Trump And Freedom Of Speech by Les May

A REGULAR THEME of what I have written for Northern Voices is the threat to freedom of speech posed by those who try to prevent people whose views they disagree with from presenting them to others. When this happens in universities and colleges it is commonly called ‘no platforming’. It’s a staple tactic of those who engage in the politics of identity.

It is the antithesis of how George Orwell defined liberty when he said ‘It is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear’. So is the decision by Twitter to refuse to allow Donald Trump to post on the social media platform an attack on liberty?

The Twitter decision does not prevent Trump saying whatever he likes. Twitter is under no obligation to provide space on it’s servers for the outpourings of Trump, myself or anyone else. If he wants to use some form of social media to enlighten his followers with his wisdom, he is entirely at liberty to set up his own version of Twitter.

Veteran Trump watchers will recognise the irony of his complaint. There are many instances at his press conferences of his refusing to answer questions he does not like and denigrating accredited journalists.

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The Death of George Blake by Brian Bamford

GEORGE Blake, a notorious British double agent who betrayed Cold War secrets and Western spies to the Soviet Union in the 1950s and, after being caught, staged a spectacular escape to live out his life as a K.G.B. colonel in Moscow, has died. He was 98.

Like the Cambridge-educated moles Kim Philby, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, Mr. Blake became a dedicated Marxist, disillusioned with the West, and a high British intelligence officer while secretly working for the Soviets. His clandestine life had lasted less than a decade, but cost the lives of many agents and destroyed vital British and American operations in Europe.

Unlike the Cambridge clique, who defected when the authorities closed in, Mr. Blake was caught in 1961, tried secretly and sentenced to 42 years in prison. Five years later, with inside and outside help, he escaped from the Wormwood Scrubs prison in London and fled to Moscow. He left behind a wife, three children and an uproar over his getaway, the tatters of a case that encapsulated the intrigues of a perilous nuclear age, with flash points in Korea and Germany, where Blake served.

Settling into a new life in Moscow in 1966, Mr. Blake assumed the identity of Colonel Georgiy Ivanovich Bleyk and was awarded the Order of Lenin and given a pension and an apartment. He divorced his wife, remarried and had a son and grandson, helped train Soviet agents and in 2007, on his 85th birthday, received the Order of Friendship from President Putin. He wrote an autobiography, “No Other Choice” (1990), and a memoir, “Transparent Walls” (2006).

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IN HIS AUTHORIZED HISTORY OF MI5 'The Defence of the Realm' Christopher Andrew wrote:

'To general astonishment, the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Parker, sentenced [George] Blake to forty-two years' imprisonment, the longest sentence ever imposed by a British court. Blake appeared stummed. Sir Dick White later said that he too had been shocked by the severity of the sentence. J.Edgar Hoover, by contrast, was delighted, telling the Washington SLO approvingly: "Anyway, the British have guts!" Macmillan, however, found the spy scandals of the early 1960s even more distastful than the furore which had surrounded his clearing of Philby in 1955. Instead of congadulating MI5 for its part in tracking down a series of Soviet spies, he blamed the Service for causing him public embarrassment. The Prime Minister complained in his diary after Blake's conviction that he public, already shocked by media reports, "do not know and cannot be told that he belonged to MI6, an organisation which does not theoretically exist. So I had rater a rough passage in the House of Commons..." Though the British press did not reveal that Blake was an SIS officer when repoting the verdict, the foreign press had no such inhibitions and the secret soon leaked out.'

This incident seems to capture the thankless job of spy-catching by MI5.

Later when Sir Roger Hollis had alerted Macmillan of the arrest of the spy John Vassal it was claimed that Hollis had told him 'I've got this fellow [Vassall], I've got him!' When Macmillan failed to show any enthusiasm for this MI5 success, Hollis allegedly remarked, 'You don't seem very pleased, Prime Minister.' Macmillan, by his own account, replied:

'No, I'm not pleased. When my gamekeeper shoots a fox, he doesn't go and hang it up outside the Master of the Foxhounds' drawing room; he buries it out of sight. But you just can't shoot a spy as you did in the war. You have to try him... better to discover him, and then control him, but never catch him... There will be a terrible row in the press, there will be a debate in the House of Commons and the government will probably fall. Why the devil did you catch him?'

This is the curious paradox presented by Sir Roger Hollis the spy-catcher to the Prime Minister Harold Macmillan in the 1960s, it was not unlike that described in the essay 'Shooting an Elephant' by George Orwell: 'The owner was furious, but he was only an Indian and could do nothing. Besides, legally I had done the right thing, for a mad elephant, like a mad dog, if the owner fails to control it. Among the Europeans opinion was divided. The older men said I was right, the younger men said it was a damn shame to shoot an elephant for killing a coolie, because an elephant was worth more than any damn coolie. And afterwards I was very glad that the coolie had been killed; it put me legally in the right and gave me sufficient pretext for shooting the elephant. I often wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool.'

