By George Orwell
Oct. 8, 1972
Credit...The New York Times Archives
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October 8, 1972, Section SM, Page 12
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October 8, 1972, Section SM, Page 12
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This book was first thought of, so far as the central idea goes, in 1937, ‐but was not written down until about the end of 1943. By the time when it came to be written it was obvious that there would be great difficulty in getting it pub lished (in spite of the present book shortage, which ensures that anything describable as a book will “sell”), and in the event it was refused by four publishers. Only one of these had any ideological motive. Two had been publishing anti‐Russian books for years, and the other had no noticeable political color. One publisher actually started by accepting the book, but after making the prelim inary arrangements he decided to consult the Ministry of Information, who appear to have warned him, or at any rate strongly advised him, against publishing it. Here is an extract from his letter:
“I mentioned the reaction I had had from an im portant official in the Ministry of Information with regard to ‘Animal Farm.’ I must confess that this expression of opinion has given me seriously to think. . . . I can see now that it might be regarded as something which it was highly ill advised to publish at the present time. If the fable were addressed generally to dictators and dictator ships at large then publication would be all right, but the fable does follow, as I see now, so com pletely the progress of the Russian Soviets and their two dictators, that it can apply only to Russia, to the exclusion of other dictatorships. Another thing: it would be less offensive if the predominant caste in the fable were not pigs.* I think the choice of pigs as the ruling caste will no doubt give offense to many people, and particularly to anyone who is a bit touchy, as undoubtedly the Russians are.”
This kind of thing is not a good symptom. Obviously it is not desirable that a Government department should have any power of censorship (except security censorship, which no one objects to in wartime) over books which are not officially sponsored. But the chief danger to freedom of thought and speech at this moment is not the direct interference of the M.O.I. or any official body. If publishers and editors exert themselves to keep certain topics out of print, it is not because they are frightened of prosecution but because they are frightened of public opinion. In this country, intel lectual cowardice is the worst enemy a writer or journalist has to face, and that fact does not seem to me to have had the discussion it deserves.
Any fair‐minded person with journalistic ex perience will admit that during this war official censorship has not been particularly irksome. We have not been subjected to the kind of totali tarian “coordination” that it might have been reasonable to expect. The press has some justified grievances, but on the whole the Government has behaved well and and has been surprisingly tolerant of minority opinions. The sinister fact about lit erary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary. Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. Anyone who has lived long in a foreign country will know of instances of sensa tional items of news—things which on their own merits would get the big headlines—being kept right out of the British press, not because the Government intervened but because of a general tacit agreement that “it wouldn't do” to mention that particular fact. So far as the daily newspapers go, this is easy to understand. The British press is extremely centralized, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics. But the same kind of veiled censorship also operates in books and periodicals, as well as in plays, films and radio. At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right thinking people will accept without question. It not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other but it is “not done” to say it, just as in mid‐Victorian times it was “not done” to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.
* It is not quite clear whether this suggested modification is Mr. —'s own Idea, or originated with the Ministry Information; but seems to have the official ring about it.
At this moment what is demanded by the preveiling orthodoxy is an un critical admiration of Soviet Russia. Everyone knows this, nearly everyone acts on it. Any serious criticism of the Soviet regime, any disclosure of facts which the Soviet Gov ernment would prefer to keep hidden, is next door to un printable. And this nation wide conspiracy to flatter our ally takes place, curiously enough, against a background of genuine intellectual toler ance. For though you are not allowed to criticize the Soviet Government, at least you are reasonably free to criticize our own. Hardly anyone will print an attack on Stalin, but it is quite safe to attack Churchill, at any rate in books and periodicals. And throughout five years of war, during two or three of which we were fighting for national survival, countless books, pamphlets and articles advocating a com promise peace have been pub lished without interference. More, they have been pub lished without exciting much disapproval. So long as the prestige of the U.S.S.R. is not involved, the principle of free speech has been reasonably well upheld, There are other forbidden topics, and I shall mention some of them pres ently, but the prevailing attitude toward the U.S.S.R is much the most serious symptom. It is, as it were, spontaneous, and is not due to the action of any pressure group.
