Orwell's Preface to Animal Farm -
George OrwellGeorge Orwell was the pseudonym of English author Eric Arthur Blair, born in 1903 in Bengal, where his father worked for the Opium Department of the Government of India. His first book publication was Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) dealing with his experience of poverty and homelessness in those two cities, which Orwell researched by living as an indigent for some months. For the same publisher he produced The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), which was controversial for including Orwell's trenchant criticism of England's left-wing intelligentsia alongside a larger attack on the flaws of capitalism as exemplified in the wretched lives led by the working poor. Orwell also wrote six fictional novels, including Animal Farm (1945) and the chock-full-of-neologisms 1984 (1949), as well as a number of essay collections and an account of his involvement in the Spanish Civil War, Homage to Catalonia (1938). He died in 1950 after a long battle with tuberculosis.
The essay below was written as a preface to the first edition of Animal Farm but was not included in the published book and only discovered in the author's original typescript some years later. It is now a favourite citation for critics of our supposedly free press, as an illustration of how the media can work to suppress uncomfortable truths without this necessitating some vast conspiracy.
It is "ironic" that the particular example of self-censorship Orwell referred to in the essay was the refusal of the left-wing and liberal press of the time to publish criticism of the Soviet Union - not a major feature of Western media orthodoxy in later years. Indeed, the subsequent popularity of Animal Farm and 1984 had much to do with their usefulness in attacking the USSR and "International Communism" (more usually, of course, these attacks were simply on anyone, left-leaning or otherwise, the attacker was anxious to demonise). Even now, Orwell is better known for these two books, apparently intended as critiques of socialism, than for the many works he wrote espousing socialism. Using Orwell's works to make generalised attacks on the left is problematic, even for the two novels championed thus - while Animal Farm is very clearly a deserved satire on the Soviet Union, its greatest criticism of the Russian leaders is that they sold out socialist principle to accommodate themselves with capitalist countries ("The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which."); 1984, meanwhile, is less an attack on the left than a satiric extrapolation drawn from the argument of James Burnham's The Managerial Revolution, which predicted the replacement of left/right ideology with a new ruling class of technocrats and social scientists. (This sixty year old idea is much favoured by post-modern intellectuals of the Fukuyama ilk - the difference being that they seem to approve.)
While the prevailing orthodoxy of the dystopian society Orwell depicts in 1984 is termed English Socialism, this only goes to show that Orwell undoubtedly viewed the possibility of a socialist system being perverted into oppressive militarist totalitarianism as more horrifying than the same happening in a capitalist state - in the latter case, at least socialism would still be an alternative. In any event, casting Orwell as a gadfly of socialism requires serious distortion of his political viewpoint and the intention behind his writing - throughout his life, Orwell remained a confirmed socialist and worked almost exclusively for socialist journals. Indeed, his often bitter criticisms of the British Left might be seen to stem from his unswerving commitment to its essential positions. Orwell despised pointless attacks on the Right for the benefit of a left-wing audience, satirising this "preaching to the choir" in 1984 as the duckspeak of mindless ideologues. Rather, what more important task was there for a socialist intellectual than to warn fellow socialists where they were going wrong?
On the other hand, given his (thoroughly justified) hatred of Stalinism, it is possible that Orwell would have made, had he lived, the same ideological journey Burnham did, from leftist to Cold Warrior. His distrust of the Soviet Union was forged in the Spanish Civil War, where he witnessed the betrayal of the non-Stalinist Left by their pro-Russian "comrades". In the years after the Second World War, he argued that, if such was the choice, it would be better to be part of the American empire than under the thumb of Russia (probably true for an Englishman; a Guatemalan might disagree). And, despite a life spent emphasizing the importance of extending to our enemies the considerations and freedoms we consider indispensable for ourselves, Orwell then spent much of his last years drawing up and distributing lists of those of his fellow writers he considered to be Soviet pawns. One might wish to cut a dying man some slack over such McCarthyist behaviour, but, even so, for a long term champion of freedom and humanity to act thus suggests that the danger of sliding into "Fascist ways of thought", as he termed them, must be real indeed.