GEORGE Orwell’s vividly imagined totalitarian Party in 1984 operated under the slogan: “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”

Workers for the Ministry of Truth modify photographs and public archives. History, in the book, is mutable, changeable; facts are simply rewritten, old truths destroyed and reshaped. Its characters aren’t even sure of the year.

1984 was published just a short time after the end of the Second World War, in 1949. Orwell’s work often reflected the hideous abuses of regimes in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, as well as the author’s time fighting in the Spanish Civil War, when he read reports in newspapers which distorted or omitted real-life events.

Yet almost 70 years later, his writing continues to speak with urgency.

In February 2015, ISIS drilled the faces of the stone sculptures which have stood guard at the Nergal Gate of Ninevah, Iraq for more than 3,000 years.

This destruction of the lamassu – an act as crude and unsubtle as it was effective – was one of the most poignant archaeological losses inflicted by the cult.

But it certainly wasn’t the only historic site targeted. ISIS fighters intentionally destroyed thousands of years of cultural heritage – actions UNESCO considers a war crime – across Iraq and Syria. Works of art were spoiled, and buildings including mosques were turned to rubble.

ISIS considers representational art to be idolatry. Its fighters often commit destruction for destruction’s sake.

However, such acts are also carried out with the purpose of erasing history.

Like Orwell’s Party, ISIS uses this destruction, as well as thought police, a rejection of love - except for god and government - and near-constant combat to map a landscape where the past is meaningless, and the terrible present is all that remains.

Thousands of miles away and three years later, Iraqi-American artist Michael Rakowitz has unveiled his recreation of the lamassu on Trafalgar Square’s fourth plinth.

The piece, The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist, is made of Arabic newspapers and 10,500 empty date syrup cans. Its construction lends it an almost animal lustre, as though it might leap from its podium and prowl home.

The Assyrian winged bull, which looks out past the buildings of London and towards Iraq, stands as an act of defiance in one of the capital’s most prominent spots, where it will be seen by millions of people every year.

Its critics have found it, variously, as “brash [and] shiny,” and a “tourist artefact blown up to massive proportions”, as well as - more flatteringly - “one of the very best fourth plinth projects”.

On a visit recently, I found it immensely touching. There is something both proud and tragic about it.

It’s impossible to forget, looking up at it, that the sculpture is little more than a shadow of an artwork created in 700 BC by men who would have spent years shaping the stone because of their faith in its protection. The original’s job - to guard the city’s past, present and future - is now over.

But this symbol is no gimmick. Rather, it's a love letter to Iraq, telling the stories of people who lived in both the near and distant past. It roots us to their history.

Tearing down archaeology and defacing art can’t, of course, compete with ISIS’s campaign of murder and torture. But that destruction is a grievous harm in its own right. It denies the people of Iraq and Syria their long and storied past.

And the fact that Rakowitz’s recreation stands at all represents both human triumph and Orwellian warning.

The artist told a national newspaper this year that his work utilises date cans because of the fruit’s traditional meaning in Iraq. Dates are put in the mouths of newborns so the first taste of life is sweet.

“The piece is to do with the resurrection of a sweet history as opposed to the bitterness we’ve all been exposed to,” he said.

I hope all who see the sculpture will enjoy a work of lingering sweetness.