THE
FREEDOM OF THE PRESS
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. [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] 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.
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 centralized, 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. Every-one 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 are not
allowed to criticize the Soviet government, at least you are
reasonably free to criticize 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 publicized 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
protégé 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
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 – I 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
organization 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 publicize 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
Heraldfor 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 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 realized, 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 the
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 the urgent need
for an Anglo-Russian alliance, demanded it; but it was clear that
this was a rationalization.
The
English intelligentsia, or a great part of it, had developed a
nationalistic loyalty towards the USSR, and in their hearts they felt
that to cast any doubt on the 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 the purges of 1936-8
were applauded by life-long 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. 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 the 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 the 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 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.
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 rationalization 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 realize 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 – 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.
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 [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 civilization 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 emphasizes 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 are 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 [i.e. 1945(!)] – 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.