Appearances are often more important than crude political considerations, and that's why cases like that of George Blake are so significant in so far as they often serve to ridicule and undermine political authority.

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George Orwell’s FREE SPEECH

Etched in stone outside the BBC’s headquarters in London, George Orwell’s quotation on the sanctity of free speech serves as a daily reminder to the hundreds of journalists who work for the Corporation.

But Left-wing activist and musician Billy Bragg has sparked fury by claiming the famous words – ‘If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear’ – make him ‘cringe’ and have nothing to do with liberty.

He says the quotation, which featured in the preface to Orwell’s 1945 novella Animal Farm, is a ‘demand for licence’ and that young people now ‘prioritise accountability over free speech’.

Writing in The Guardian newspaper, Bragg, 62, added that the words, inscribed next to Orwell’s bronze statue outside New Broadcasting House, make him shudder every time he sees them.

Left-wing activist and musician Billy Bragg has sparked fury by claiming the famous words etched in stone outside the BBC’s headquarters in London – ‘If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear’ – make him ‘cringe’

‘It’s a snappy slogan that fits neatly into a tweet, but whenever I walk past this effigy of the English writer that I most admire, it makes me cringe,’ he said.

Lear, Tolstoy, Shakespeare and Orwell

The Play’s the Thing: Orwell and Drama (Last of Three)

by Richard Lance Keeble of the ORWELL SOCIETY

19th September 2020

Drama at the BBC: The next act

Orwell’s work for the BBC is not to end in November 1943. For through his friendship with Rayner Heppenstall, a producer at the corporation, he goes on to write two fine dramatic adaptations – of Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle, for the Home Service on 29 March 1946 (CWGO XIII: 179-201). The second, too often neglected, is of Little Red Riding Hood (ibid: 345-354). Just like the earlier adaptation of Andersen’s ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’ for the BBC’s Eastern Service, this reflects Orwell’s deep interest in the fairy story genre – which finds its most famous flowering in Animal Farm – A Fairy Story, in 1945. And Orwell is to adapt his famous satire on the Russian revolution for the BBC in 1947. Crick describes it as ‘very stilted’ (1980: 493) while Orwell told his friend, Mamaine Paget: ‘I had the feeling that they had spoilt it but one nearly always does with anything one writes for the air’ (Lynskey 2019: 157).

ORWELL’s fascination with the theatre and Shakespeare in particular culminates in two remarkable ways. This first is his essay, ‘Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool’, published in Polemic, in March 1947. It has been strangely missed, or its significance downplayed, by the biographers.

There is no mention of the essay at all in either Shelden (1991) or Meyers (2000) while D. J. Taylor (2003) and Bowker (2003) only comment on it en passant. Crick (op cit: 438, 520, 522) first focuses on Orwell’s critique of anarchism and pacifism; in the third reference he points out Orwell’s ‘tempered pessimism’; only in the second reference is there any mention of Shakespeare as he describes it as ‘a profound comparison of the didacticism of Tolstoy with the tolerant humanism of Shakespeare’.

From British Library’s blog on Tolstoy and Orwell

Orwell bases his critique of Tolstoy on an obscure pamphlet in which he has damned King Lear as ‘stupid, verbose, unnatural, unintelligible, bombastic, vulgar, tedious’ etc. (1980 [1947]: 793). Tolstoy fails to consider Shakespeare as a poet. ‘Those who care most for Shakespeare value him in the first place for his use of language, the “verbal music” which even Bernard Shaw, another hostile critic, admits to be “irresistible”’ (ibid: 796). Tolstoy sees no justification for the presence of the Fool. But for Orwell it’s crucial. ‘He acts not only as a sort of chorus, making the central situation clearer by commenting on it more intelligently than the other characters, but as a foil to Lear’s frenzies. His jokes, riddles and scraps of rhyme, and his endless digs at Lear’s high-minded folly … are like a trickle of sanity running through the play….'

But Tolstoy’s essential ‘anti-human’ stance draws Orwell’s special venom. Indeed, what Tolstoy probably most dislikes about Shakespeare ‘is a sort of exuberance, a tendency to take – not so much a pleasure as simply an interest in the actual process of life’ (ibid). In other words, it’s a ‘quarrel between the religious and humanist attitudes towards life’.

An early English language edition of Tolstoy’s essay.

