Orwell: Totalitarianism Starts As an Internal Mental State
While the scene has certainly changed in the last eighty years, the effort to control information is still vigorousOn Saturday, I looked at Matt Johnson’s thoughts on George Orwell’s vital but comparatively unknown 1946 essay, “The Prevention of Literature.” Orwell, famous for Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), wanted to “make political writing into an art.” He was well aware that most competitors for public attention simply wanted to make political writing a reliable form of mass brainwashing. He hoped to find a public that sought an alternative. He published “Prevention” (longish, at 5500 words) in Polemic, a short-lived British intellectual magazine (1945–47), which featured work by such notables as Henry Miller, Bertrand Russell, A. J. Ayer, and Dylan Thomas. Intellectual freedom as “violence” Intellectual freedom, as we have always been told, is only ever one generation Read More ›