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The unpublished preface to Orwell’s Animal Farm

303 points by momirlan 3y ago

oska 3y ago
Are we confident that this preface was actually written by Orwell? Is there testimony from that time that he had written such a preface? Because it seems to me that the propagandistic exploitative value of 'finding' and publishing a preface supposedly from Orwell would be very high and that this preface could well be a fraud.
pallas_athena 3y ago
Everyman's Library edition has a great introduction by Julian Symons, that covers this post and more. Sadly I cannot find it online.
selfagency 3y ago
readers of this article should know that it was published by a website funded and operated by a conservative think tank called the discovery institute that promotes "intelligent design" (ie., that evolution is a myth and that humans were made as-is by god) and gave the world chris ruffo, the man leading the charge to ban books in public schools and libraries nationally.
RagnarD 3y ago
An important takeaway is to consider what's considered forbidden to discuss in supposedly enlightened 2023. The sad fact is that there are many more such topics now than in 1945 - but for the same reasons. These are topics which threaten a certain politically driven contingent, and this is enforced by the loyal minions of that contingent, including many so lacking in introspection that they accept as axioms, false and destructive ideas which should be honestly challenged.
- Semaphor 3y ago
  Like?
- Brotkrumen 3y ago
  What would those topics be? I guess they are suppressed quite well, since none come to mind.
  - ozr 3y ago
    "I dare you to say forbidden things publicly as we comment on an article discussing the negative impacts of doing so"
    - Brotkrumen 3y ago
      Are we pretending now, that even mentioning these "forbidden topics" will get you banned? Here, I'll mention some for you: eugenics, Holocaust, incest. So please, if I don't get censored for these, please tell me what these secret topics hidden from me are!
    - deleted 3y ago
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  - wrp 3y ago
    Taking this as a serious question, it wouldn't be hard to make a list of topics that get instant flagging on HN. I suppose the reason why people don't bother is they expect any attempt to explain would also be downvoted to oblivion.
    - CoastalCoder 3y ago
      I'm not sure it's that cut and dry. But I agree there are some viewpoints more likely to be downvoted than others. I strongly disagree with Graham's view that disagreement is a good reason for downvoting.
  - Glyptodon 3y ago
    A lot of discourse about China on HN seems to get pulled into perpetual "but bad things have happened in the US too" whataboutism and a sort of mild muffling. Not to mention the weird stuff that happens with topics like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36946171 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36946171.
- parker_mountain 3y ago
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- photonerd 3y ago
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- wrp 3y ago
  I suppose parent is mainly thinking of issues grouped under the term "culture wars". Another, more urgent issue, is indicated by this quote in TFA: 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.
- deleted 3y ago
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- vasco 3y ago
  > including many so lacking in introspection that they accept as axioms, false and destructive ideas which should be honestly challenged Despite the existence of people like this, it's generally not a good stance to consider those who disagree with you as lacking introspection. It's just a crutch to further validate your beliefs without any effort. How much more developed would your thoughts be if you pretend that every opinion you encounter was thought through, and included as much life experiences and research as your own opinions do?
  - bheadmaster 3y ago
    It is also naive to assume that everyone has good reasons to believe what they believe, when we live in the world where astrology is popular, and people believe things because they "feel deep inside that it's true!".
    - vasco 3y ago
      I agree with you, here's an expanded version of the buckets I think exist: 1. I'm genuine but I haven't thought this through 2. I'm genuine and I have thought this through (regardless if I'm right or wrong) 3. I'm adversarial and weaponise my opinion in order to advance some other agenda or push the overton window My proposition is that if you assume everyone is in bucket 1, you never rethink your opinions and just think "poorly" of others which doesn't allow you to advance your thinking as fast as if you classify them as bucket 2. For people in bucket 3, you just have to trust that you'll spot a bad actor from their actions and inconsistent rhetoric over time so that you're not fooled over the long run. But similarly to people that choose to never find love for fear of having their heart broken, I wouldn't want to assume everyone is in bucket 3 because that's a shitty life to live.
- osivertsson 3y ago
  What current topics and ideas do you fear will be harmful to society in the long run then? What will the consequences be to individuals, communities, etc? This is HN, we can discuss all sorts of deep insights. For that discussion to be able to take place please give examples and explain what you see based on your unique experiences. That way you can win people over and slowly transform views of people, communities etc.
  - bheadmaster 3y ago
    The most harmful current idea is that there is such a thing as a "harmful idea that must be censored for the good of society". I think this is one place where tolerance paradox arises.
    - manofmanysmiles 3y ago
      I agree wholeheartedly. The only remedy to bad information is more knowledge. With enough knowledge, all falsehoods fall away.
  - manofmanysmiles 3y ago
    I don’t believe any ideas are harmful to “society” [1], but there are many that are “harmful” to the current paradigm of power. Some that come to mind: 1) The illusion of authority. The idea that some people have the moral right to do violence to enforce arbitrary rules written on paper. 2) The root cause of suffering, which is a lack of true knowledge of self and the nature of reality. 3) The fiat money system, or the idea of money at all. 4) The inherent ability (and maybe desire) to do harm and commit violence to existing in every being. 5) The idea of self ownership, when it comes to choices such as what we consume, whether it be food, “drugs”, or media. 6) Anything deemed a “conspiracy theory”. 7) Objective morality and natural law. I could go on. All of these stem from a lack of knowledge of the self, morality, and the nature of consciousness and morality. Of course these can be discussed in small groups, but widespread discussion of these, by “public figures” or “the media” is all but completely lacking. Edit: I forgot to add a "citation" to my post. [1]: I always wonder what people mean when they say society. Do they mean the current structure and way of doing things? Do they mean all people?
- omscs99 3y ago
