
Freedom of the Press: Orwell's Proposed Preface to Animal Farm (1945) - primroot
http://home.iprimus.com.au/korob/Orwell.html
======
CamperBob2
Some great passages in there. This one could have been written today:

    
    
       One of the peculiar phenomena 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 only 
       defend democracy by totalitarian methods. If one loves 
       democracy, the argument runs, one must crush its enemies 
       by no matter what means. And who are its enemies? It 
       always appears that they are not only those who attack 
       it openly and consciously, but those who 'objectively' 
       endanger it by spreading mistaken doctrines. In other 
       words, defending democracy involves destroying all 
       independence of thought. This argument was used, for 
       instance, to justify the Russian purges. The most ardent 
       Russophile hardly believed that all of the victims were 
       guilty of all the things they were accused of. but by 
       holding heretical opinions they 'objectively' harmed the 
       régime, and therefore it was quite right not only to 
       massacre them but to discredit them by false 
       accusations. The same argument was used to justify the 
       quite conscious lying that went on in the leftwing press 
       about the Trotskyists and other Republican minorities in 
       the Spanish civil war. And it was used again as a reason 
       for yelping against habeas corpus when Mosley was 
       released 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...

~~~
jsprogrammer
Indeed, there appears to be no reason to believe in objectivity and any claim
to it should be viewed as highly suspect. Subjectivity is the best we can do.

------
tjradcliffe
> A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing,
> either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.

Still true today, as is the observation that it is intellectuals who are most
hostile to heterodox ideas.

The preface to the preface(not by Orwell, but by the webmaster) whining about
how mean people were to leftists--who all went strangely quiet for a decade or
more after the Soviet empire collapsed and the true extent of the horrors
perpetrated could be fully exposed without a constant barrage of propaganda
attempting to bury the details--is a nice illustration of how "truly
unpopular" democratic capitalism and the Enlightenment values that underpin it
remain.

Socialists still steadfastly believe they have the moral high ground, even
after they and those almost all of them actively or passively supported had
piled up tens of millions of innocent dead. And their support went on for
decades after the truth had been thoroughly documented by people like Robert
Conquest and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

Orwell stands today, still, as one of the very, very few voices on the Left
who called out the Soviets for what they were. He did so early. Decades later
most Western leftists were still quietly accepting Soviet hegemony, or
actively defending the Soviet regime.

So Orwell's voice is notable not just because of his insight and eloquence,
but because so few of his comrades had the courage to follow his lead and
condemn the Soviets or their puppets in other nations.

The fact of his uniqueness is a far deeper condemnation of 20th century
socialists than anything he actually wrote, and that's saying something.

~~~
cma
Orwell was socialist.

~~~
JupiterMoon
This is exactly the point. He was a socialist who was able to call out other
socialists. Most socialists of the time (and even today) were/are not prepared
to do this (why I don't know - and I suspect some Russian control on elements
of the British socialist mainstream at the time may have played a role). This
one of the reasons that people on the right of the political spectrum think
that socialism is a dirty word.

The reality is that socialism itself is not bad but that the implementation as
seen in the USSR was terrible. The principle needs to be separated from the
poor implementation.

HOWEVER, how to implement socialism well? Any implementation would have to
account for people's inherent selfishness etc. I don't have an ideas for how
to overcome this and I don't think anyone ever has yet. Therefore I prefer
that we stay with market driven capitalism (which deliberately uses people's
selfishness and in a pure from has very simple implementation) for the
foreseeable future.

~~~
MatekCopatek
I disagree with 2 things.

Firstly - I feel there are very few socialists today who would still support
the old Soviet regimes (and other similar totalitarian implementations
worldwide). In Orwell's time, this was much more common because it was a
political situation people were living in, nowadays it's just something from
history, so it's much easier to judge. I totally agree that anyone who is
still looking up to Stalin today shouldn't be taken seriously.

Secondly - the supposed inherence of values that support capitalism is
completely false. Every system has its way of promoting values that it is
based on and can benefit from. In past regimes, this was mostly state driven
propaganda, in modern capitalism it's popular culture. Anthropologists and
sociologists can easily point to a bunch of cultures that developed value
systems very different from ours, simply because they were isolated or
affected by different influences.

Throughout history, the currently employed system always tries to assert
itself as "the natural state of people" in order to be superior to anything
else in comparison, but I firmly believe political discussions remain much
more rational if we agree that every economic/political system is just a man-
made construct.

------
luxpir
I always enjoy reading Orwell's writing, mostly for the technical side. It is
so fluid and clear. This was pleasing:

    
    
      It is 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.
    

And as mentioned elsewhere, still applies today (i.e. the British media + the
BBC's silence over Snowden, D-Notice or not).

A few curiosities from a writing point of view, sticking to his advice about
avoiding the traditional elementary school grammar rules:

    
    
      . 'Every-one' and 'everyone' in the same sentence. I can just about
      see how that could have a literary effect, but part of me thinks
      it could just be a quirk.
    
      . Starting sentences with 'and' and 'but'. Great!
    
      . A liberal use of commas.
    
      . The use of a single - dash - combo instead of brackets/parentheses.
    
      . The use of the now-American-only: Start everything after a colon
      with a capital letter. Nearly everything, anyway.
    
      . The editor's decision between s/or/of should IMO be 'of',
      if the style of the sentence is to match Orwell's style, and indeed
      if it is to make complete sense.
    
      . The use of 'traduce', to slander or defame, was fun. And educational...
    

A quote to wrap up this rambling comment:

    
    
      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 convince me and that our civilization over a
      period of four hundred years has been founded on the opposite notice. 
    

Well worth a read!

------
peteretep
I remember reading 1984 when I was very young and finding all the linguistic
stuff he'd written terribly dull. Coming back to it when I was a teenager, it
was considerably more interesting than the book itself. Rare that such a great
story teller also had so many interesting structured thoughts to share.

