, half-finished conversations. A lot of points marked, no road drawn between them yet.
Wanting to do it wasn't enough. Documentation needs a method, so I studied verification, digital preservation, source protection, metadata and archive design. I took an OSINT course, joined workshops run by a few different organizations, and picked up enough coding to understand what a searchable database would actually require. Shelly and the team at Mnemonic were generous with technical guidance and shared documents that shaped how I think about this work. What they showed me is that preserving evidence isn't just downloading files. Provenance, context, integrity, security, and the link between a claim and its source all have to hold together at once.
We also looked for support in the US, Australia, Germany, the UK, and Bangladesh. A lot of people listened. Some were genuinely enthusiastic and said they'd look into it. None of that turned into funding. Not one penny. Chronicles of Tyranny has run entirely on volunteer time, my own resources, and the stubborn belief that the work is worth doing even when the scale of it feels impossible.
I'm grateful to Toby Cadman, who made time to meet online in 2023; to Shelly and the Mnemonic team for their technical suggestions and materials; to contacts at the Center for Justice and Accountability; and to the friends who kept taking the idea seriously back when there was nothing to show for it but files.
The long-term goal is to work through a collection expected to reach around 22,000 documented reports, mostly from 2009 to 2024, with the archive continuing past that. That's not 22,000 verified incidents or 22,000 victims. A report isn't the same as an incident, and several reports can describe the same event. Sorting that out carefully, while preserving competing accounts and marking how verified each record is, is the point of the database.
When a link dies, that can't be the end of it. We go back to the publication date, check archived versions and print editions where they exist, save photographs of newspaper cuttings, record the original filename and source, and look for other outlets that covered the same thing. Where accounts disagree, the archive keeps the disagreement instead of forcing a false certainty. Where the evidence is sensitive, the public page never exposes the private file just to prove it exists.
The pilot site is just the first visible piece of something bigger. Eventually people should be able to browse by issue, by major event, or by date. A Calendar of Tyranny should let a researcher pick a day, month, year, or range and pull up the verified records tied to it. Major episodes, including the 2009 BDR mutiny and its aftermath, the 2013 Shapla Square crackdown, the 2018 student protests, the July 2024 uprising, should stand as their own collections while still connecting to the individual categories of violations within them.
Chronicles of Tyranny is nowhere near finished. Its public records will come out slowly, because preservation isn't verification, and verification isn't permission to publish. But after years of carrying this through files, dead links, method questions, and unpaid labor, it finally has something to show.
Maybe that's where an archive actually starts: not simply recording what happened, but refusing to let disappearance pass for absence.
A broken link shouldn't get to become a broken memory.