  Two different types of forbidden, one is the top down state driven kind, the other is the puritan witch burning kind. They are not the same
RajT88 3y ago
This forward hints at a missing puzzle piece for me, regarding history. Why did the English intellectuals want to avoid criticizing Stalin? Was it because it would be by extension criticizing Communism which at the time was a popular idea among intellectuals? Was this the progress being referred to?
- CobrastanJorji 3y ago
  Orwell was certainly not a fan of Soviet communism. In fact, an especially astute reader of "Animal Farm" may notice subtle hints concerning Orwell's opinion of communism.
  - lurquer 3y ago
    They are indeed very subtle. Easy to miss.
    - hinkley 3y ago
      So easy it would be futile to make it assigned reading for 13-14 year olds, who could not possibly grasp the nuance.
      - lurquer 3y ago
        Almost as easy to miss as sarcasm, apparently. Sigh….
        hinkley 3y ago
        If you think I missed the sarcasm, look in the mirror. Cold War era middle schoolers in the US had that book as required reading in some parts of the country. At least it got us out of reading Shakespeare for a few months. You don’t assign complex reading to middle schoolers.
        lurquer 3y ago
ozr 3y ago
> What scares me is that there are moral fashions too. They're just as arbitrary, and just as invisible to most people. But they're much more dangerous. Fashion is mistaken for good design; moral fashion is mistaken for good. Dressing oddly gets you laughed at. Violating moral fashions can get you fired, ostracized, imprisoned, or even killed. http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
- deleted 3y ago
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- velhartice 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - dang 3y ago
    Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. (This is true regardless of which ideology you favor, btw) If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
ReptileMan 3y ago
Isn't it fun how we are moving to all antiutopias at once. Social media acts as big brother while simultaneously pushing us into brave new world, on top of that we are following the cyberpunk megacorp dystopias manual to the letter. Forever wars are in vogue again. The culture war is waged with almost religious zeal and self censorship is on the rise. And we are working on AI to plug us into the matrix ...
- deleted 3y ago
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- manofmanysmiles 3y ago
  Three serious questions: 1) do you believe we can stop it? 2) Do you believe we want to stop it? 3) What is the root cause?
  - dennis_jeeves1 3y ago
    > 3) What is the root cause? This really is an easy ( but not popular) answer. It's collective stupidity or more formally low IQ. A quote come to mind: “If at age 20 you are not a Communist then you have no heart. If at age 30 you are not a Capitalist then you have no brains.”
  - ReptileMan 3y ago
    Also throw a potential ecological catastrophe in the mix 3) Look in the early/mid seventies around the oil embargo - this is when the cost disease really took off and I wouldn't be surprised if there was some subtle change in mentality that enabled a lot of the things we see now. 2) I think that the majority of people that are not profiting want to stop them, but the boiling frog effect is so slow that few do - and the brave new world is quite good at subduing the fighting spiring and inquisitiveness - think of it that way BG3 that is moving to become one of the highest rated PC games ever is just a basic very good game from the late 90s/early 2000s 1) I think we are in a really bad Nash equilibrium right now - so to change we need a really big external push. Never let a crisis go to waste. And there will be crisis. But it will require the right kinds of people to be near the power levers.
cjensen 3y ago
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- deleted 3y ago
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- resolutebat 3y ago
  Surely the more important piece of missing context is that Animal Farm was published in 1945, while World War II was still raging and the Soviet Union and the UK were Allies fighting Nazi Germany? They were always odd bedfellows, but the enemy of my enemy is my friend (at least temporarily), and it's sensible not to antagonize your friend when you're both engaged in literal mortal combat against the enemy.
  - constantcrying 3y ago
    No. Much of the British and American elite (especially those not of the intellectual class), was still absolutely opposed to communism (Operation Unthinkable), they had supported the USSR with enormous amounts of war material, because they prefered Communism taking over large parts of Europe over Fascism doing the same. (WW2 nominally started over the German/Soviet invasion of Poland) On the other hand the british and american intellectual class saw the USSR as worthy of emulation. They wanted a Stalinist regime in Britain/America.
- psychoslave 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - mmmmmmtoes 3y ago
    Capitalism is not inherently a political system. "Liberalism" would probably be more apt here.
    - Dylan16807 3y ago
      It's no more of a misuse than the parent comment's critique of "communism".
TotalCrackpot 3y ago
Orwell was actually fighting FOR communism. Specifically anarcho-communist Catalonia. What you call Communism is actually ideology called Marxism-Leninism, there are libertarian variants of communists too, for example anarcho-communism or council communism. Communism is stateless, classless and moneyless society so you can ask yourself a question. Was USSR state communist? It was a state. That ideology postulated that it can impose communism top-down, which was always criticised by anarchist thought which operates on horizontalism and not hierarchy. Orwell was a democratic socialist till the end of his life, which a lot of people don't know. He was not a liberal or social democrat.
- goatlover 3y ago
  But that kind of state Marxism happened in other countries as well. The state Marxists might ask the anarchists how they expect to accomplish a sateless, classless, moneyless society. The state Marxists didn't succeed, but it does still pose a question toward anarchists. How do you get rid of the state? To that I'd add, what makes you think people want a classless, moneyless society? Or another question would be, how do you have a revolution to overthrow the state and not just replace it with another state setup by whoever ends up leading the revolution?
  - TotalCrackpot 3y ago
    You can read about Zapatistas, who ideologically are the closest to anarchist territory in practice. They have quite a bit higher standard of living then the rest of Chiapas, so it seems the experiment is successful. A lot of people don't like liberalism anymore and because they think the only alternative on the left was Marxist-Leninism they slowly go in the direction of fascism. Anarchism is another direction. Anarchist revolution wouldn't have leaders and it in theory wouldn't have to be violent - anarcho-syndycalists postulate that a general strike would be enough. Probably some violence would happen, especially from the state or fascist paramilitary groups but who knows. Anarchist main strategy is prefiguration, so create spaces that are anarchist in nature and grow them from there, show as many people they don't need a state or private property or if you are a communist a money too.