The plot of King Lear, Orwell argues, is essentially about renunciation. And this clearly resonates with Tolstoy’s own history. ‘In his old age he renounced his estate, his title and his copyrights and made an attempt – a sincere attempt though it was not successful – to escape from his privileged position and live the life of a peasant. … Ultimately, therefore, Tolstoy renounced the world under the expectation that this would make him happier. But there is one thing certain about his later years, it is that he was not happy’ (ibid: 799, italics in the original). Indeed, one of the morals of the play is that ‘to make yourself powerless is to invite an attack’. Moreover, all of Shakespeare’s later tragedies ‘start out with the humanist assumption that life, although full of sorrow, is worth living and that Man is a noble animal – a belief which Tolstoy in his old age did not share’. Against Tolstoy’s ‘other-worldliness’, Orwell celebrates Shakespeare’s worldly vitality, his love of life which he conveys, above all, in the ‘music of language’.

Orwell next moves on to Tolstoy’s pacifism – criticising it, along with anarchism, for being intolerant. ‘For if you have embraced a creed which appears to be free from the ordinary dirtiness of politics – a creed from which you yourself cannot expect to draw any material advantage – surely that proves you are in the right? And the more you are in the right, the more natural that everyone should be bullied into thinking likewise’ (ibid: 802).

In many respects, Orwell is presenting a very slanted view of Tolstoy. For instance, Peter Marshall offers a totally different picture of him in his monumental history of anarchism: ‘Although Tolstoy condemned the passions of greed, anger and lust as vigorously as any tub-thumping Puritan, he was no other-worldly moralist. He recommended the happiness which is to be found in a life close to nature, voluntary work, family, friendship and a painless death.’ Moreover, Tolstoy’s promotion of anarchistic pacifism stresses its impact on people’s well-being here and now. ‘He rejects the charge that without government there will be chaos or a foreign invasion. His experience of Cossack communities in the Urals had shown him that order and well-being are possible without the organized violence of government’ (Marshall 2008 [1992]: 370, 374).

Yet Orwell is using his picture of Tolstoy for essential rhetorical purposes – and as a foil against which he can deliver his wonderfully profound celebration of life – and the music of words of his hero, William Shakespeare.

Shakespeare not forgotten in Nineteen Eighty-Four

In Orwell’s last novel, the dystopian masterpiece Nineteen Eighty-Four (2000 [1949]), women are represented as both highly sexualised or the complete opposite – desexualised madonnas. In her essay, ‘Desire is Thoughtcrime’, Jenny Taylor highlights the novel’s ‘dichotomy between lust and utopian desire, between woman as Madonna and whore’ (1983: 28). Julia, the ‘girl from the Fiction Department’ – though perhaps also a Party spy engaged in a honeytrap operation – conducts a passionate, secret affair with Winston Smith. Yet in another crucial scene, Winston dreams of his mother, the good breast, as part of an Arcadian Golden age of plenitude. A girl comes towards him across the field. ‘With what seemed a single movement she tore off her clothes and flung them disdainfully aside’ (op cit: 36). But her naked body arouses no desire in him. Rather ‘What overwhelmed him in that instant was admiration for the gesture with which she had thrown her clothes aside. With its grace and carelessness it seemed to annihilate a whole culture, a whole system of thought, as though Big Brother and the Party and the Thought Police could all be swept into nothingness by a single splendid movement of the arm. That too was a gesture belonging to an ancient time.’ And he concludes the scene triumphantly: ‘Winston woke up with the word “Shakespeare” on his lips’ (ibid).

This split in the representation of women, then, is highly problematic. Yet is it not significant that Orwell brings together the worlds of the unconscious, utopian desire and High Art with his final evocation of the name of Shakespeare?

Conclusions

Orwell’s love of the theatre begins in his childhood and remains constant throughout his life. It has been too often missed by biographers and Orwell scholars. Theatrical plot lines are dotted about – often wittily and imaginatively – A Clergyman’s Daughter. For instance, when Dorothy, while recovering from her breakdown, teaches at Mrs Creevy’s appalling school, Orwell has a great deal of fun describing the hoo-ha and parental protests that follow her class on Macbeth with its oh so controversial/shocking line ‘Macduff was from his mother’s womb/Untimely ripp’d’ (1976 [1935]: 387). ‘I do so adore Macbeth,’ he writes to his friend Eleanor Jaques, on 18 November 1932 and is keen to take her to see a production at the Old Vic (Orwell and Angus 1970, 1: 130-131).

Orwell does not particularly distinguish himself during his stint as drama critic (1940-1941) but many of his reviews capture his sense of humour, his love of bawdy, Max Miller-ish jokes and show him playing with ideas later to be taken up in longer essays. Then while working at the BBC, his drama interests inevitably spill over into his output. Along with all his often inventive and highly original arts feature programmes and political commentaries, he designs thirteen courses based on Calcutta and Bombay University syllabuses in English and American literature, science, medicine, agriculture and psychology and runs a series introducing drama and the mechanics of production, backed up with shortened versions of Indian plays. According to Peter Davison: ‘This had a direct effect in that two participants, Balraj and Damyanti Sahni, set up a travelling drama company in India on their return’ (1996: 117).

