Reader Orwell Press Freedom

"If information be withheld,
or warped in the interests of those few who control it,
the gravest harm is done to the citizen and to the commonwealth."

COMMUNISTS ENSLAVE BRITISH FREE PRESS

Orwell encountered great difficulty getting Animal Farm published.
The publisher who had initially accepted the manuscript subsequently rejected the book
after an important official at the British Ministry of Information warned him off.
The 'important official' was a man named Peter Smollett,
who was later unmasked as a Soviet agent.

I just wanted to send you a note to say a big thank you to you for your wonderful website. I happened on it this morning by accident while checking on the provenance of the well-trained circus dog quote, which I have used in a booklet I am writing on the experience of living in a society with complete 'freedom of the press' but where it feels like there is consistent, continuous, totally waterproof censorship in my own field....

So glad you came across ORWELL TODAY in your search for the origin of the "well-trained circus dog" quote -- ie Orwell's words for the British press who "turn somersaults even when there is no whip".

Orwell wrote those words in June 1944 after ANIMAL FARM had been turned down -- yet again -- by another Capitalist publisher afraid to offend the Communists or Stalin -- even though there was no rule against it in Britain as there was in the Soviet Union where the penalty was torture and death.

When Orwell finally found a publisher for ANIMAL FARM -- ie Fred Warburg who was a corporal under Sergeant Orwell in the Home Guard -- he wrote an introduction entitled THE FREEDOM OF THE PRESS explaining its threatened demise in Britain.

And when Orwell subsequently wrote his masterpiece -- NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR -- the issue of enslavement of the press -- through the Ministry of Truth -- was a major component of life under global totalitarian rule, ie life under BIG BROTHER.

Getting back to the "well-trained circus dog" quote in Orwell's 1944 essay -- there's another great quote in there, ie:

You cannot hope to bribe or twist
Thank God! the British journalist.
But seeing what the man will do
unbribed, there's no occasion to.

The poem is by Hilaire Belloc who, during Orwell's day, was one of England's most controversial writers and who, like Orwell, had suffered suppression and censorship over his criticism of Communism.

In my on-going study of Orwell (whenever he mentions a writer or a book, as he often does in his journalism, letters and books) I make a point of reading that particular work or researching that particular author and invariably I'm able to recognize how Orwell later incorporates that person's ideas into his own works.

Such is definitely the case with Hilaire Belloc whom Orwell mentions again in a 1946 essay discussing economic systems -- ie SECOND THOUGHTS ON JAMES BURNHAM -- and mentions Belloc's book THE SERVILE STATE.

Having subsequently researched Belloc -- inspired by your "well-trained circus dog" email -- I recognize ideas from Belloc that made it into NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR -- especially his essays on Freedom of the Press, Communism and Usury.

Orwell's political philosophy of Democratic Socialism is very much akin to Belloc's Distribution philosophy founded in the early 30s as an alternative to Capitalism and Communism.

Belloc and Orwell were political writers who wrote for the purpose of enpowering the working man with knowledge and to warn Western Civilization of the Communist Conspiracy For World Domination which could only succeed under cloak of secrecy. Enslavement of the free press -- to prevent exchange of ideas and enlightenment -- is a major plank of the Communist Manifesto.

Today, in Britain, some of the major newpapers are now under ownership of Communist Russians, ie a former KGB agent -- Lebedev -- in partnership with a former president of Communist Russia -- Gorbachev. Go to RUSSIAN KGB BUYS UK NEWSPAPERS

In Britain it's predominantly the Communist Russians taking over the land and the resources whereas here in North America it's predominantly the Communist Chinese.

They say Communism is dead -- but that's a lie -- its alive and growing in the form of Corporate Communism -- or what Orwell described as Oligarchical Collectivism in NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR.

Unbeknownst to Orwell -- but as he suspected -- there were Communist agents behind the scenes when ANIMAL FARM was being turned down. It turns out that the official at the Ministry of Information, to whom publishers took Orwell's manuscript, was a KGB agent working for Britain's spy agency, MI6. The future head of MI6 -- to whom the official reported -- was himself a Communist agent, ie Kim Philby.