dang 3y ago
Fun fact: among the publishers who rejected Animal Farm was T. S. Eliot: And after all, your pigs are far more intelligent than the other animals, and therefore the best qualified to run the farm—in fact, there couldn’t have been an Animal Farm at all without them: so that what was needed, (someone might argue), was not more communism but more public-spirited pigs. https://www.openculture.com/2013/11/t-s-eliot-rejects-george-orwells-animal-farm.html https://www.openculture.com/2013/11/t-s-eliot-rejects-george... Eliot was surely wrong to call Animal Farm "Trotskyite" but that was probably his way of noting that Orwell's critique of communism was coming from the left, not the right. This fits with another fun fact: the most famous fan of Orwell's unpublished preface is Chomsky, who has been championing it for decades.
- simonebrunozzi 3y ago
  I didn't know about Chomsky's support; do you have any reference?
  - ravenousgeek 3y ago
    I have heard Chomsky mention it on many occasions, one example here in an interview with Andrew Marr. https://youtu.be/GjENnyQupow?t=490 https://youtu.be/GjENnyQupow?t=490
    - dang 3y ago
      It would be interesting to find where he first wrote or talked about it. I'm pretty sure it goes back even a lot further than that.
  - TaylorAlexander 3y ago
    I googled “Chomsky Orwell preface” and found this: https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/noam-chomsky-90th-birthday/ https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/noam-chomsky-90th-... (Search the text of the article for the word preface to directly find the reference).
    - 3y ago
renewiltord 3y ago
Ah, originally unpublished. By the time I read it, it was in the book.
lelanthran 3y ago
> 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… Some things never change - this could have been written verbatim in 2021, and would still have been accurate. If only I had a dollar for every time some apologist said "This is not censorship because it's not the government's Thought Police", or "Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences" whenever a large minority was silenced. I always wonder why there is such a large and vocal support for thought police in these enlightened times. Do these supporters believe that they are exempt?
- ManuelKiessling 3y ago
  So, should we introduce freedom from consequences then?
  - lelanthran 3y ago
    > So, should we introduce freedom from consequences then? I upvoted you because you make a good point with that question. However, my point is that "Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences" is a meaningful expression used primarily by people who want to police the thoughts of everyone. My point is not that everyone should be forced to associate with everyone else. IOW, that expression is useful as an indicator that an individual is in a mob.
  - gadders 3y ago
    The only consequence to speech you don't like should be more speech opposing it. (Unless the speech is completely illegal such as a credible threat or encouragement of violence).
    - Dylan16807 3y ago
      How direct of an encouragement? If it has to be all the way to illegal then I can't refuse business to KKK members? Or even KKK leadership?
cpach 3y ago
Link to site with full preface and cleaner layout: https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/the-freedom-of-the-press/ https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
davidy123 3y ago
I find this video discussion of Orwell and his works to be illuminating: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Gz0I_X_nfo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Gz0I_X_nfo Asimov's critiques of his work, for example.
tetrep 3y ago
> (except security censorship, which no one objects to in war time) Ha! That's exactly when everyone should care the most about censorship, it's when the stakes are highest for "both" sides. I assume he realized the error in his ways by the time he realized that we've always been at war with...
- bennettnate5 3y ago
  I don't think he's giving a blanket free pass on censorship during war time, but rather is acknowledging that there are necessarily censored fields of information during war that would otherwise be used to the enemy's strategic advantage. Anti-war protests should not be censored, but a news story specifying the production capacity of one's navy may very well be.
- crop_rotation 3y ago
  Anyone who takes such an extreme position during a war would be most likely conquered by the enemy. Ideally there should be no wars, but if there are, some compromises are necessary to win them. Besides, in a brutal war like the World Wars censorship is the least of anyone's worries. If your city is being bombed or you are fighting at a trench, controlling sensitive information is far more important.
bell-cot 3y ago
Historical Context: Animal Farm was published (per Wikipedia) in England on 17 Aug 1945. Nazi Germany had surrendered to the Allies (France, UK, US, USSR, etc.) on 8 May 1945. The great majority of the fighting and dying "needed" to achieve that victory was done by the USSR (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d1/World_War_II_Casualties.svg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d1/World_Wa...). Back in WWI, the UK had experienced 2X or so the number of deaths that it did in WWII. The UK's leaders were extremely aware of how bad a massive war, with a massive death toll, could be for a country. Regardless of Orwell's fuming about freedom of the press, pro-Soviet English intellectual fashions, and such - for the WWII-era British government, not "rocking the boat" with Stalin, when "his" USSR was still critical to winning the war with a less-horrific British body count, would be a "d'oh, obviously" policy.
- hackandthink 3y ago
  It was clear in the thirties that there will again be war in Europe. But who with whom at what time against whom was not so clear. Somebody had to defeat the Germans, the Soviet Union had the main burden in the end. Fiasco: The Anglo-Franco-Soviet Alliance That Never Was and the Unpublished British White Paper, 1939–1940 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07075332.2018.1458043?journalCode=rinh20 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07075332.2018.14... German–Polish declaration of non-aggression "The new constellation made the Soviet Union fear a joint German-Polish attack." https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsch-polnischer_Nichtangriffspakt https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsch-polnischer_Nichtangrif... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German%E2%80%93Polish_declaration_of_non-aggression https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German%E2%80%93Polish_declarat...
- nickff 3y ago
  >"Regardless of Orwell's fuming about freedom of the press, pro-Soviet English intellectual fashions, and such - for the WWII-era British government, not "rocking the boat" with Stalin, when "his" USSR was still critical to winning the war with a less-horrific British body count, would be a "d'oh, obviously" policy." On the other hand, we shouldn't forget that Stalin's USSR was also critical to starting the war as well.
