Telling People What They Don't Want to Hear: The Original Preface to Animal Farm
Orwell, George
"Nothing has contributed so much to the corruption of the original idea of socialism as the belief that Russia is a socialist country and that every act of its rulers must be excused, if not...
...The endless executions in the purges of 1936-38 were applauded by lifelong opponents 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...
...As it was there was little or no protest...
...But freedom, as Rosa Luxemburg said, is "freedom for the other fellow...
...Only one of these had any ideological motive...
...But now to come back to this book of mine The reaction toward it of most English intellectuals will be quite simple: "It oughtn't to have been published...
...Then, too, the factions on the Republican side which the Russians were determined to crush were recklessly libeled in the English left-wing press, and any statement in their defense, even in letter form, was refused publication...
...Very similar things happened during the Spanish civil war...
...Some years later the British Communists, having destroyed the original edition of the books 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...
...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...
...A particularly glaring case was that of Colonel Mihailovich, the Yugoslav Chetnik leader...
...On one controversial issue after another the Russian viewpoint has been accepted without examination and then publicized with complete disregard to historical truth or intellectual decency...
...And it was used again as a reason for yelping against habeas corpus when Mosley was released in 1943...
...Quite possibly that particular fashion will not last...
...Naturally, those reviewers who understand the art of denigration will not attack it on political grounds but on literary ones...
...What you said might possibly be true, but it was "inopportune" and "played into the hands of " this or that reactionary interest...
...The same principle is contained in the famous words of Voltaire: "I detest what you say...
...Everyone knows this, nearly everyone acts on it...
...It is very rare for anything of an anti-Catholic tendency to appear on the stage or in a film...
...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...
...There always must be, or at any rate there always will be, some degree of censorship, so long as organized societies endure...
...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...
...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...
...The British press "splashed" the reward for Tito, but only one paper mentioned (in small print) the reward for Mihailovich...
...Any serious criticism of the Soviet regime, any disclosure of facts which the Soviet government would prefer to keep hidden, is next door to unprintable...
...So wrote George Orwell to introduce a Ukrainian edition of Animal Farm four years after his celebrated novella was written...
...A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals...
...The word ancient emphasizes the fact that intellectual freedom is a deep-rooted tradition without which our characteristic Western culture could only doubtfully exist...
...Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness...
...They will say that it is a dull, silly book and a disgraceful waste of paper...
...It is, as it were, spontaneous, and is not due to the action of any pressure group...
...In the end, however, a major firm, Secker and Warburg, accepted it...
...One may assume that it was not an unbiased book, but obviously it was saleable...
...Another thing: it would be less offensive if the predominant caste of the fable were not pigs...
...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...
...To name one instance...
...For all I know, by the time this book is published my view of the Soviet regime may be the generally accepted one...
...This rule has been almost universally observed since 1941, but it had operated, to a greater extent than is sometimes realized, for ten years earlier than that...
...q 64 • DISSENT...
...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...
...To keep him shut up, without trial, in 1943 was an outrage...
...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...
...But give it a concrete shape, and ask, "How about an attack on Stalin...
...I found myself defending the Daily Worker, which has gone out of its way to libel me more than once...
...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...
...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...
...Now, when one demands liberty of speech and of the press, one is not demanding absolute liberty...
...The result of preaching totalitarian doctrines is to weaken the instinct by means of which free peoples know what is or is not dangerous...
...After all, acres of rubbish are presented daily and no one bothers...
...The servility with which the greater part of the English intelligentsia have swallowed and repeated Russian propaganda from 1941 onward would be quite astounding if it were not that they have behaved similarly on several earlier occasions...
...EDS...
...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...
...For though you are not allowed to criticize the Soviet government, at least you are reasonably free to criticize our own...
...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 genial tacit agreement that "it wouldn't do" to mention that particular fact...
...If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear...
...From that tradition many of our intellectuals are visibly turning away...
...We were fighting for our lives and could not allow a possible quisling to go free...
...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...
...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 highbrow press...
...Two had been publishing anti-Russian books for years, and the other had no noticeable political color...
...At this moment what is demanded by the prevailing orthodoxy is an uncritical admiration of Soviet Russia...