On his deathbed -- after publication of NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR -- which, like ANIMAL FARM, was banned in Communist Russia and in all the nations under its subjugation -- Orwell was still trying to expose Communism. For years he'd been compiling a list of people he suspected of being Communists and Communist sympathizers and he handed it over to the post-war anti-Communist British government in hopes of preventing Communists from finding employment in areas where they could spread their propaganda through freedom of the press.

Throughout their writing careers, both Belloc and Orwell contributed articles to alternative magazines, ie magazines not owned by the corporate or government media. Below are excerpts from articles by Belloc that obviously contributed to Orwell's thinking because they are recognizable in passages from NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR.

Orwell and Belloc were literary rebels -- or knights in shining armour -- or dragon-slayers of their day -- fighting for the cause of freedom of thought and speech and press -- getting the word out to we the people.

The most important thing we can do toward Belloc's and Orwell's cause is keep on spreading their word -- through the press -- while the word "free" still exists.

COMMUNISM IS WICKED: Everywhere Communism Begins With Massacre and Continues With Murder Because Only By Terror Can Men Be Forced To Support A Remedy That Is Against The Spirit, by Hilaire Belloc, Social Justice, June 20, 1938
Communism is a false remedy to the evils which capitalism has brought upon us. We have seen that it is a false remedy: but there are two other things about it all important for us to understand. The first is that it is evil, not a mere economic theory to be tested like a mathematical or an engineering theory, but a moral theory snd a wicked one...Communism proposes an imposition by force of something repulsive to the spirit of man. You cannot get men'to accept an order which is against nature and against every good human instinct, save by the inhuman and abnormal method of continuous terror....)

Big Brother is the guise in which the Party chooses to exhibit itself to the world...The Party exists...BIG BROTHER is the embodiment of the Party...BIG BROTHER will never die...The rule of the Party is forever...The Party was a dedicated sect doing evil...The more the Party is powerful, the less it will be tolerant: the weaker the opposition, the tighter the despotism...There will be no loyalty, except loyalty towards the Party. There will be no love, except the love of BIG BROTHER...You must love BIG BROTHER. It is not enough to obey him: you must love him...)

42.The Party Tells Why ("...The kind of world we are creating is a world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress towards more pain. The old civilizations claimed that they were founded on love or justice. Ours is founded upon hatred. In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement. Everything else we shall destroy - everything. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - for ever. We control life, Winston, at all its levels. You are imagining that there is something called human nature which will be outraged by what we do and will turn against us. But we create human nature. Men are infinitely malleable. Or perhaps you have returned to your old idea that the proletarians or the slaves will arise and overthrow us. Put it out of your mind. They are helpless, like the animals. Humanity is the Party. The others are outside - irrelevant.".... "I don't care. In the end they will beat you. Sooner or later they will see you for what you are, and then they will tear you to pieces.".... "Do you see any evidence that that is happening? Or any reason why it should?".... "No. I believe it. I know that you will fail. There is something in the universe - I don't know, some spirit, some principle - that you will never overcome.".... "Do you believe in God, Winston?"... "No.".... "Then what is it, this principle that will defeat us?".... "I don't know. The spirit of Man.".... "And do you consider yourself a man?".... "Yes"....)

Ministry of Truth concerned itself with Lies. Party ownership of the print media made it easy to manipulate public opinion, and the film and radio carried the process further. The primary job of the Ministry of Truth was to supply the citizens of Oceania with newspapers, films, textbooks, telescreen programmes, plays, novels - with every conceivable kind of information, instruction, or entertainment, from a statue to a slogan, from a lyric poem to a biological treatise, and from a child's spelling-book to a Newspeak dictionary...)

THE PREVENTION OF LITERATURE, by George Orwell, Polemic, January 1946; The Atlantic Monthly, March 1947 (About a year ago I attended a meeting of the P.E.N. Club, the occasion being the tercentenary of Milton’s AREOPAGITICA — A pamphlet, it may be remembered, in defense of freedom of the press. Milton’s famous phrase about the sin of “killing” a book was printed on the leaflets advertising the meeting which had been circulated beforehand....)