jxramos 3y ago
> Every right-thinking intellectual somehow knew that a candid assessment of Soviet rule was, well, just not the done thing!… What does this sentence even mean, did they mean to write “was just not something you (ever) did”?
- pie_flavor 3y ago
  To quote the preface: > 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. It means 'don't do it' but with the passive voice, so as not to imply that the speaker is the one who should defend the instruction.
  - jxramos 3y ago
    Ah yes I missed that part, that is indeed a tricky back reference to manage and pull off in prose.
    - sanderjd 3y ago
      I think this is a pretty common construction in (especially older) british english. I think it is also the back reference the parent commenter notes, but I don't think it would have been unclear without that reference, especially at the time he wrote it.
      - jxramos 3y ago
        I wonder if its mostly expressed in the negative form, because "the done thing" by itself is like an incomplete sentence and an ambiguous phrase. Kind of grammatically squishy in some fascinating way.
        sanderjd 3y ago
        I don't think it seems incomplete or ambiguous. To me, it is pretty clear that it is turning the verb form of "done" - that is, not the adjective meaning "finished", but the past tense of the verb "do" as in "fishing is an activity that people have done for a long time" - into an adjective modifying "thing". So a "done thing" is just "a thing that is being done". Using that fishing example again, it shifts from "fishing is a thing that is done by people" to just "fishing is a done thing". This "adjectivizing" technique is a common way that colloquialisms are created. (Maybe it's a bit weirder in this case because an adjective form of the word already exists, but has a different meaning.)
hackandthink 3y ago
I find this hard to believe, even in 1945 in Great Britain: "Hardly anyone will print an attack on Stalin, but it is quite safe to attack Churchill" Bertrand Russel wrote "The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism" in 1920, but maybe nobody read it. https://books.google.de/books/about/The_Practice_and_Theory_of_Bolshevism.html?id=3At-WNrRE_YC&redir_esc=y https://books.google.de/books/about/The_Practice_and_Theory_...
- crop_rotation 3y ago
  It is easy to believe in the context of the world war, as the preface even mentions "our ally". You could criticise Stalin safely before Hitler attacked him but once the Red Army was fighting a bloody battle against the Nazis, it was not the same.
codexb 3y ago
"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." Sounds eerily appropriate for most issues today
- barbariangrunge 3y ago
  I’m finding this surreal: hackernews standing up against censorship? But maybe it’s just the wording, or because it’s Orwell, since “free speech” became a dirty phrase around here a few years ago. As if people forgot that we have the nice things we have today because of all the forbidden things those before us were able to say, as if we can just stop with that rule since the left is the one in charge of public opinion now, as if free speech only applies to us and things we like
  - AnimalMuppet 3y ago
    HN isn't pro censorship. HN is very much against government censorship. It gets more confusing when you talk about a company censoring (as opposed to a government). HN gets schizophrenic here. Companies should not be forced to carry content they don't want to carry, but companies shouldn't be able to censor people because of company ideology or politics or whatever. HN is very conflicted on this issue. But I don't think it's fair to be surprised that HN is not in favor of censorship, even the closed-minded groupthink self-censorship that Orwell was dealing with.
    - barbariangrunge 3y ago
      If you call it censorship, hn is against it. But if you call it free speech, in an act of doublespeak, hn is loudly against that for the last year or so
    - coffeeisyummy 3y ago
      The waters get muddy when the government asks companies to censor on its behalf, as we've seen with social media in the past. Moveover, a couple of years of go, it was a good thing "dangerous" ideas were censored, in the name of the greater good. Certain elections and viruses come to mind.
nextmove 3y ago
He may be right that people self sensor to keep a clean image of themselves in the eyes of their peers, but Orwell did not live in a time of cell phones. If you people still don't believe you're all under deep surveillance, after Assange and Snowden leaks, then you all are mentally ill. We now know that this government is willing to subvert the first amendment by forcing shadowbans. Orwell's books doesn't come anywhere near what the current government does. Just because you all aren't in interment camps now doesn't mean they won't use the data they gather to be used against you in the future. So now people that want to speak their minds are either censored by the sheep that downvote or the government that forces censorship.
- deleted 3y ago
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gumby 3y ago
His worst work IMHO. And I'm a huge fan of his writing in general.
Dig1t 3y ago
Dang, I really admire Orwell, he was such an excellent writer. I liked this line the best: >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 author of the article's commentary says it all: >Many of us might also find key points of comparison between his situation and the shrill calls for censorship that we hear so often today.
WalterBright 3y ago
When I was little, I was working my way through the "Freddie the Pig" stories: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07CQ9T198 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07CQ9T198 I noticed my dad had "Animal Farm" and it seemed to be about a pig, so I read it. I took it at face value as a good story about animals running a farm. Many, many years later I realized it was an allegory about the Soviet Revolution.
- dennis_jeeves1 3y ago
  >I took it at face value as a good story about animals running a farm. I think adult 'socialists' ( as opposed to capitalists ) are in that league. A quote come to mind: “If at age 20 you are not a Communist then you have no heart. If at age 30 you are not a Capitalist then you have no brains.”
  - dpig_ 3y ago
    Watch this quote become very silly over time, when the average material wealth of a 30 year old is in steep decline.
    - WalterBright 3y ago
      It's a Winston Churchill quote from 80 years ago. > when the average material wealth of a 30 year old is in steep decline Thanks to the leftward turn of the economy.
  - JuanPosadas 3y ago
    Survivorship bias people in their 30s be like "My money stacks have bullet holes, better buy some armor for my money stacks" ignoring the corpses and poverty of their less fortunate peers.
Animats 3y ago
And the actual text comes from "orwell.ru". Not, apparently, censored there. As for avoiding British criticism of Stalin during WWII, we have Churchill's remark: "If Hitler invaded hell I would make at least a favourable reference to the devil in the House of Commons."

