The Freedom of the Press
Orwell's Proposed Preface to ‘Animal Farm’
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 published (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 colour. One publisher
actually started by accepting the book, but after making the preliminary 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 important 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 dictatorships at
large then publication would be all right, but the fable does follow, as I see
now, so completely the progress of the Russian Soviets and their two dictators,
that it can apply only to Russia, to the exclusion of the 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 offence to many people, and particularly to anyone who is a bit touchy, as
undoubtedly the Russians are.
* It is not quite clear whether this suggested modification is
Mr... ’s own idea, or originated with the Ministry of
Information; but it seems to have the official ring about it.
[
Orwell’s Note
]
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 war time) 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 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.
Any fairminded person with journalistic experience will admit that during this war
official
censorship has not been particularly irksome. We have not been subjected to the kind of
totalitarian ‘co-ordination’ that it might have been reasonable to expect. The press has some
justified grievances, but on the whole the Government has behaved well and has been
surprisingly tolerant of minority opinions. The sinister fact about literary 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
sensational 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 centralised,
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 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. 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.
At this moment what is demanded by the prevailing orthodoxy is an uncritical admiration of
Soviet Russia. Everyone knows this, nearly everyone acts on it. Any serious criticism of the
Soviet régime, any disclosure of facts which the Soviet government would prefer to keep
hidden, is next door to unprintable. And this nation-wide conspiracy to flatter our ally takes
place, curiously enough, against a background of genuine intellectual tolerance. For though
you arc not allowed to criticise the Soviet government, at least you are reasonably free to
criticise 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 compromise peace have been published without interference. More, they
have been published without exciting much disapproval. So long as the prestige of the USSR
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 presently, but the prevailing attitude
towards the USSR 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 propaganda from 1941 onwards would be quite astounding if it were not
that they have behaved similarly on several earlier occasions. On one controversial issue after
another the Russian viewpoint has been accepted without examination and then publicised
with complete disregard to historical truth or intellectual decency. To name only one
instance, the BBC celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Red Army without
mentioning Trotsky. This was about as accurate as commemorating the battle of Trafalgar
without mentioning Nelson, but it evoked no protest from the English intelligentsia. In the
internal struggles in the various occupied countries, the British press has in almost all cases
sided with the faction favoured by the Russians and libelled the opposing faction, sometimes
suppressing material evidence in order to do so. A particularly glaring case was that of
Colonel Mihailovich, the Jugoslav Chetnik leader. The Russians, who had their own Jugoslav
protege in Marshal Tito, accused Mihailovich of collaborating with the Germans. This
accusation was promptly taken up by the British press: Mihailovich’s supporters were given
no chance of answering it, and facts contradicting it were simply kept out of print. In July of
1943 the Germans offered a reward of 100,000 gold crowns for the capture of Tito, and a
similar reward for the capture of Mihailovich. The British press ‘splashed’ the reward for
Tito, but only one paper mentioned (in small print) the reward for Mihailovich: and the
charges of collaborating with the Germans 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 libelled in the English leftwing [
sic
] press, and any
statement in their defence even in letter form, was refused publication. At present, not only is
serious criticism of the USSR considered reprehensible, but even the fact of the existence of
such criticism is kept secret in some cases. For example, shortly before his death Trotsky 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 — 1 believe the review copies had been sent out — when the USSR entered the
war. The book was immediately withdrawn. Not a word about this has ever appeared in the
British press, though clearly the existence of such a book, and its suppression, was a news
item worth a few paragraphs.
It is important to distinguish between the kind of censorship that the English literary
intelligentsia voluntarily impose upon themselves, and the censorship that can sometimes be
enforced by pressure groups. Notoriously, certain topics cannot be discussed because of
‘vested interests’. The best-known case is the patent medicine racket. Again, the Catholic
Church has considerable 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
Anglican priest who gets into trouble (e.g. the Rector of Stiffkey) 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 attacks 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 understandable. Any large organisation will look after its own interests as best it
can, and overt propaganda is not a thing to object to. One would no more expect the
Daily
Worker
to publicise unfavourable facts about the USSR than one would expect the
Catholic
Herald
to denounce the Pope. But then every thinking person knows the
Daily Worker
and
the
Catholic Herald
for what they are. What is disquieting is that where the USSR and its
policies are concerned one cannot expect intelligent criticism or even, in many cases, plain
honesty from Liberal [
sic — and throughout as typescript
] writers and journalists who are
under no direct pressure to falsify their opinions. Stalin is sacrosanct and certain aspects of
his policy must not be seriously discussed. This rule has been almost universally observed
since 1941, but it had operated, to a greater extent than is sometimes realised, for ten years
earlier than that. Throughout that time, criticism of the Soviet régime
from the left
could only
obtain a hearing with difficulty. There was a huge output of anti-Russian literature, but nearly
all of it was from the Conservative angle and manifestly 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
discuss all-important questions in a grown-up manner. You could, indeed, publish anti-
Russian books, but to do so was to make sure of being ignored or misrepresented by nearly
me whole of the highbrow 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 me urgent need for an Anglo-Russian alliance, demanded
it; but it was clear that this was a rationalisation. The English intelligentsia, or a great part of
it, had developed a nationalistic loyalty towards me USSR, and in their hearts they felt that to
cast any doubt on me wisdom of Stalin was a kind of blasphemy. Events in Russia and events
elsewhere were to be judged by different standards. The endless executions in me purges of
1936-8 were applauded by life-long opponents of capital punishment, and it was considered
equally proper to publicise famines when they happened in India and to conceal them when
they happened in me Ukraine. And if this was true before the war, the intellectual atmosphere
is certainly no better now.
