George Orwell’s essay “The Freedom of the Press”

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.

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.

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 organized societies endure. But freedom, as Rosa Luxembourg 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 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.

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.

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.

www.orwell.ru...

Emphasis mine.

Just thought I’d post bits and pieces of this, reading it for like the hundredth time and I’m always so intrigued by Orwell’s expressed frustrations. Reminds me a lot of the time we live in today, those frustrations are still very much alive.

I wonder what Orwell would think of the media now, (especially the US media) and its coverage of 9/11, the war in Iraq and the Patriot Act.

The essay you quote, which was intended as a preface to Animal Farm, is excellent, but perhaps you should make clear the historical context for members who may not be as well-read as yourself.

Here, this may help:

George Orwell was a man of the left, who - like many politically aware and concerned intellectuals in the first half of the twentieth century - originally saw in the triumph of Russian Communism the realization of his Socialist ideas and a model for the rest of the world, Britain very much included.

However, he quickly saw through the facade of the 'Soviet Socialist Republic' and, disgusted by the brutal and totalitarian methods of Stalin, abandoned first his support for the USSR and then his sympathy with Communism, though he remained a Socialist, more or less, for the rest of his days (which were short).

Here is why he wrote the essay you quote. At the time, most European intellectuals were strong supporters of Socialism, a majority were Communists and admiration for Soviet Russia and its ruler, with whom Orwell had grown disillusioned, was commonplace. So much so, in fact, that there was a near-uniformity of Socialist outlook in the intellectual and literary community of Europe; so much so, indeed, that when reports of torture, forced labour, summary imprisonment and execution and mass displacements of huge numbers of people began coming out of the USSR, European editors would play them down and suppress them. That is the self-censorship Orwell was adverting against. Few writers would write, and few editors publish, material antithetical to Socialism, Communism, Stalin or the government of the USSR. Those who did were frozen out by the establishment. Those who merely expressed misgivings were laughed at or shouted down.

That situation was what inspired this essay of Orwell's, and some of his other writings too, most notably Animal Farm itself.

Why did European intellectuals behave like this? One of the reasons was that, at the time, the big threat to freedom in Europe was not Socialism or Communism but Fascism. The intelligentsia recognized this. They also recognized that Fascism and Socialism were antithetical philosophies, and that Socialists and Communists could be strong allies in the battle against Fascism. They were proved right, too, when the USSR joined Britain and the USA in the triple alliance against the Nazis and their allies.

Other factors contributed towards this highbrow sympathy for Socialism. An important one, in Britain at least, was repugnance for the inequalities of the class system and the filth, poverty and hopelessness of the British working classes (vividly and unflinchingly described by Orwell in The Road to Wigan Pier). To any ATS member who thinks he's poor, or that modern life is miserable and unbearable, I would say: read this book, and then complain about your lot, if you dare.

I hope this little note helps puts your quotes into perspective. Orwell is one of my favourite writers.

Thanks for summarizing the history; it is given at the link I gave. However I didn’t tack it on to this post because I didn’t wish to make it about communism or the general history behind the essay. I was trying to point out Orwell’s obvious frustrations with the press he encountered and how much those frustrations mirror many others frustrations now in our current political climate.