303 points by momirlan 3y ago

oska 3y ago

Are we confident that this preface was actually written by Orwell? Is there testimony from that time that he had written such a preface? Because it seems to me that the propagandistic exploitative value of 'finding' and publishing a preface supposedly from Orwell would be very high and that this preface could well be a fraud.

pallas_athena 3y ago

Everyman's Library edition has a great introduction by Julian Symons, that covers this post and more. Sadly I cannot find it online.

selfagency 3y ago

readers of this article should know that it was published by a website funded and operated by a conservative think tank called the discovery institute that promotes "intelligent design" (ie., that evolution is a myth and that humans were made as-is by god) and gave the world chris ruffo, the man leading the charge to ban books in public schools and libraries nationally.

RagnarD 3y ago

An important takeaway is to consider what's considered forbidden to discuss in supposedly enlightened 2023. The sad fact is that there are many more such topics now than in 1945 - but for the same reasons. These are topics which threaten a certain politically driven contingent, and this is enforced by the loyal minions of that contingent, including many so lacking in introspection that they accept as axioms, false and destructive ideas which should be honestly challenged.

Semaphor 3y ago
Like?
Brotkrumen 3y ago
What would those topics be? I guess they are suppressed quite well, since none come to mind.
- ozr 3y ago
  "I dare you to say forbidden things publicly as we comment on an article discussing the negative impacts of doing so"
  - Brotkrumen 3y ago
    Are we pretending now, that even mentioning these "forbidden topics" will get you banned? Here, I'll mention some for you: eugenics, Holocaust, incest. So please, if I don't get censored for these, please tell me what these secret topics hidden from me are!
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- wrp 3y ago
  Taking this as a serious question, it wouldn't be hard to make a list of topics that get instant flagging on HN. I suppose the reason why people don't bother is they expect any attempt to explain would also be downvoted to oblivion.
  - CoastalCoder 3y ago
    I'm not sure it's that cut and dry. But I agree there are some viewpoints more likely to be downvoted than others. I strongly disagree with Graham's view that disagreement is a good reason for downvoting.
- Glyptodon 3y ago
  A lot of discourse about China on HN seems to get pulled into perpetual "but bad things have happened in the US too" whataboutism and a sort of mild muffling. Not to mention the weird stuff that happens with topics like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36946171 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36946171.
parker_mountain 3y ago
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photonerd 3y ago
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wrp 3y ago
I suppose parent is mainly thinking of issues grouped under the term "culture wars". Another, more urgent issue, is indicated by this quote in TFA: 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.
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vasco 3y ago
> including many so lacking in introspection that they accept as axioms, false and destructive ideas which should be honestly challenged Despite the existence of people like this, it's generally not a good stance to consider those who disagree with you as lacking introspection. It's just a crutch to further validate your beliefs without any effort. How much more developed would your thoughts be if you pretend that every opinion you encounter was thought through, and included as much life experiences and research as your own opinions do?
- bheadmaster 3y ago
  It is also naive to assume that everyone has good reasons to believe what they believe, when we live in the world where astrology is popular, and people believe things because they "feel deep inside that it's true!".
  - vasco 3y ago
    I agree with you, here's an expanded version of the buckets I think exist: 1. I'm genuine but I haven't thought this through 2. I'm genuine and I have thought this through (regardless if I'm right or wrong) 3. I'm adversarial and weaponise my opinion in order to advance some other agenda or push the overton window My proposition is that if you assume everyone is in bucket 1, you never rethink your opinions and just think "poorly" of others which doesn't allow you to advance your thinking as fast as if you classify them as bucket 2. For people in bucket 3, you just have to trust that you'll spot a bad actor from their actions and inconsistent rhetoric over time so that you're not fooled over the long run. But similarly to people that choose to never find love for fear of having their heart broken, I wouldn't want to assume everyone is in bucket 3 because that's a shitty life to live.
osivertsson 3y ago
What current topics and ideas do you fear will be harmful to society in the long run then? What will the consequences be to individuals, communities, etc? This is HN, we can discuss all sorts of deep insights. For that discussion to be able to take place please give examples and explain what you see based on your unique experiences. That way you can win people over and slowly transform views of people, communities etc.
- bheadmaster 3y ago
  The most harmful current idea is that there is such a thing as a "harmful idea that must be censored for the good of society". I think this is one place where tolerance paradox arises.
  - manofmanysmiles 3y ago
    I agree wholeheartedly. The only remedy to bad information is more knowledge. With enough knowledge, all falsehoods fall away.
- manofmanysmiles 3y ago
  I don’t believe any ideas are harmful to “society” [1], but there are many that are “harmful” to the current paradigm of power. Some that come to mind: 1) The illusion of authority. The idea that some people have the moral right to do violence to enforce arbitrary rules written on paper. 2) The root cause of suffering, which is a lack of true knowledge of self and the nature of reality. 3) The fiat money system, or the idea of money at all. 4) The inherent ability (and maybe desire) to do harm and commit violence to existing in every being. 5) The idea of self ownership, when it comes to choices such as what we consume, whether it be food, “drugs”, or media. 6) Anything deemed a “conspiracy theory”. 7) Objective morality and natural law. I could go on. All of these stem from a lack of knowledge of the self, morality, and the nature of consciousness and morality. Of course these can be discussed in small groups, but widespread discussion of these, by “public figures” or “the media” is all but completely lacking. Edit: I forgot to add a "citation" to my post. [1]: I always wonder what people mean when they say society. Do they mean the current structure and way of doing things? Do they mean all people?
omscs99 3y ago
Two different types of forbidden, one is the top down state driven kind, the other is the puritan witch burning kind. They are not the same

RajT88 3y ago

This forward hints at a missing puzzle piece for me, regarding history. Why did the English intellectuals want to avoid criticizing Stalin? Was it because it would be by extension criticizing Communism which at the time was a popular idea among intellectuals? Was this the progress being referred to?