But now to come back to this book of mine. The reaction towards it of most English
intellectuals will be quite simple: ‘It oughtn’t to have been published.’ Naturally, those
reviewers who understand 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 me whole of the story. One does not say that a book
‘ought not to have been published’ 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 because it traduces their Leader and (as they see it) does harm to the cause of
progress. If it did me opposite they would have nothing to say against it, even if its literary
faults were ten times as glaring 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 scurrility 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 — entitled to a hearing? Put it in that form and nearly any English
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 current orthodoxy happens to be challenged, and so the principle
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 organised societies endure. But freedom, as Rosa
Luxembourg [
sic
] said, is ‘freedom for the other 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 civilisation 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 unmistakable way. Both capitalist 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
ordinary people in the street-partly, perhaps, because they are not sufficiently interested in
ideas to be 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 scientific
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 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. Make a habit of imprisoning 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 workingmen’s college in South London. The
audience were working-class and lower-middle class intellectuals — 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 be
tolerated in war time. I found myself defending the
Daily Worker
, which has gone out of its
way to libel me more than once. But where had these people learned this essentially
totalitarian outlook? Pretty certainly they had learned it from the Communists themselves!
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 technical 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 symptom, though it is true that the agitation against
Mosley’s release was partly factitious and partly a rationalisation of other discontents. But
how much of the present slide towards Fascist ways of thought is traceable to the ‘anti-
Fascism’ of the past ten years and the unscrupulousness it has entailed?
It is important to realise that the current Russomania is only a symptom of the general
weakening of the western liberal tradition. Had the MOI chipped in and definitely vetoed the
publication of this book, the bulk of the English intelligentsia would have seen nothing
disquieting in this. Uncritical loyalty to the USSR happens to be the current orthodoxy, and
where the supposed interests of the USSR 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 author of
Ten Days that Shook the World —
first-hand account 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
British Communists, having destroyed the original edition of the book as completely as they
could, issued a garbled version from which they had eliminated mentions of Trotsky and also
omitted the introduction written by Lenin. If a radical intelligentsia 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 intellectuals it seemed
quite a natural thing to do. And this tolerance or [
sic
= of?] plain dishonesty means much
more than that admiration for Russia happens to be fashionable at this moment. Quite
possibly that particular fashion will not last. For all I know, by the time this book is published
my view of the Soviet régime 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 convince me and that our civilisation over a period of four
hundred years has been founded on the opposite notice. For quite a decade past I have
believed that the existing Russian régime is a mainly evil thing, and I claim the right to say
so, in spite of the fact that we are allies with the USSR 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 liberty.
The word
ancient
emphasises 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 arc 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 actually 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 those 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 compromise 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 only explain this
contradiction in one way: that is, by a cowardly desire to keep in with the bulk of the
intelligentsia, whose patriotism is directed towards the USSR rather than towards Britain. I
know that the English intelligentsia 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 liberty 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 doctrine 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 USA today — it is the
liberals who fear liberty and the intellectuals who want to do dirt on the intellect: it is to draw
attention to that fact that I have written this preface.
1945
For some reason in their 2000 edition, Penguin decided to publish this preface
(the only one) as Appendix with small intro. But it is preface? Preface for
Ukrainian edition of
Animal Farm
was printed also as Appendix (II). (O. Dag)
____
By Penguin:
APPENDIX I
Orwell’s Proposed Preface to
Animal Farm.
Space was allowed in the first edition of
Animal Farm
for a preface by Orwell,
as the pagination of the author’s proof indicates. This preface was not included
and the typescript was only found years later by Ian Angus. It was published,
with an introduction by Professor Bernard Crick entitled ‘How the essay came
to be written’, in
The Times Literary Supplement
, 15 September 1972.
____BD____
George Orwell: ‘The Freedom of the Press’
First published:
The Times Literary Supplement
, September 15, 1972.
____
Machine-readable version: O. Dag
Last modified on: 2019-12-29
George Orwell
‘
Animal Farm: A Fairy Story
’
© 2000 Penguin Classic
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