REVIEW OF "FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION" CONFERENCE, by George Orwell, Tribune, Oct 12, 1945
...Here are some of the subjects that were not mentioned, or barely mentioned: — The centralised ownership of the British press, with its consequent power to suppress any bit of news that it chooses; the question of who really controls the B.B.C., the buying-up of young writers by film units, the M.O.I., etc.; the methods by which British correspondents in foreign countries are squeezed into telling lies or concealing truths; the corruption of literary criticism by the publishing trade; the vague semi-official pressure that prevents books on unpopular themes from getting published; the spread of totalitarian ideas, mostly emanating from the U.S.S.R., among English intellectuals. One could extend the list, but it is that kind of influence that now menaces all that we have hitherto meant by intellectual liberty....

THE FREEDOM OF THE PRESS, by George Orwell, 1945
...At this moment what is demanded by the prevailing orthodoxy is an uncritical admiration of Soviet Russia. Everyone knows this, nearly everyone acts on it. Any serious criticism of the Soviet régime, any disclosure of facts which the Soviet government would prefer to keep hidden, is next door to unprintable. And this nation-wide conspiracy to flatter our ally takes place, curiously enough, against a background of genuine intellectual tolerance. For though you are not allowed to criticise the Soviet government, at least you are reasonably free to criticise our own. Hardly anyone will print an attack on Stalin, but it is quite safe to attack Churchill, at any rate in books and periodicals. And throughout five years of war, during two or three of which we were fighting for national survival, countless books, pamphlets and articles advocating a compromise peace have been published without interference. More, they have been published without exciting much disapproval. So long as the prestige of the USSR is not involved, the principle of free speech has been reasonably well upheld. There are other forbidden topics, and I shall mention some of them presently, but the prevailing attitude towards the USSR is much the most serious symptom. It is, as it were, spontaneous, and is not due to the action of any pressure group. The servility with which the greater part of the English intelligentsia have swallowed and repeated Russian propaganda from 1941 onwards would be quite astounding if it were not that they have behaved similarly on several earlier occasions. On one controversial issue after another the Russian viewpoint has been accepted without examination and then publicised with complete disregard to historical truth or intellectual decency.... 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.

DISTRIBUTISM: NEITHER CAPITALISM NOR COMMUNISM (Mr Belloc, generally recognized as the leader of the movement, describes its chief points), Mercury, July 1937
Distributism is a long and clumsy word which is coming into use for a very simple and normal thing: the system of society in which the average citizen possesses enough property to give him and his family economic freedom. There was a time when everyone took it for granted, especially in the United States, that the typical free citizen would be an owner -- generally an owner of land and if not the owner of land, then the owner of a business or the master of a craft. But today, wherever industrial capitalism rules - and it rules in all our main industries, including our transport system -- a perilous and unnatural state of things has come to pass. The bulk of men are still called free citizens, for they are still politically free; but they are no longer economically free. They no longer possess the wherewithal to live. They live only at the mercy of employers who possess the means of life... We desire the better distribution of private property in at least a sufficient amount to secure freedom of action to the average man. It is natural to man to own, and to use his possessions under the action of his own will. To have one’s life ordered by other men with no authority other than their possession of the means of production is not the norm, consonant to human instinct....

9.Keeing Masses Down (...As early as the beginning of the twentieth century, human equality had become technically possible. It was still true that men were not equal in their native talents and that functions had to be specialized in ways that favoured some individuals against others; but there was no longer any real need for class distinctions or for large differences of wealth. With the development of machine production - even if it was still necessary for human beings to do different kinds of work - it was no longer necessary for them to live at different social or economic levels. But it was also clear that an all-round increase in wealth threatened the destruction - indeed, in some sense was the destruction - of a hierarchical society. In a world in which everyone worked short hours, had enough to eat, lived in a house with a bathroom and a refrigerator, and possessed a motor-car or even an aeroplane, the most obvious and perhaps the most important form of inequality would already have disappeared. If it once became general wealth would confer no distinction. It was possible, no doubt, to imagine a society in which wealth, in the sense of personal possessions and luxuries, should be evenly distributed, while power remained in the hands of a small privileged caste. But in practice such a society could not long remain stable. For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance. It had long been realized that the only secure basis for oligarchy is collectivism...The so-called 'abolition of private property' put the concentration of property in far fewer hands than before: but with this difference, the new owners were a group instead of a mass of individuals...

