"The Freedom of the Press", Orwell's unpublished preface to 'Animal Farm'

After completing "Animal Farm" in 1944, Georges Orwell saw his satire on Soviet society being rejected by several publishers and decided to write the preface "The Freedom of the Press", commenting on this experience. This preface was not included in the first edition and was only discovered in 1971. It is from it that I extract the following excerpts that remain relevant because freedom is never guaranteed and is once again threatened by a horde of enemies on the left and right in the name of Equality, Justice, Nation, State, Family, or one of many other "isms".

«To exchange one orthodoxy for another is not necessarily an advance. The enemy is the gramophone mind, whether or not one agrees with the record that is being played at the moment. (...)

If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. The common people still vaguely subscribe to that doctrine and act on it. In our country — it is not the same in all countries: it was not so in republican France, and it is not so in the USA today — it is the liberals who fear liberty and the intellectuals who want to do dirt on the intellect: it is to draw attention to that fact that I have written this preface. (...)

These people don’t see that if you encourage totalitarian methods, the time may come when they will be used against you instead of for you. Make a habit of imprisoning Fascists without trial, and perhaps the process won’t stop at Fascists. (...)

I am well acquainted with all the arguments against freedom of thought and speech — the arguments which claim that it cannot exist, and the arguments which claim that it ought not to. I answer simply that they don’t convince me and that our civilisation over a period of four hundred years has been founded on the opposite notice. (...)

If I had to choose a text to justify myself, I should choose the line from Milton:

By the known rules of ancient liberty.

The word ancient emphasises the fact that intellectual freedom is a deep-rooted tradition without which our characteristic western culture could only doubtfully exist. From that tradition many of our intellectuals arc visibly turning away.»