...Throughout that time, criticism of the Soviet regime from the left could only obtain a hearing with difficulty...
...I will defend to the death your right to say it...
...And this tolerance of plain dishonesty means much more than that admiration for Russia happens to be fashionable at the moment...
...The common people still vaguely subscribe to that doctrine and act on it...
...At the death of John Reed, the author of Ten Days that Shook the World—a 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...
...The enemy is the gramophone mind, whether or not one agrees with the record that is being played at the moment...
...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...
...For example, shortly before his death Trotsky had written a biography of Stalin...
...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...
...Apparently the Russians have a right to defend themselves, whereas for us to do so is a deadly sin...
...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...
...But the chief danger to freedom of thought and speech at this moment is WINTER • 1996 • 59 Orwell not direct interference of the MOI or any official body...
...The best-known case is the patent medicine racket...
...and the charges of collaborating with the Germans continued...
...This attitude was usually defended on the grounds that the international situation, and the WINTER • 1996 • 61 Orwell urgent need for an Anglo-Russian alliance, demanded it...
...To many English intellectuals it seemed quite a natural thing to do...
...One would no more expect the Daily Worker to publicize unfavorable facts about the USSR than one would expect the Catholic Herald to denounce the pope...
...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...
...But then every thinking person knows the Daily Worker and the Catholic Herald for what they are...
...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...
...This kind of thing is not a good symptom...
...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 USSR entered the war...
...It is important to realize that the current Russomania is only a symptom of the general weakening of the Western liberal tradition...
...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...
...So far as the daily newspapers go, this is easy to understand...
...Is that entitled to a hearing...
...The same argument was used to justify the quite conscious lying that went on in the left-wing press about the Trotskyists and other Republican minorities in the Spanish civil war...
...But the same kind of veiled censorship also operates in books and periodicals, as well as in plays, films, and radio...
...In the internal struggles in the various occupied countries, the British press has in almost all cases sided with the faction favored by the 60 • DISSENT Orwell Russians and libeled the opposing faction, sometimes suppressing material evidence in order to do so...
...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 rationalization of other discontents...
...The press has some justified grievances, but on the whole the government has behaved well and has been surprisingly tolerant of minority opinions...
...Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban...
...Nothing has contributed so much to the corruption of the original idea of socialism as the belief that Russia is a socialist country and that every act of its rulers must be excused, if not imitated...
...The issue involved here is quite a simple one: is every opinion, however unpopular—however foolish, even—entitled to a hearing...
...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 unmistakable way...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...Events in Russia and events elsewhere were to be judged by different standards...
...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 it tells them what they want to hear...
...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 appears here for the first time in an American publication, courtesy of the estate of the late Sonia Brownell Orwell...
...I must confess that this expression of opinion has given me seriously to think...
...Notoriously, certain topics cannot be discussed because of "vested interests...
...But where had these people learned this essentially totalitarian outlook...
...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...
...And who are its enemies...
...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...
...When asked why, they said that it was a paper of doubtful loyalty and ought not to be tolerated in wartime...
...If I had to choose a text to justify myself I should choose the line from Milton: "By the known rules of ancient liberty...
...Make a habit of imprisoning Fascists without trial, and perhaps the process won't stop at Fascists...
...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...
...There are other forbidden topics, and I shall mention some of them presently, but the prevailing attitude toward the USSR is much the most serious symptom...
...but it was clear that this was a rationalization...
...Here is an extract from his letter: I mentioned the reaction I had from an important official in the Ministry of Information with regard Copyright © the Estate of the late Sonia Brownell Orwell...
...Tolerance and decency are deeply rooted in England, but they are not indestructible, and they have to be kept alive partly by conscious effort...
...But what use would that be in itself...
...Our government, as I have already pointed out, still makes some show of respecting it...
...I answer simply that they don't convince me and WINTER • 1996 • 63 Orwell that our civilization over a period of four hundred years has been founded on the opposite notice...
...Plans were made for its publication by a small British press, and Orwell, sometime in 1944, penned a sharp, passionate preface defending the "right to tell people what they do not want to hear...
...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...