USURY: When Bonds are Issued to Yield a Profit Out of Destruction, or Exact Interest From Non-Productive Investment, the Evil Will Eat Society Up, by Hilaire Belloc, Social Justice, April 18, 1938
...For instance, nearly all the great war loans demand interst on an unproductive loan. The money was spent in buying goods which were consumed, not in producing more wealth, but in producing no wealth -- or even in destroyng wealth. It went to support soldiers and sailors, who produced no wealth and often actually destroyed wealth. It went to buy guns and ammunition which produce no wealth, but were often actively employed in destroying wealth. You spend $100,000 in buying guns and ammuniton for knocking down in war an industrial building which in peace produced $5,000 worth of wealth a year and you go asking $5,000 interest on the money represented by worn out guns, exploded ammunition and a factory that has been destroyed. There are other ways in which the recogniton of money's right to interest, merely because it is money, eats up society, but this one major case of the unproductive loan is sufficient to show the evil that Usury does. When money lending ('the providing of credits', as it is called) carries interest as a matter of course, it is an acitivty which devours mankind.

11.Ministry of Plenty (...From the moment when the machine first made its appearance it was clear to all thinking people that the need for human drudgery, and therefore to a great extent for human inequality, had disappeared. If the machine were used deliberately for that end, hunger, overwork, dirt, illiteracy, and disease could be eliminated within a few generations. The machine, when used for that purpose, did raise the living standards of the average human being very greatly over a period of about fifty years at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. The problem was how to keep the wheels of industry turning without increasing the real wealth of the world. Goods must be produced, but they must not be distributed. And in practice the only way of achieving this was by continuous warfare. The primary aim of modern warfare is to use up the products of the machine without raising the general standard of living. If technical progress were allowed to flourish in directions other than war and surveillance, there would be no more need for human drudgery and human inequality would disappear....

Hilaire Belloc (...Asked once why he wrote so much, he responded, "Because my children are howling for pearls and caviar." Belloc observed that "The first job of letters is to get a canon," that is, to identify those works which a writer looks upon as exemplary of the best of prose and verse. For his own prose style, he claimed to aspire to be as clear and concise as "Mary had a little lamb"...)

ORWELL WHY I WRITE (...I write because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.... Of late years I have tried to write less picturesquely and more exactly. ANIMAL FARM was the first book in which I tried, with full consciousness of what I was doing, to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole. I hope to write another fairly soon.... Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention.... Good prose is like a windowpane....)

Hilaire Belloc the myth and the man, Tablet (...As George Orwell pointed out, Belloc's The Servile State (1912) was a prophetic insight into today's world of mega-corporations and mega-governments. Belloc foresaw that a consumerist capitalist society and a consumerist socialist society are essentially the same: in both, people surrender their freedom in exchange for material abundance, becoming slaves of the State or the corporations which feed their appetites. Visitors to Western Europe and the United States, and to China and Vietnam, can see for themselves the truth of Belloc's insight....)

Hilaire Belloc Poetry (...Both during his lifetime and since, Belloc's refusal to tone down his views, and his contempt for the political, literary and social establishments of the day, militated against recognition of him as a major writer and thinker. Nor was he helped by the range of his work; critics like to pigeon-hole a writer as poet, historian, playwright, or novelist, and they could not cope with his diversity, huge output, and his overwhelming ebullience. They resented him. Even today, that fear and resentment is to be seen in the dismissive little articles and reviews, but slowly the truth is emerging that Hilaire Belloc is among the great writers of English prose and that the best of his verse is of equally high quality. More importantly, he was a thinker of power, significance and - how rare these days - integrity. Where are the people today who would sacrifice the material rewards of public life and office as did Belloc when he demanded, in Parliament in 1908 and repeatedly thereafter, that the funds of political parties should be subject to audit?...)

Fredric Warburg's report on "Nineteen Eighty-Four", December 13, 1948
..."1984" is "Animal Farm" writ large and in purely anthropomorphic terms. One hopes (against hope?) that its successor will supply the other side of the picture. For what is "1984" but a picture of man unmanned, of humanity without a heart, of a people without tolerance or civilization, of a government whose sole object is the maintenance of its power, of its absolute totalitarian power, by every contrivance of cruelty. Here is the Soviet Union to the nth degree, a Stalin who never dies, a secret police with every device of modern technology...