Interestingly, his fascination with fairy stories is reflected in two dramatic adaptions he writes for the BBC – of ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’ and ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ while his own version of Animal Farm is broadcast in 1947.

Moreover, the work of dramatists such as Anton Chekhov, George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde and William Shakespeare is constantly reflected upon during his writing career (though D. H. Lawrence’s short stories and poems especially interest him rather than the plays). The Collected Works, edited by Peter Davison (1998), indicates more than 120 references to Shakespeare, 96 to Shaw, around 30 to Wilde and 11 to Chekhov. Even while fighting in the trenches alongside Republican militiamen during the Spanish civil war in 1937, Orwell is reported by his comrade, Douglas Moyle, to find time to read his favourite dramatist: ‘I was surprised to find him sitting quietly by himself, sheltering from the cold wind, reading a little volume of Shakespeare’s plays. He didn’t speak, and I realized he would rather be left alone’ (quoted in Wadhams 1984: 80).

From British Library’s blog on Olivier and Leigh’s Macbeth

Davison even suggests that the concept of ‘Doublethink’ (the ability to hold two contradictory ideas at the same time) of Nineteen Eighty-Four could have been drawn from Macbeth. In this play, the Porter refers satirically to equivocation. Standing at the Door of Hell, the Porter asks who knocks: ‘Faith, here’s an equivocator that could swear in both the scales against either scale, who committed treason enough for God’s sake, yet could not equivocate to Heaven: O come in [to Hell] equivocator’ (Davison 1996: 132). An intriguing idea.

One thing is certain, however: for it’s the Bard’s sexiness and love of life that Orwell, the theatre man, celebrates so movingly and memorably in his essay ‘Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool’.

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Orwell's Politics and the English Language

From THE LANCETT:

Richard Horton

ALSO ON THE THE ORWELL Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/TheOrwellSociety

The Orwell Society - Home | Facebook The Orwell Society. 1.4K likes. The Orwell Society aims to promote the understanding and appreciation of the life and work of George Orwell. Join here:... www.facebook.com

GEORGE ORWELL, in his 1945 essay Politics and the English Language, wrote that “to think clearly is a necessary first step towards political regeneration”.

The Moscow press briefing held last week on the Russian COVID-19 vaccine quickly turned into a platform for national rivalry. The research, led by scientists at the N F Gamaleya National Research Centre for Epidemiology and Microbiology, found encouraging evidence of an immune response using their prime boost strategy of a two-component, human recombinant adenovirus vector-based vaccine. The study was small, non-randomised, uncontrolled, and did not include those most at risk of severe disease. The Russian team recognise these limitations and are proceeding with large randomised trials. The first results were released by Russian President Vladimir Putin on Aug 13. “I know that it works quite effectively”, he said, “forms strong immunity, and I repeat, it has passed all the needed checks”. At last week's event, more big claims were made. The “poorly researched approaches” by “western” nations were criticised, and one speaker challenged western governments to respond to these alleged concerns—“would you please show your citizens” evidence about the safety of western vaccine candidates given the “poorly developed platforms” you are using, he said. “It doesn't make any sense to use poorly researched approaches”, he argued. His view was that a human adenovirus vector was safer than a chimpanzee adenovirus vector (the basis for the Oxford COVID-19 vaccine, for example). A press conference to present the results of a scientific study became the venue for renewed Cold War conflict.

Russia isn't the only country to use COVID-19 as a tool to fight perceived adversaries. US President Donald Trump routinely refers to SARS-CoV-2 as the “China virus”. He is seeking to amplify the American public's fear of China to wound his opponent in the current presidential campaign. In Latrobe, PA, on Sept 3, President Trump suggested that, “Joe Biden wants to surrender your jobs to China”. The message is clear—China is America's enemy, it is the cause of a pandemic that has destroyed the US economy, and the policies of the Democrat candidate will only strengthen America's chief international competitor. There is not one shred of evidence to support these claims. The twisting of language in public discussion of the pandemic is now standard fare. “Thanks to the efforts of Operation Warp Speed”, said President Trump in Wilmington, NC, on Sept 2, “we remain on track to deliver a vaccine very rapidly, in record time”. He has suggested a vaccine might be available by the end of October—an important claim given that the US election will take place on Nov 3. Yet there is no possibility that a COVID-19 vaccine will be ready for public use before the US election. Orwell's reflection that language is used “with intent to deceive” in “the sordid processes of international politics” could not be more apposite.

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'If Liberty Means Anything!'