CobrastanJorji 3y ago
Orwell was certainly not a fan of Soviet communism. In fact, an especially astute reader of "Animal Farm" may notice subtle hints concerning Orwell's opinion of communism.
- lurquer 3y ago
  They are indeed very subtle. Easy to miss.
  - hinkley 3y ago
    So easy it would be futile to make it assigned reading for 13-14 year olds, who could not possibly grasp the nuance.
    - lurquer 3y ago
      Almost as easy to miss as sarcasm, apparently. Sigh….
      - hinkley 3y ago
        If you think I missed the sarcasm, look in the mirror. Cold War era middle schoolers in the US had that book as required reading in some parts of the country. At least it got us out of reading Shakespeare for a few months. You don’t assign complex reading to middle schoolers.
        lurquer 3y ago

ozr 3y ago

> What scares me is that there are moral fashions too. They're just as arbitrary, and just as invisible to most people. But they're much more dangerous. Fashion is mistaken for good design; moral fashion is mistaken for good. Dressing oddly gets you laughed at. Violating moral fashions can get you fired, ostracized, imprisoned, or even killed. http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html

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velhartice 3y ago
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- dang 3y ago
  Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. (This is true regardless of which ideology you favor, btw) If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

ReptileMan 3y ago

Isn't it fun how we are moving to all antiutopias at once. Social media acts as big brother while simultaneously pushing us into brave new world, on top of that we are following the cyberpunk megacorp dystopias manual to the letter. Forever wars are in vogue again. The culture war is waged with almost religious zeal and self censorship is on the rise. And we are working on AI to plug us into the matrix ...

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manofmanysmiles 3y ago
Three serious questions: 1) do you believe we can stop it? 2) Do you believe we want to stop it? 3) What is the root cause?
- dennis_jeeves1 3y ago
  > 3) What is the root cause? This really is an easy ( but not popular) answer. It's collective stupidity or more formally low IQ. A quote come to mind: “If at age 20 you are not a Communist then you have no heart. If at age 30 you are not a Capitalist then you have no brains.”
- ReptileMan 3y ago
  Also throw a potential ecological catastrophe in the mix 3) Look in the early/mid seventies around the oil embargo - this is when the cost disease really took off and I wouldn't be surprised if there was some subtle change in mentality that enabled a lot of the things we see now. 2) I think that the majority of people that are not profiting want to stop them, but the boiling frog effect is so slow that few do - and the brave new world is quite good at subduing the fighting spiring and inquisitiveness - think of it that way BG3 that is moving to become one of the highest rated PC games ever is just a basic very good game from the late 90s/early 2000s 1) I think we are in a really bad Nash equilibrium right now - so to change we need a really big external push. Never let a crisis go to waste. And there will be crisis. But it will require the right kinds of people to be near the power levers.

cjensen 3y ago

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resolutebat 3y ago
Surely the more important piece of missing context is that Animal Farm was published in 1945, while World War II was still raging and the Soviet Union and the UK were Allies fighting Nazi Germany? They were always odd bedfellows, but the enemy of my enemy is my friend (at least temporarily), and it's sensible not to antagonize your friend when you're both engaged in literal mortal combat against the enemy.
- constantcrying 3y ago
  No. Much of the British and American elite (especially those not of the intellectual class), was still absolutely opposed to communism (Operation Unthinkable), they had supported the USSR with enormous amounts of war material, because they prefered Communism taking over large parts of Europe over Fascism doing the same. (WW2 nominally started over the German/Soviet invasion of Poland) On the other hand the british and american intellectual class saw the USSR as worthy of emulation. They wanted a Stalinist regime in Britain/America.
psychoslave 3y ago
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- mmmmmmtoes 3y ago
  Capitalism is not inherently a political system. "Liberalism" would probably be more apt here.
  - Dylan16807 3y ago
    It's no more of a misuse than the parent comment's critique of "communism".

TotalCrackpot 3y ago

Orwell was actually fighting FOR communism. Specifically anarcho-communist Catalonia. What you call Communism is actually ideology called Marxism-Leninism, there are libertarian variants of communists too, for example anarcho-communism or council communism. Communism is stateless, classless and moneyless society so you can ask yourself a question. Was USSR state communist? It was a state. That ideology postulated that it can impose communism top-down, which was always criticised by anarchist thought which operates on horizontalism and not hierarchy. Orwell was a democratic socialist till the end of his life, which a lot of people don't know. He was not a liberal or social democrat.

goatlover 3y ago
But that kind of state Marxism happened in other countries as well. The state Marxists might ask the anarchists how they expect to accomplish a sateless, classless, moneyless society. The state Marxists didn't succeed, but it does still pose a question toward anarchists. How do you get rid of the state? To that I'd add, what makes you think people want a classless, moneyless society? Or another question would be, how do you have a revolution to overthrow the state and not just replace it with another state setup by whoever ends up leading the revolution?
- TotalCrackpot 3y ago
  You can read about Zapatistas, who ideologically are the closest to anarchist territory in practice. They have quite a bit higher standard of living then the rest of Chiapas, so it seems the experiment is successful. A lot of people don't like liberalism anymore and because they think the only alternative on the left was Marxist-Leninism they slowly go in the direction of fascism. Anarchism is another direction. Anarchist revolution wouldn't have leaders and it in theory wouldn't have to be violent - anarcho-syndycalists postulate that a general strike would be enough. Probably some violence would happen, especially from the state or fascist paramilitary groups but who knows. Anarchist main strategy is prefiguration, so create spaces that are anarchist in nature and grow them from there, show as many people they don't need a state or private property or if you are a communist a money too.