Animal Farm, Wikipedia ( ...Orwell encountered great difficulty getting the manuscript published, as it was feared that the book might upset the alliance between the US, UK and the Soviet Union. Four publishers refused; one had initially accepted the work but declined after consulting an important official at the Ministry of Information....The 'important official' was a man named Peter Smollett, who was later unmasked as a Soviet agent. He came to Britain in 1933 as an NKVD agent with the codename 'Abo', became a naturalized British subject in 1938; changed his name and after the outbreak of World War II joined the Ministry of Information where he organised pro-Soviet propaganda, working with Kim Philby in 1943-45.... Eventually, Secker and Warburg published the first edition in 1945.... In his London Letter on 17 April 1944 for Partisan Review, Orwell wrote that it was "now next door to impossible to get anything overtly anti-Russian printed....)

watch The Bloody History of Communism, Documentary Heaven, YouTube
Communism was the bloodiest ideology that caused more than 120 million innocent deaths in the 20th century. It was a nightmare which promised equality and justice, but which brought only bloodshed, death, torture and fear. This three-volume documentary displays the terrible savagery of communism and its underlying philosophy. From Marx to Lenin, Stalin, Mao or Pol Pot, discover how the materialist philosophy transforms humans into theorists of violence and masters of cruelty.

Journalist spy crossed swords with Orwell, SMH, Jul 11, 2013
Norman MacKenzie was Professor of Education at Sussex University, though in an earlier incarnation, as assistant editor of the New Statesman, he had appeared on a notorious blacklist prepared by George Orwell of 38 “crypto-communists and fellow-travellers who should not be trusted as propagandists”. MacKenzie had joined the journal as assistant editor in 1943 after being discharged from the RAF on health grounds, having been recommended to the editor, Kingsley Martin, by Harold Laski, his former tutor at the London School of Economics. He worked on the magazine for nearly 20 years before becoming an academic. It is not hard to understand why Orwell might have included MacKenzie on his list — which he prepared in 1949 for a clandestine anti-communist propaganda unit in the Foreign Office (the list was made public in 2003). MacKenzie had been, first, a member of the Marxist Independent Labour Party, and then of the Communist Party before he joined the Labour Party in 1943. In addition to the New Statesman he sometimes wrote for Telepress, a Soviet-backed news agency. Leonard Woolf had once described him as “the most dangerous man in the New Statesman”. Yet in fact MacKenzie, like others identified as “fellow-travellers” on Orwell’s list, had been working for MI6... What was more surprising was that he continued to work for MI6 during the Cold War when, for genuine fellow travellers, allegiances were severely tested. As the magazine’s expert on communism during the 1950s, MacKenzie made numerous visits behind the Iron Curtain, somehow maintaining a reputation as a communist sympathiser while continuing to report to the security services. While his reputation as a “fellow-traveller” eased his path, he also was able to make use of MI6 contacts to gain insights that made him one of the best-informed among western analysts of the Soviet system....

Animal Farm rejected by four publishers (because of its anti-Stalin politics), Mar 29, 2009
The poet TS Eliot, a director of the publisher Faber & Faber, made his feelings clear in a rejection letter to Orwell in 1944. Orwell succeeded in having Animal Farm, an allegory on Stalinist communism, published the following year by Secker & Warburg, after being turned down by four publishers.... Animal Farm concerns a group of talking pigs who take over a farm, purportedly for the benefit of all its inhabitants, but end up running it for their own selfish ends. Its plot sees the pig Napoleon, based on Stalin, forcing out his rival Snowball, who genuinely works for the good of the farm. Many commentators have concluded that Snowball was based on Stalin's rival Leon Trotsky, who was expelled from the Communist Party in 1927... Eliot's rejection might have been prompted by the political situation at the time, when Russia was regarded as an essential ally to defeat Hitler. Animal Farm was only published in August 1945, three months after the war in Europe ended.... Intriguingly, there was no preface in the first edition even though Orwell had proposed one titled The Freedom of the Press. In it, he attacked self-censorship during the war, writing: "Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness." He wrote that Animal Farm had been rejected by four publishers, but stated only one had "any ideological motive" for doing so.