EDITORIAL STATEMENT: A STATUE of George Orwell stands outside Broadcasting House, the headquarters of the BBC, in London. The wall behind the statue is inscribed with Orwell's words 'If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear'. Although the statue was not unveiled until 7 November 2017, the Northern Voices blog, and before that the magazine of the same name, was established to be a concrete manifestation of that same sentiment. We do not have an alignment with any political party and have a scepticism about the activities of many politicians. It will be apparent to readers that our contributors have left of centre allegiances. This covers a spectrum of libertarians, trades unionists and democratic socialists. We believe that everyone has the right to have a different viewpoint from ourselves and from others, irrespective of who they are, and no one should be prevented from expressing that viewpoint, even if we or others disagree with it. This does not place upon us any obligation to publish material which is abusive, unsubstantiated or merely an assertion. However often an assertion is repeated, it does not make it true. In commenting on the views of others we avoid overused terms like, racist, sexist, homo-phobic, trans-phobic, islamo-phobic, anti-semitic, fascist, nazi etc, and object to their use in contexts where they are little more than abuse intended to intimidate others into remaining silent and so stifle debate on contentious issues. If anyone reading this blog objects to what one of our contributors has to say then we encourage them to write a comment. Unless they can provide some evidence more substantial than their own opinion about the nature of the content, it is unlikely that it will be taken down or altered.

The Cambridge Professor & the Burnley Welder

'WHITE LIVES DON'T MATTER'

by Les May

I HAVE been writing pieces for Northern Voices for about five years.  Everything I write I try to make sure is factually accurate and if possible provide links to where further information can be found so that anyone reading what I write can decide for themselves whether I am ‘cherry picking’, rather than presenting a full picture.  I do not guarantee that what I am writing now is factually accurate; however I will try.

The reason for my scepticism is that it involves things being posted on Twitter.   

Looking through these Twitter posts and trying to decide who is attacking or supporting who, has all the allure of wading in a slurry pit in open toed sandals.

On 22 June a recently appointed Cambridge professor, Priyamvada Gopal, posted a ‘tweet’ which said “I’ll say it again.  White Lives Don’t Matter.   As white lives”.  It has been claimed that she did this in response to a banner flown over a football stadium that read "White lives matter Burnley". Following this, abusive messages directed at her, including death threats and rape, were posted on Twitter.  Having read some of these I can only say that you will meet nicer turds in a slurry pit.

A somewhat more rational response has come from those signing an online petition at Change.org which reads:

"Cambridge must move to immediately discontinue their relationship with Ms Gopal in the best interest of all students and the community at large.”
“Her statements are racist and hateful and must not be tolerated by Cambridge University leadership.  Cambridge must move to immediately discontinue their relationship with Ms. Gopal in the best interest of all students and the community at large.”

Her employers, Cambridge University, responded by saying;  ‘The University defends the right of its academics to express their own lawful opinions which others might find controversial and deplores in the strongest terms abuse and personal attacks.   These attacks are totally unacceptable and must cease.’
So what happened to the person behind the airborne banner?  Did his employers rush to issue a statement supporting his right to express his lawful opinion? Not quite!   Jake Hepple was dismissed from his job as a welder by Paradigm Precision.  His girlfriend Megan Rambadt, was also sacked from her job as beautician.  If he is in a union will he get support from that quarter?  I wouldn’t count on it.

One reason I write for Northern Voices is that it makes an effort to implement what George Orwell said:  ‘If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear’.  As I accept this dictum I cannot support either the petition to have this woman dismissed, nor the actions of Paradigm Precision in sacking this man. 
 
What this shows is that privilege in our society is not about what colour your skin happens to be, it manifests itself in what position you hold, what you earn, where you live and who respects your views.  I’ll let you figure out who I think is the privileged one in this case.  Why is it acceptable for Jake to join the ranks of the unemployed and not Priya? 
 
I have already made clear my opinion of the people who are attacking her, rather than attacking her opinions.   But if she is daft, or naive, enough to post deliberately inflammatory comments on Twitter I’m afraid my sympathy for her is not very great and overall she does not come over as a very nice lady.

According to the website below, “she has earlier called for the persecution of Hindus and branded them sickos”.

https://swarajyamag.com/insta/cambridge-professor-priyamvada-gopal-tweets-white-lives-dont-matter-follows-it-up-with-abolish-brahmins-and-upper-castes

But for me the icing on the cake was an item in the Deccan Chronicle from July 2018 which mentioned that she had tweeted that she would no longer supervise students at King’s College because the porters did not address her as ‘Doctor’. Isn’t that what you call a ‘snob’?

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World Refugee Day: Who ******* Cares?

by Les May

YESTERDAY was Juneteenth, it marks the day when slavery was finally ended in the state of Texas 155 years ago.   It produced rallies all over the USA and today there will be ’demos’ in major cities in the UK ostensibly in support of ‘black lives matter’, though not doubt the opportunity to air other grievances will not be missed.