dang 3y ago

Fun fact: among the publishers who rejected Animal Farm was T. S. Eliot: And after all, your pigs are far more intelligent than the other animals, and therefore the best qualified to run the farm—in fact, there couldn’t have been an Animal Farm at all without them: so that what was needed, (someone might argue), was not more communism but more public-spirited pigs. https://www.openculture.com/2013/11/t-s-eliot-rejects-george-orwells-animal-farm.html https://www.openculture.com/2013/11/t-s-eliot-rejects-george... Eliot was surely wrong to call Animal Farm "Trotskyite" but that was probably his way of noting that Orwell's critique of communism was coming from the left, not the right. This fits with another fun fact: the most famous fan of Orwell's unpublished preface is Chomsky, who has been championing it for decades.

simonebrunozzi 3y ago
I didn't know about Chomsky's support; do you have any reference?
- ravenousgeek 3y ago
  I have heard Chomsky mention it on many occasions, one example here in an interview with Andrew Marr. https://youtu.be/GjENnyQupow?t=490 https://youtu.be/GjENnyQupow?t=490
  - dang 3y ago
    It would be interesting to find where he first wrote or talked about it. I'm pretty sure it goes back even a lot further than that.
- TaylorAlexander 3y ago
  I googled “Chomsky Orwell preface” and found this: https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/noam-chomsky-90th-birthday/ https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/noam-chomsky-90th-... (Search the text of the article for the word preface to directly find the reference).
  - 3y ago

renewiltord 3y ago

Ah, originally unpublished. By the time I read it, it was in the book.

lelanthran 3y ago

> 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… Some things never change - this could have been written verbatim in 2021, and would still have been accurate. If only I had a dollar for every time some apologist said "This is not censorship because it's not the government's Thought Police", or "Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences" whenever a large minority was silenced. I always wonder why there is such a large and vocal support for thought police in these enlightened times. Do these supporters believe that they are exempt?

ManuelKiessling 3y ago
So, should we introduce freedom from consequences then?
- lelanthran 3y ago
  > So, should we introduce freedom from consequences then? I upvoted you because you make a good point with that question. However, my point is that "Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences" is a meaningful expression used primarily by people who want to police the thoughts of everyone. My point is not that everyone should be forced to associate with everyone else. IOW, that expression is useful as an indicator that an individual is in a mob.
- gadders 3y ago
  The only consequence to speech you don't like should be more speech opposing it. (Unless the speech is completely illegal such as a credible threat or encouragement of violence).
  - Dylan16807 3y ago
    How direct of an encouragement? If it has to be all the way to illegal then I can't refuse business to KKK members? Or even KKK leadership?

cpach 3y ago

Link to site with full preface and cleaner layout: https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/the-freedom-of-the-press/ https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...

davidy123 3y ago

I find this video discussion of Orwell and his works to be illuminating: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Gz0I_X_nfo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Gz0I_X_nfo Asimov's critiques of his work, for example.

tetrep 3y ago

> (except security censorship, which no one objects to in war time) Ha! That's exactly when everyone should care the most about censorship, it's when the stakes are highest for "both" sides. I assume he realized the error in his ways by the time he realized that we've always been at war with...

bennettnate5 3y ago
I don't think he's giving a blanket free pass on censorship during war time, but rather is acknowledging that there are necessarily censored fields of information during war that would otherwise be used to the enemy's strategic advantage. Anti-war protests should not be censored, but a news story specifying the production capacity of one's navy may very well be.
crop_rotation 3y ago
Anyone who takes such an extreme position during a war would be most likely conquered by the enemy. Ideally there should be no wars, but if there are, some compromises are necessary to win them. Besides, in a brutal war like the World Wars censorship is the least of anyone's worries. If your city is being bombed or you are fighting at a trench, controlling sensitive information is far more important.

bell-cot 3y ago

Historical Context: Animal Farm was published (per Wikipedia) in England on 17 Aug 1945. Nazi Germany had surrendered to the Allies (France, UK, US, USSR, etc.) on 8 May 1945. The great majority of the fighting and dying "needed" to achieve that victory was done by the USSR (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d1/World_War_II_Casualties.svg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d1/World_Wa...). Back in WWI, the UK had experienced 2X or so the number of deaths that it did in WWII. The UK's leaders were extremely aware of how bad a massive war, with a massive death toll, could be for a country. Regardless of Orwell's fuming about freedom of the press, pro-Soviet English intellectual fashions, and such - for the WWII-era British government, not "rocking the boat" with Stalin, when "his" USSR was still critical to winning the war with a less-horrific British body count, would be a "d'oh, obviously" policy.

hackandthink 3y ago
It was clear in the thirties that there will again be war in Europe. But who with whom at what time against whom was not so clear. Somebody had to defeat the Germans, the Soviet Union had the main burden in the end. Fiasco: The Anglo-Franco-Soviet Alliance That Never Was and the Unpublished British White Paper, 1939–1940 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07075332.2018.1458043?journalCode=rinh20 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07075332.2018.14... German–Polish declaration of non-aggression "The new constellation made the Soviet Union fear a joint German-Polish attack." https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsch-polnischer_Nichtangriffspakt https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsch-polnischer_Nichtangrif... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German%E2%80%93Polish_declaration_of_non-aggression https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German%E2%80%93Polish_declarat...
nickff 3y ago
>"Regardless of Orwell's fuming about freedom of the press, pro-Soviet English intellectual fashions, and such - for the WWII-era British government, not "rocking the boat" with Stalin, when "his" USSR was still critical to winning the war with a less-horrific British body count, would be a "d'oh, obviously" policy." On the other hand, we shouldn't forget that Stalin's USSR was also critical to starting the war as well.