...If it did the opposite they would have nothing to say against it, even if its literary faults were ten times as glaring as they are...
...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 toward the USSR rather than toward Britain...
...But how much of the present slide toward Fascist ways of thought is traceable to the "anti-Fascism" of the past ten years and the unscrupulousness it has entailed...
...Any fair-minded person with journalistic experience will admit that during this war official censorship has not been particularly irksome...
...If one loves democracy, the argument runs, one must crush its enemies by no matter what means...
...The English intelligentsia, or a great part of it, had developed a nationalistic loyalty toward the USSR, and in their hearts they felt that to cast any doubt on the wisdom of Stalin was a kind of blasphemy...
...And this nationwide conspiracy to flatter our ally takes place, curiously enough, against a background of genuine intellectual tolerance...
...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 writers and journalists who are under no direct pressure to falsify their opinions...
...In that case the current orthodoxy happens to be challenged, and so the principle of free speech lapses...
...Both publicly and privately you were warned that it was "not done...
...and the answer more often than not will be "No...
...The sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary...
...The book was immediately withdrawn...
...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...
...And others who do not actually hold this view assent to it from sheer cowardice...
...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...
...So long as the prestige of the USSR is not involved, the principle of free speech has been reasonably well upheld...
...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...
...But at least let us have no more nonsense about defending liberty against Fascism...
...But this kind of thing is harmless, or at least it is understandable...
...One of the peculiar phenomena of our time is the renegade Liberal...
...This was about as accurate as commemorating the battle of Trafalgar without mentioning Nelson, but it evoked no protest from the English intelligentsia...
...Put it in that form and nearly any English intellectual will feel that he ought to say "Yes...
...One does not say that a book "ought not to have been published" merely because it is a bad book...
...The most ardent Russophile hardly believed that all of the victims were guilty of all of the things they were accused of, but by holding heretical opinions they "objectively" 62 • DISSENT Orwell harmed the regime, and therefore it was quite right not only to massacre them but to discredit them by false accusations...
...But how many of them have ever suggested that war is also evil when it is waged by the Red Army...
...Two major British publishers refused it, and Dial Press, in New York, informed him that "it was impossible to sell animal stories in the USA...
...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...
...to Animal Farm...
...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 other dictatorships...
...Again, the Catholic church has considerable influence in the press and can silence criticism of itself to some extent...
...We have not been subjected to the kind of totalitarian "co-ordination" that it might have been reasonable to expect...
...The case of Mosley illustrates this...
...Pretty certainly they had learned it from the Communists themselves...
...More, they have been published without exciting much disapproval...
...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...
...Any large organization will look after its own interests as best it can, and overt propaganda is not a thing to object to...
...Both capitalist democracy and the Western versions of socialism have till recently taken that principle for granted...
...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...
...This may well be true, but it is obviously not the whole of the story...
...Animal Farm appeared in mid-1945 and became a best-seller, but without the original 1944 preface, which was rediscovered a quarter of a century later...
...This argument was used, for instance, to justify the Russian purges...
...In other words, defending democracy involves destroying all independence of thought...
...And if this was true before the war, the intellectual atmosphere is certainly no better now...
...Stalin is sacrosanct, and certain aspects of his policy must not be seriously discussed...
...To exchange one orthodoxy for another is not necessarily an advance...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...The Russians, who had their own Yugoslav protégé in Marshal Tito, accused Mihailovich of collaborating with the Germans...
...For quite a decade past I have believed that the existing Russian regime 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...
...I can see now that it might be regarded as something which it was highly ill-advised to publish at the present time...
...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...
...To name only one instance, the BBC celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Red Army without mentioning Trotsky...
...Soon after the suppressed Daily Worker had been reinstated, I was lecturing to a workingmen's college in South London...
...He composed the book in a brief three months beginning in November 1943, and while it is now a classic, it is often forgotten how difficult it was for him to get it into print...
...Hardly anyone will print an attack on Stalin, but it is quite safe to attack Churchill, at any rate in books and periodicals...
...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...
...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...
...In 1940 it was perfectly right to intern Mosley, whether or not he had committed any technical crime...
Vol. 43 • January 1996 • No. 1