Today is World Refugee Day, it marks the fact that 80 million people, 1% of the world population, have been displaced by war, persecution and famine.  Will it produce similar ‘demos’ throughout the land?  Probably not.

What was it that George Orwell’s animals in his fable Animal Farm had to say? Oh yes! ‘All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others’.

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Not just about chlorine chicken

This isn’t just about chlorine chicken

 by Brian Bamford

GEORGE ORWELL wrote an essay 'In Defence of English Cooking' that:
'It will be seen that we have no cause to be ashamed of our cookery, so far as originality goes or so far as the ingredients go.  And yet it must be admitted that there is a serious snag from the foreign visitor's point of view.  This is that you practically don't find good English cooking outside a private house....  It is a fact that restaurants which are distinctively English are hard to find.' [1945]

Over half a century later in the Caterer & Hotelkeeper Millennium Supplement, on the 23 December 1999 claimed:
'Rationing was reintroduced in 1940, a year after the outbreak of the Second World War.  It continued until 1954, casting a shadow over any real culinary progression. Post-war London's leading restaurants were almost entirely run by Continental Europeans.'

And yet it goes on to argue:

'Outside the capital, though, the general state of food being served in most restaurants was abysmal, apart from rare exceptions such as Sharrow Bay in Ullswater (which opened in 1949) and the Bell at Aston Clinton.'


Raymond Postgate who went on to jointly write The Common People with G.D.H.Cole, helped to found The Good Food Guide.  Postgate a socialist, who helped to found the Communist Party of Great Britain, laid down some rules for fighting a war for English food wrote:



'Navigating a British restaurant during the middle of the twentieth century was in its way not so different from scoring a drink in Sweden before the outbreak of hostilities.  Postgate likened it to war.  The “Rules for Eating Out” published in the first Guide , from 1951-52, refer to restaurant staff as “the Enemy” and recommend battle tactics.'  And he advises:

“Take a long time reading the bill of fare, and see that your wife decides what she wants first. If the Enemy hears one of you say: ‘I’ll have whatever you do, dear’, he immediately decides he has no serious foe to encounter. What you want to impress on the establishment is that it has to deal with a pair of people who know exactly what they want, and are implacable.” ( GFG 19)

Adding in his recommendations:  'While diners and waiters were engaged in conflict, rules of war did apply, and the encounter should be civil even if it was not yet civilized. “You wish to give the impression not that you are angry with this particular restaurant, but that you are suspicious, after a lifetime of suffering.” ( GFG 19)'

His basic justification for the founding of The Guide is clear:
 'The Guide had become necessary because the suffering had lasted longer even than the lifetime of many GFG users: “For fifty years now complaints have been made against British cooking, and no improvement has resulted.” ( GFG 7)'


Serious entertaining was more likely to be done in private houses, where most professional chefs were employed, or in gentlemen's clubs - there were 200 at the turn of the century, compared with about 40 today.  Restaurants were frequented mostly by aristocrats and the gentry.  Women, of whatever class, were rarely seen in such establishments.

Derek Pattison & the 'Veblen good'

In response to the recent news that members of the US Congress have written to the US negotiator, calling on him to get rid of the UK’s ban on chlorinated chicken ‘once and for all’ DEREK PATTISON writes:
'I think it is true to say that people are economic maximizers and though we can make choices, our choices are always constrained for a variety of reasons.  This could be economic and also due to our social/class position in society .'

So speaks Pattsion, the economist, on behalf of the most miserable of sciences; forever labouring the price of everything and the value of nothing.  What would Raymond Postgate, founder of the Good Food Guide have to say about that?

When I did my degree in sociology at Manchester Poly. it was structured around economics, because at that time it was considered  that of all of the social sciences it was the closest to a 'natural science' like physics etc.  Do we want to eat cheap chlorine chicken suitably swilled with the chemical from the USA?  Yet when we considered this science of economics our attention was drawn to 'inverted demand curves'  and the effect of what came to be called a Veblen good as a type of luxury good for which demand increases as the price increases, in apparent contradiction of the law of demand, resulting in an upward-sloping demand curve. A higher price may make a product desirable as a status symbol in the practices of conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure.  A product may be a Veblen good because it is a positional good, something few others can own. *

This is a sociological consequence which determines a price according to a snob value.   Here the effect on demand depends on the range of other goods available, their prices, and whether they serve as substitutes for the goods in question.  The effects are anomalies within demand theory, because the theory normally assumes that preferences are independent of price or the number of units being sold. They are therefore collectively referred to as interaction effects.

We can imagine that after Brexit cheap chlorine chicken will quickly become the food of the poor.