jxramos 3y ago

> Every right-thinking intellectual somehow knew that a candid assessment of Soviet rule was, well, just not the done thing!… What does this sentence even mean, did they mean to write “was just not something you (ever) did”?

pie_flavor 3y ago
To quote the preface: > 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. It means 'don't do it' but with the passive voice, so as not to imply that the speaker is the one who should defend the instruction.
- jxramos 3y ago
  Ah yes I missed that part, that is indeed a tricky back reference to manage and pull off in prose.
  - sanderjd 3y ago
    I think this is a pretty common construction in (especially older) british english. I think it is also the back reference the parent commenter notes, but I don't think it would have been unclear without that reference, especially at the time he wrote it.
    - jxramos 3y ago
      I wonder if its mostly expressed in the negative form, because "the done thing" by itself is like an incomplete sentence and an ambiguous phrase. Kind of grammatically squishy in some fascinating way.
      - sanderjd 3y ago
        I don't think it seems incomplete or ambiguous. To me, it is pretty clear that it is turning the verb form of "done" - that is, not the adjective meaning "finished", but the past tense of the verb "do" as in "fishing is an activity that people have done for a long time" - into an adjective modifying "thing". So a "done thing" is just "a thing that is being done". Using that fishing example again, it shifts from "fishing is a thing that is done by people" to just "fishing is a done thing". This "adjectivizing" technique is a common way that colloquialisms are created. (Maybe it's a bit weirder in this case because an adjective form of the word already exists, but has a different meaning.)

hackandthink 3y ago

I find this hard to believe, even in 1945 in Great Britain: "Hardly anyone will print an attack on Stalin, but it is quite safe to attack Churchill" Bertrand Russel wrote "The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism" in 1920, but maybe nobody read it. https://books.google.de/books/about/The_Practice_and_Theory_of_Bolshevism.html?id=3At-WNrRE_YC&redir_esc=y https://books.google.de/books/about/The_Practice_and_Theory_...

crop_rotation 3y ago
It is easy to believe in the context of the world war, as the preface even mentions "our ally". You could criticise Stalin safely before Hitler attacked him but once the Red Army was fighting a bloody battle against the Nazis, it was not the same.

codexb 3y ago

"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." Sounds eerily appropriate for most issues today

barbariangrunge 3y ago
I’m finding this surreal: hackernews standing up against censorship? But maybe it’s just the wording, or because it’s Orwell, since “free speech” became a dirty phrase around here a few years ago. As if people forgot that we have the nice things we have today because of all the forbidden things those before us were able to say, as if we can just stop with that rule since the left is the one in charge of public opinion now, as if free speech only applies to us and things we like
- AnimalMuppet 3y ago
  HN isn't pro censorship. HN is very much against government censorship. It gets more confusing when you talk about a company censoring (as opposed to a government). HN gets schizophrenic here. Companies should not be forced to carry content they don't want to carry, but companies shouldn't be able to censor people because of company ideology or politics or whatever. HN is very conflicted on this issue. But I don't think it's fair to be surprised that HN is not in favor of censorship, even the closed-minded groupthink self-censorship that Orwell was dealing with.
  - barbariangrunge 3y ago
    If you call it censorship, hn is against it. But if you call it free speech, in an act of doublespeak, hn is loudly against that for the last year or so
  - coffeeisyummy 3y ago
    The waters get muddy when the government asks companies to censor on its behalf, as we've seen with social media in the past. Moveover, a couple of years of go, it was a good thing "dangerous" ideas were censored, in the name of the greater good. Certain elections and viruses come to mind.

nextmove 3y ago

He may be right that people self sensor to keep a clean image of themselves in the eyes of their peers, but Orwell did not live in a time of cell phones. If you people still don't believe you're all under deep surveillance, after Assange and Snowden leaks, then you all are mentally ill. We now know that this government is willing to subvert the first amendment by forcing shadowbans. Orwell's books doesn't come anywhere near what the current government does. Just because you all aren't in interment camps now doesn't mean they won't use the data they gather to be used against you in the future. So now people that want to speak their minds are either censored by the sheep that downvote or the government that forces censorship.

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gumby 3y ago

His worst work IMHO. And I'm a huge fan of his writing in general.

Dig1t 3y ago

Dang, I really admire Orwell, he was such an excellent writer. I liked this line the best: >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 author of the article's commentary says it all: >Many of us might also find key points of comparison between his situation and the shrill calls for censorship that we hear so often today.

WalterBright 3y ago

When I was little, I was working my way through the "Freddie the Pig" stories: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07CQ9T198 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07CQ9T198 I noticed my dad had "Animal Farm" and it seemed to be about a pig, so I read it. I took it at face value as a good story about animals running a farm. Many, many years later I realized it was an allegory about the Soviet Revolution.

dennis_jeeves1 3y ago
>I took it at face value as a good story about animals running a farm. I think adult 'socialists' ( as opposed to capitalists ) are in that league. A quote come to mind: “If at age 20 you are not a Communist then you have no heart. If at age 30 you are not a Capitalist then you have no brains.”
- dpig_ 3y ago
  Watch this quote become very silly over time, when the average material wealth of a 30 year old is in steep decline.
  - WalterBright 3y ago
    It's a Winston Churchill quote from 80 years ago. > when the average material wealth of a 30 year old is in steep decline Thanks to the leftward turn of the economy.
- JuanPosadas 3y ago
  Survivorship bias people in their 30s be like "My money stacks have bullet holes, better buy some armor for my money stacks" ignoring the corpses and poverty of their less fortunate peers.

Animats 3y ago

And the actual text comes from "orwell.ru". Not, apparently, censored there. As for avoiding British criticism of Stalin during WWII, we have Churchill's remark: "If Hitler invaded hell I would make at least a favourable reference to the devil in the House of Commons."