Fun fact: among the publishers who rejected Animal Farm was T. S. Eliot:<p><i>And after all, your pigs are far more intelligent than the other animals, and therefore the best qualified to run the farm—in fact, there couldn’t have been an Animal Farm at all without them: so that what was needed, (someone might argue), was not more communism but more public-spirited pigs.</i><p><a href="https://www.openculture.com/2013/11/t-s-eliot-rejects-george-orwells-animal-farm.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.openculture.com/2013/11/t-s-eliot-rejects-george...</a><p>Eliot was surely wrong to call Animal Farm "Trotskyite" but that was probably his way of noting that Orwell's critique of communism was coming from the left, not the right. This fits with another fun fact: the most famous fan of Orwell's unpublished preface is Chomsky, who has been championing it for decades.
This forward hints at a missing puzzle piece for me, regarding history.<p>Why did the English intellectuals want to avoid criticizing Stalin? Was it because it would be by extension criticizing Communism which at the time was a popular idea among intellectuals? Was this the progress being referred to?
Link to site with full preface and cleaner layout: <a href="https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/the-freedom-of-the-press/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...</a>
When I was little, I was working my way through the "Freddie the Pig" stories:<p><a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07CQ9T198" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07CQ9T198</a><p>I noticed my dad had "Animal Farm" and it seemed to be about a pig, so I read it. I took it at face value as a good story about animals running a farm.<p>Many, many years later I realized it was an allegory about the Soviet Revolution.
> (except security censorship, which no one objects to in war time)<p>Ha! That's exactly when everyone should care the most about censorship, it's when the stakes are highest for "both" sides. I assume he realized the error in his ways by the time he realized that we've always been at war with...
<i>"But at least let us have no more nonsense about defending liberty against Fascism. If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear."</i><p>Sounds eerily appropriate for most issues today
I find this video discussion of Orwell and his works to be illuminating: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Gz0I_X_nfo">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Gz0I_X_nfo</a><p>Asimov's critiques of his work, for example.
Historical Context: Animal Farm was published (per Wikipedia) in England on 17 Aug 1945. Nazi Germany had surrendered to the Allies (France, UK, US, USSR, etc.) on 8 May 1945. The great majority of the fighting and dying "needed" to achieve that victory was done by the USSR (<a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d1/World_War_II_Casualties.svg" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d1/World_Wa...</a>).<p>Back in WWI, the UK had experienced 2X or so the number of deaths that it did in WWII. The UK's leaders were <i>extremely</i> aware of how bad a massive war, with a massive death toll, could be for a country.<p>Regardless of Orwell's fuming about freedom of the press, pro-Soviet English intellectual fashions, and such - for the WWII-era British government, not "rocking the boat" with Stalin, when "his" USSR was still critical to winning the war with a less-horrific British body count, would be a "d'oh, <i>obviously</i>" policy.
> Every right-thinking intellectual somehow knew that a candid assessment of Soviet rule was, well, just not the done thing!…<p>What does this sentence even mean, did they mean to write “was just not something you (ever) did”?
Orwell was actually fighting FOR communism. Specifically anarcho-communist Catalonia. What you call Communism is actually ideology called Marxism-Leninism, there are libertarian variants of communists too, for example anarcho-communism or council communism. Communism is stateless, classless and moneyless society so you can ask yourself a question. Was USSR state communist? It was a state. That ideology postulated that it can impose communism top-down, which was always criticised by anarchist thought which operates on horizontalism and not hierarchy. Orwell was a democratic socialist till the end of his life, which a lot of people don't know. He was not a liberal or social democrat.
Dang, I really admire Orwell, he was such an excellent writer.
I liked this line the best:<p>>But at least let us have no more nonsense about defending liberty against Fascism. If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.<p>The author of the article's commentary says it all:<p>>Many of us might also find key points of comparison between his situation and the shrill calls for censorship that we hear so often today.
Are we confident that this preface <i>was</i> actually written by Orwell? Is there testimony from that time that he had written such a preface?<p>Because it seems to me that the propagandistic exploitative value of 'finding' and publishing a preface supposedly from Orwell would be very high and that this preface could well be a fraud.
readers of this article should know that it was published by a website funded and operated by a conservative think tank called the discovery institute that promotes "intelligent design" (ie., that evolution is a myth and that humans were made as-is by god) and gave the world chris ruffo, the man leading the charge to ban books in public schools and libraries nationally.
I find this hard to believe, even in 1945 in Great Britain:<p>"Hardly anyone will print an attack on Stalin, but it is quite safe to attack Churchill"<p>Bertrand Russel wrote "The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism" in 1920, but maybe nobody read it.<p><a href="https://books.google.de/books/about/The_Practice_and_Theory_of_Bolshevism.html?id=3At-WNrRE_YC&redir_esc=y" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://books.google.de/books/about/The_Practice_and_Theory_...</a>
And the actual text comes from "orwell.ru". Not, apparently, censored there.<p>As for avoiding British criticism of Stalin during WWII, we have Churchill's remark:
"If Hitler invaded hell I would make at least a favourable reference to the devil in the House of Commons."
> What scares me is that there are moral fashions too. They're just as arbitrary, and just as invisible to most people. But they're much more dangerous. Fashion is mistaken for good design; moral fashion is mistaken for good. Dressing oddly gets you laughed at. Violating moral fashions can get you fired, ostracized, imprisoned, or even killed.<p><a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html</a>
An important takeaway is to consider what's considered forbidden to discuss in supposedly enlightened 2023. The sad fact is that there are many more such topics now than in 1945 - but for the same reasons. These are topics which threaten a certain politically driven contingent, and this is enforced by the loyal minions of that contingent, including many so lacking in introspection that they accept as axioms, false and destructive ideas which should be honestly challenged.
> But the chief danger to freedom of thought and speech at this moment is not the direct interference of the MOI 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 intellectual 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…<p>Some things never change - this could have been written verbatim in 2021, and would still have been accurate.<p>If only I had a dollar for every time some apologist said <i>"This is not censorship because it's not the government's Thought Police"</i>, or <i>"Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences"</i> whenever a large minority was silenced.<p>I always wonder why there is such a large and vocal support for thought police in these enlightened times. Do these supporters believe that they are exempt?
He may be right that people self sensor to keep a clean image of themselves in the eyes of their peers, but Orwell did not live in a time of cell phones.<p>If you people still don't believe you're all under deep surveillance, after Assange and Snowden leaks, then you all are mentally ill.<p>We now know that this government is willing to subvert the first amendment by forcing shadowbans. Orwell's books doesn't come anywhere near what the current government does. Just because you all aren't in interment camps now doesn't mean they won't use the data they gather to be used against you in the future.<p>So now people that want to speak their minds are either censored by the sheep that downvote or the government that forces censorship.
Isn't it fun how we are moving to all antiutopias at once. Social media acts as big brother while simultaneously pushing us into brave new world, on top of that we are following the cyberpunk megacorp dystopias manual to the letter. Forever wars are in vogue again. The culture war is waged with almost religious zeal and self censorship is on the rise. And we are working on AI to plug us into the matrix ...