The servility with which the greater part of the English intelligentsia have swallowed and repeated Russian propa ganda from 1941 onward would be quite astounding if it were not that they have behaved similarly on several earlier occasions. On one con troversial issue after another the Russian viewpoint has been accepted without exam ination and then publicized with complete disregard to historical truth or intellectual decency. To name only one instance, the B.B.C. celebrated the 25th anniversary of the Red Army without mentioning Trotsky. This was about as accurate as commemorating the battle of Trafalgar with out mentioning Nelson, but evoked no protest from the English intelligentsia. In the internal struggles in the vari ous occupied countries, the British press has in almost all cases sided with the faction favored by the Russians and libeled the opposing faction, sometimes suppressing mate rial evidence in order to do so. A particularly glaring case was that of Colonel Mikhailo vich, the Yugoslav Chetnik leader. The Russians, who had their own Yugoslav protégé in Marshal Tito, accused Mikhail ovich of collaborating with the Germans. This accusation was promptly taken up by the British press: Mikhailovich's supporters were given no chance of answering it, and facts contradicting it were kept out of print.
In July, 1943, the Germans offered a reward of 100,000 gold crowns for the capture of Tito, and a similar reward for the capture of Mikhailovich. The British press “splashed” the reward for Tito, but only one paper mentioned (in small print) the reward for Mikhailovich; and the charges of collaborating with the Ger mans continued. Very similar things happened during the Spanish Civil War. Then, too, the factions on the Republican side which the Russians were determined to crush were recklessly libeled in the Eng lish left‐wing press, and any statement in their defense, even in letter form, was re fused publication. At present, not only is serious criticism of the U.S.S.R. considered reprehensible, but even the fact of the existence of such criticism is kept secret in some cases. For example, shortly before his death Trot sky had written a biography of Stalin. One may assume that it was not an altogether unbiased book, but obviously it was saleable. An American publisher had arranged to issue it and the book was in print — I believe the review copies had been sent out when the U.S.S.R. entered the war. The book was imme diately withdrawn. Not word about this has ever ap peared in the British press, though clearly the existence of such a book, and its sup pression, was a news item worth a few paragraphs.
It is important to distin guish between the kind of censorship that the English literary intelligentsia volun tarily impose upon them selves, and the censorship that can sometimes be en forced by pressure groups. Notoriously, certain topics cannot he discussed because of “vested interests.” The best‐known case is the pat ent‐medicine racket. Again, the Catholic Church has con siderable influence in the press and can silence criticism of itself to some extent. A scandal involving a Catholic priest is almost never given publicity, whereas an Angli can priest who gets into trouble . . . is headline news. It is very rare for anything of an anti‐Catholic tendency to appear on the stage or in a film. Any actor can tell you that a play or film which at tacks or makes fun of the Catholic Church is liable to be boycotted in the press and will probably be a failure. But this kind of thing is harmless, or at least it is understand able. Any large organization will look after its own inter ests as best it can, and overt propaganda is not a thing to object to. One would no more expect The Daily Worker to publicize unfavorable facts about the U.S.S.R. than one would expect The Catholic Herald to denounce the Pope. But then every thinking per son knows The Daily Worker and The Catholic Herald for what they are.
What is disquieting is that where the U.S.S.R. and its policies are concerned one cannot expect intelligent crit icism or even, in many cases, plain honesty from liberal writers and journalists who are under no direct pressure to falsify their opinions. Stalin is sacrosanct and cer tain aspects of his policy must not be seriously dis cussed. This rule has been al most universally observed since 1941, but it had oper ated, to a greater extent than is sometimes realized, for 10 years earlier than that. Throughout that time, critic ism of the Soviet regime from the left could obtain a hearing only with difficulty. There was a huge output of anti Russian literature, but nearly all of it was from the con servative angle and manifest ly dishonest, out of date and actuated by sordid motives. On the other side, there was an equally huge and almost equally dishonest stream of pro‐Russian propaganda, and what amounted to a boycott on anyone who tried to dis cuss all‐important questions in a grown‐ manner.
The author
You could, indeed, publish anti‐Russian books, but to do so was to make sure of being ignored or misrepresented by nearly the whole of the high brow press. Both publicly and privately you were warned that it was “not done.” What you said might possibly be true, but it was “inopportune” and “played into the hands of” this or that reactionary interest. This attitude was usually defended on the ground that the international situation, and the urgent need for an Anglo‐Russian alliance, demanded it: but it was clear that this was a rationaliza tion. The English intelligent sia, or a great part of it, had developed nationalistic loy alty toward the U.S.S.R., and in their hearts they felt that to cast any doubt on the wis dom of Stalin was a kind of blasphemy. Events in. Russia and events elsewhere were to be judged by different stand ards. The endless executions in the purges of 1936–38 were applauded by life‐long op ponents of capital punishment, and it was considered equally proper to publicize famines when they happened in India and to conceal them when they happened in the Ukraine. And if this was true before the war, the intellectual at mosphere is certainly no bet ter now.
