[int_19h]

"Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. Anyone who has lived long in a foreign country will know of instances of sensational items of news—things which on their own merits would get the big headlines—being kept right out of the British press, not because the Government intervened but because of a general tacit agreement that ‘it wouldn’t do’ to mention that particular fact. So far as the daily newspapers go, this is easy to understand. The British press is extremely centralised, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics. But the same kind of veiled censorship also operates in books and periodicals, as well as in plays, films and radio. At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was ‘not done’ to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals."

"One of the peculiar phenomena of our time is the renegade Liberal. Over and above the familiar Marxist claim that ‘bourgeois liberty’ is an illusion, there is now a widespread tendency to argue that one can only defend democracy by totalitarian methods. If one loves democracy, the argument runs, one must crush its enemies by no matter what means. And who are its enemies? It always appears that they are not only those who attack it openly and consciously, but those who ‘objectively’ endanger it by spreading mistaken doctrines. In other words, defending democracy involves destroying all independence of thought."

"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 are visibly turning away. They have accepted the principle that a book should be published or suppressed, praised or damned, not on its merits but according to political expediency. And others who do not actually hold this view assent to it from sheer cowardice."

Sounds familiar? It was written during WW2:

https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...

[kbenson]

What this is really describing is what we now call the Overton Window[1], and how it's controlled to a degree. I think it's a mistake to think it can be controlled completely, but depending on the society and the makeup of the media control, more or less control can be exerted. China has much more control over it for their citizens than the United States or the media companies within it, most likely.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window

[hojjat12000]

At the bottom of that page it says:

"Proposed preface to Animal Farm, first published in the Times Literary Supplement on 15 September 1972 with an introduction by Sir Bernard Crick. Ian Angus found the original manuscript in 1972."

So, I don't think this was written during WWII.

[int_19h]

Animal Farm itself was written in 1943-44.

The essay I linked to was written in 1945 - if you read it, it actually talks about the ongoing war etc, e.g.:

"... we are allies with the USSR in a war which I want to see won"

It wasn't published until 1972, for exactly the reasons Orwell outlines in it. Indeed, publishing Animal Farm itself was hard enough - many American and British publishers refused to do so, on the ground that the book clearly satirizes the USSR, which was then a war ally.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_Farm#Preface

[tablespoon]

> So, I don't think this was written during WWII.

If it wasn't, it was probably written very soon after the end. It uses "this war" to refer to WWII and it doesn't appear to discuss anything post-war.

[a0-prw]

Yes, exactly. The outrage and cognitive dissonance that people experience when they see the censorship happening these days can only happen because they actually believed the propaganda about free speech.

[salawat]

Ohohohohoho.

How adorable! You think "propaganda" is anything more than a post-hoc reactionary label often applied by those afraid of the outcome of widespread espousal of a controversial idea.

Yes, it exists. Yes, people are far more vulnerable to it than anyone thinks they are. Free Speech, however, is an ideal exactly in that we often in reality fail to attain it, but nevertheless should strive to.

Without the ability to articulate that which is ugly and repugnant to the common sensibility, one is divested of the capability of immunizing oneself from being led astray by someone already too far gone.

We should protect the ability to speak monstrous things that we are not intellectually blinded to their existence. For they will arise whether we talk about them in polite company or not.

[int_19h]

Propaganda does not preclude very real variability over time. It's certainly quite true that, for a while now, we have been retreating from "peak free speech" in the Western world. This doesn't imply that said peak was perfect freedom - of course not! But the trend is towards less speech overall, and even more specifically, towards privatized censorship (so as to dodge legal constraints).