Another writer John Wilkins writes:  'And so we have the climb down.  The ban will be dropped and low animal welfare, chlorinated chicken will be UP on our supermarket shelves.'


The concession in this case has been that low welfare products will pay a higher tariff (the tax charged on imports) than high welfare products.  But even if the US agrees to this, there is no guarantee that the tariffs rate won’t be cut later on.

Mr. Wilkins adds:  'This is fundamentally about the right of our government or any government to set standards and regulations on things that people care about, whether on animal welfare, climate standards, workers rights, public health, environmental standards or anything else.'



Worryingly, the government is trying to present this as a win for the environment minister, because even though the promise that a ban would be maintained has been broken, it turns out that what the trade minister, Liz Truss, actually wanted to do was not only overturn the ban but also reduce all tariffs on chicken to zero! 

The Decline of English Food 

When George Orwell was writing in the post-war years there was rationing, and as he says 'Pubs, as a rule, sell no food at all, other than potato crisps and tasteless sandwiches.'  Meanwhile, at that time, the 'expensive restaurants  and hotels almost all imitate French cookery ... while if you want a good cheap meal you gravitate naturally towards a Greek, Italian or Chinese restaurant.'

Raymond Postgate believed that the decline in English cuisine went back to the Industrial Revolution, when he claimed that the young migrant women from the rural areas who moved into the cities had lost contact with their grandmothers thus distancing them from their traditional recipes and ingredients. 

The concession is that low welfare products will pay a higher tariff (the tax charged on imports) than high welfare products.

But we know agribusiness has been lobbying hard on this, and 47 members of the US Congress have written to the US negotiator, calling on him to get rid of the UK’s ban on chlorinated chicken ‘once and for all’.  Former trade minister, Liam Fox, said last month that “the US would walk” if it had to comply with the UK’s animal welfare standards.[5]

And so now John Wilkins says 'we have the climb down and the ban will be dropped and low animal welfare, chlorinated chicken will be UP on our supermarket shelves.  The concession is that low welfare products will pay a higher tariff (the tax charged on imports) than high welfare products.  But even if the US agrees to this, there is no guarantee that the tariffs rate won’t be cut later on.

'Worryingly, the present government is trying to represent this as a win for the environment minister, because even though the promise that a ban would be maintained has been broken, it turns out that what the trade minister, Liz Truss, actually wanted to do was not only overturn the ban but also reduce all tariffs on chicken to zero!' 


It is hard to believe that the quality of English cuisine will improve as a result of these recent developments in UK-US trade relations and animal welfare.

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*   Veblen goods are named after American economist Thorstein Veblen, who first identified conspicuous consumption as a mode of status-seeking in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899).^[1] A corollary of the Veblen effect is that lowering the price decreases the quantity demanded.^[2]

A Veblen good is a type of luxury good for which demand increases as the price increases, in apparent contradiction of the law of demand, resulting in an upward-sloping demand curve. A higher price may make a product desirable as a status symbol in the practices of conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure. A product may be a Veblen good because it is a positional good, something few others can own.

Veblen goods are named after American economist Thorstein Veblen, who first identified conspicuous consumption as a mode of status-seeking in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899).^[1] A corollary of the Veblen effect is that lowering the price decreases the quantity demanded.

Veblen goods are named after American economist Thorstein Veblen, who first identified conspicuous consumption as a mode of status-seeking in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899).^[1] A corollary of the Veblen effect is that lowering the price decreases the quantity demanded.^[2]

Do we need to address 'Not Counting Niggers'?

AS I write statues are being toppled and historical figures are being denounced for alleged 'racism' and trading in slavery.  Dare I say it, it is as if a retrospective 'blacklist' is being drawn up by energetic individuals all over the world.

Back in July 1939, George Orwell wrote a telling essay for Adelphi entitled 'Not Counting Niggers' in which he questions what he calls the humbug of left wing politics generally towards what were then described as 'the dependencies'.  The long list of British dependencies as they were then called in the 1930s, were really the off-shore British proletariat.

Or as Orwell had it in 1939:
'What we always forget is that the overwhelming bulk of the British proletariat does not live in Britain, but in Asia and Africa.  It is not in Hitler's power, for instance, to make a penny an hour a normal industrial wage; it is perfectly normal in India, and we are at great pains to keep it so... It is quite common for an Indian coolie's leg to be thinner than the average Englishman's arm.  And there is nothing racial in this, for well-fed members of the same races are of normal physique; it is due to starvation.  This is a system which we live on and which we denounce when there seems to be no danger of it being altered.'

The fact is that over the last few centuries the people of these islands have all benefited from imperialism including the working classes. 