But now to come back to this book of mine. The reac tion toward it of most Eng lish intellectuals will be quite simple: “It oughtn't to have been published.” Naturally, those reviewers who under stand the art of denigration will not attack it on political grounds but on literary ones. They will say that it is a dull, silly book and a disgraceful waste of paper. This may well be true, but it is obviously not the whole of the story. One does not say that a book “ought not to have been pub lished” merely because it is a bad book. After all, acres of rubbish are printed daily and no one bothers. The English intelligentsia, or most of them, will object to this book be cause it traduces their Leader and (as they see it) does harm to the cause of progress. If it did the opposite they would have nothing to say against it, even if its literary faults were 10 times as glar ing as they are. The success of, for instance, the Left Book Club over a period of four or five years shows how willing they are to tolerate both scur rility and slipshod writing, provided that it tells them what they want to hear.
The issue involved here is quite a simple one: Is every opinion, however unpopular— however foolish, even—en titled to a hearing? Put it in that form and nearly any Eng lish intellectual will feel that he ought to say “Yes.” But give it a concrete shape, and ask, “How about an attack on Stalin? Is that entitled to a hearing?” and the answer more often than not will be “No.” In that case, the cur rent orthodoxy happens to be challenged, and so the prin ciple of free speech lapses. Now, when one demands liberty of speech and of the press, one is not demanding absolute liberty. There always must be, or at any rate there always will be, some degree of censorship, so long as or ganized societies endure. But freedom, as Rosa Luxemburg said, is “freedom for the oth er fellow.” The same principle is contained in the famous words of Voltaire: “I detest what you say; I will defend to the death your right to say it.” If the intellectual liberty which without a doubt has been one of the distinguishing marks of Western civilization means anything at all, it means that everyone shall have the right to say and to print what he believes to be the truth, provided only that it does not harm the rest of the community in some quite unmistakeable way. Both cap italist democracy and the Western versions of Socialism have till recently taken that principle for granted. Our Government, as I have already pointed out, still makes some show of respecting it. The or dinary people in the street— partly, perhaps, because they are not sufficiently interested in ideas to he intolerant about them—still vaguely hold that “I suppose everyone's got a right to their own opinion.” It is only, or at any rate it is chiefly, the literary and scien tific intelligentsia, the very people who ought to be the guardians of liberty, who are beginning to despise it, in theory as well as in practice.
One of the peculiar phe nomena of our time is the renegade liberal. Over and above the familiar Marxist claim that “bourgeois liberty” is an illusion, there is now a widespread tendency to argue that one can defend democ racy only by totalitarian meth ods. If one loves democracy, the argument runs, one must crush its enemies by no mat ter what means. And who are its enemies? It always appears that they are not only those who attack it openly and con sciously, but those who “ob jectively” endanger it by spreading mistaken doctrines. In other words, defending democracy involves destroy ing all independence of thought. This argument was used, for instance, to justify the Russian purges. The most ardent Russophile hardly be lieved that all of the victims were guilty of all the things they were accused of: but by holding heretical opinions they “objectively” harmed the regime, and therefore it was quite right not only to mas sacre them but to discredit them by false accusations. The same argument was used to justify the quite conscious lying that went on in the left wing press about the Trotsky ists and other Republican minorities in the Spanish Civil War. And it was used again as a reason for yelping against habeas corpus when Mosley [Sir Oswald Mosley, the Brit ish Fascist leader] was re leased in 1943.
These people don't see that if you encourage totalitarian methods, the time may come when they will be used against you instead of for you. Make a habit of impris oning Fascists without trial, and perhaps the process won't stop at Fascists. Soon after the suppressed Daily Worker had been reinstated, I was lecturing to a working men's college in South London. The audience were working‐class and lower‐middle‐class intel lectuals—the same sort of audience that one used to meet at Left Book Club branches. The lecture had touched on the freedom of the press, and at the end, to my astonishment, several questioners stood up and asked me: Did I not think that the lifting of the ban on The Daily Worker was a great mistake? When asked why, they said that it was a paper of doubtful loyalty and ought not to he tolerated in war time. I found myself defend ing The Daily Worker, which has gone out of its way to libel me more than once. But where had these people learned this essentially totali tarian outlook? Pretty certainly they had learned it from the Communists them selves!
Tolerance and decency are deeply rooted in England, but they are not indestructible, and they have to be kept alive partly by conscious effort. The result of preaching totalitarian doctrines is to weaken the instinct by means of which free peoples know what is or is not dangerous. The case of Mosley illustrates this. In 1940, it was perfectly right to intern Mosley, whether or not he had committed any tech nical crime. We were fighting for our lives and could not allow a possible Quisling to go free. To keep him shut up, without trial, in 1943 was an outrage. The general failure to see this was a bad symp tom, though it is true that the agitation against Mosley's release was partly factitious and partly a rationalization of other disconterrts. But how much of the present slide to ward Faseist ways of thought is traceable to the “anti‐Fas the unscrupulousness it has entailed?
It is important to realize that the current Russomania is only a symptom of the gen eral weakening of the Western liberal tradition. Had the M.O.I. chipped in and definite ly vetoed the publication of this book, the bulk of the English intelligentsia would have seen nothing disquieting in this. Uncritical loyalty to the U.S.S.R. happens to be the current orthodoxy, and where the supposed interests of the U.S.S.R. are involved they are willing to tolerate not only censorship but the deliberate falsification of history. To name one instance. At the death of John Reed, the au thor of “Ten Days that Shook the World”—a first‐hand ac count of the early days of the Russian Revolution—the copyright of the book passed into the hands of the British Communist party, to whom I believe Reed had bequeathed it. Some years later, the Brit ish Communists, having de stroyed the original edition of the book as completely as they could, issued a garbled version from which they had eliminat ed mentions of Trotsky and also omitted the introduction writ ten by Lenin. If a radical in telligentsia had still existed in Britain, this act of forgery would have been exposed and denounced in every literary paper in the country. As it was, there was little or no protest. To many English in tellectuals it teemed quite a natural thing to do. And this tolerance of plain dishonesty means much more than that admiration for Russia happens to be fashionable at this mo ment. Quite possibly that particular fashion will not last. For all I know, by the time this book is published my view of the Soviet regime may be the generally accepted one. But what use would that be in itself? To exchange one orthodoxy for another is not necessarily an advance. The enemy is the gramophone mind, whether or not one agrees with the record that is being played at the moment.
I am well acquainted with all the arguments against freedom of thought and speech—the arguments which claim that it cannot exist, and the arguments which claim that it ought not to. I answer simply that they don't con vince me and that our civiliza tion over a period of 400 years has been founded on the op posite notice. For quite a dec ade past I have believed that the existing Russian regime is a mainly evil thing, and claim the right to say so, in spite of the fact that we are allies with the U.S.S.R. in a war which I want to see won. If I had to choose a text to justify myself, I should choose the line from Milton: “By the known rules of ancient lib erty.”
The word ancient empha sizes the fact that intellectual freedom is a deep‐rooted tradition without which our characteristic Western culture could only doubtfully exist. From that tradition many of our intellectuals are visibly turning away. They have accepted the principle that a book should be published or suppressed, praised or damned, not on its merits but according to political expediency.
And others who do not ac tually hold this view assent to it from sheer cowardice. An example of this is the failure of the numerous and vocal English pacifists to raise their voices against the prevalent worship of Russian militarism. According to these pacifists, all violence is evil, and they have urged us at every stage of the war to give in or at least to make a com promise peace. But how many of them have ever suggested that war is also evil when it is waged by the Red Army? Apparently the Russians have a right to defend themselves, whereas for us to do so is a deadly sin. One can explain this contradiction in only one way—that is, by a cowardly desire to keep in with the bulk of the intelligentsia, whose patriotism is directed toward the U.S.S.R. rather than toward Britain.
I know that the English in telligentsia have plenty of reason for their timidity and dishonesty; indeed, I know by heart the arguments by which they justify themselves. But at least let us have no more nonsense about defending lib erty against fascism. If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. The common people still vaguely subscribe to that doc trine and act on it. In our country—it is not the same in all countries: it was not so in Republican France, and it is not so in the United States today—it is the liberals who fear liberty and the intellec tuals who want to do dirt on the intellect: it is to draw at tention to that fact I have written this preface. ■
Copyright 1972 by Sonia Brownell Orwell.
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