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English speakers: Grappling with the Grammar

 by Brian Bamford

SOME time ago my co-editor, partly-what jokingly, questioned my spelling and grammatical abilities, and I was reminded of this when more recently a commentator and meticulous Marxist complained in a P.S. 'You can at least take the trouble to spell my name correctly.'
 

The name, Charles Charalambous, had a French ring to it and, to be honest, I had some trouble getting it right.

 'FORGET GRAMMAR' & start 'acquiring a vocabulary'

As it happens I'm just reviewing a book entitled 'The Conspiracy of GOOD TASTE', and I was researching what the art critic Wyndham Lewis had had to say about vulgarity, slang and what he calls slum city English, as well as his thoughts on art and architecture.  On this very subject of the English language Lewis in his essay 'MEN WITHOUT ART' commenting on H.L. Mencken's treatise, The American Language, had cause to write:

'English is of all languages the simplest grammatically and the easiest to make into a Beach-la-mar* or pigin tongue.  Whether this fact, combined with its "extraordinary tendency to degenerate into slang of every kind," is against it, is of some importance for the future - for it will have less and less grammar, obviously, and more and cosmopolitan slang. - Mr Mencken is of the opinion that a language cannot be too simple - he is all for Beach-la-mar.  The path towards analysis and  the elimination of inflection, has been trod by English so thoroughly that, in its American form, it should today win the race for a universal volapuk.  Indeed, as Mr Mencken says, "the foreigner essaying it, indeed, finds his chief  difficulty, not in mastering its forms, but in grasping its lack of form.  He doesn't have to learn a new and complex grammar; what he has to do is forget grammar.  Once he has done so, the rest is a mere matter of acquiring a vocabulary".'

I suppose that I became more aware of the limited forms of English grammar, my mother tongue, not at school but while living in Spain and trying to get my head around Castillian Spanish using a book entitle 'Colloquial Spanish', while at the same time working among people speaking Valenciano [a form of Catalan] in the 1960s, yet I hadn't realised that English has this special quality through its limited grammatical form which lends it a vitality and richness that adds to its universality.  Wyndham Lewis warns 'There is, it is true, the difficulty of the vowel sounds'  It seems that according to him 'Standard English possesses nineteen distinct vowel sounds: no other living European tongue except Portuguese', so Mr Mencken says, 'possesses so many'.  Modern Greek, it seems, 'can boast only five'.  The answer, according to Lewis, is the neutralised vowel, which he says 'supported by the slip-shod speech-habits of the native proletariat, makes steady progress' in America.  

Perhaps, it occurs to me, this formless grammar of English may explain why the Brexit lobby triumphed in the referendum.  Wyndham Lewis writes that:  'Watch your vowels should be our next national slogan!'  And he adds, 'The fatal grammatical easiness of English is responsible, however, for such problems as these, as much as the growing impressionability of the English nation, and the proletarianization, rather than the reverse of the American.'

Hitherto, while England was a powerful empire, run by an aristocratic caste, its influence on speech and even the psychology of the American ex-colonies was paramount.  Yet today, the tables have been turned and cultural domination has for long been coming from Hollywood and elsewhere across the pond.  Lewis foresaw this in 1934 saying:  'the cinema brought the American scene and the American dialect nightly into the heart of England, and the "Americanising" process is far advanced, "done gones," "good guys" and 'buddies' spout upon the ips of cockney children as readily as those to the manner born of New York or Chicago: and no politically-powerful literate class any longer now, in our British 'Banker's Olympus,' to confer prestige upon an exact and intelligent selective speech.'

BREXIT, 'Airstrip One' & '1984'

Wyndham Lewis well understood the proletarianision of the anglo-saxon people in which he grasped, in the 1930s, that '...if America has come to England, there has been no reciprocal movement of England into the United States: indeed, with the new American nationalism, England is deliberately kept out: and all the great influence that England exerted formall - merely by being there and speaking the same tongue and sharing the same fundamental political principles - that is today a thing of the past.' 

It would seem that this process is now well developed and should progress further as we associate  ourselves more closely with the United States and Trump and his cultivation of American Nationalism.

Later than this in the 1940's George Orwell he portrayed England as 'airstrip one'.  Air  part of Oceania covers the entire continents of America and Oceania and the British Isles, the main location for the novel, in which they are referred to as ‘Airstrip One’.   Within the novel, London is the capitol of the province called Airstrip One, which is itself part of the nation of Oceania. Oceania is one of three world powers, and is composed of the Americas, the Atlantic islands including the British Isles, Australasia, and the southern portion of Africa.  In this novel unofficial language of Oceania is English (officially called Oldspeak), and the official language is Newspeak.

************************************

*   C19: quasi-French, from bêche-de-mer (trepang, this being a major trading commodity in the SW Pacific; hence the name was applied to the trading language)

**  commenting on 'Air Strip One' one commentator writes:  'I'm pretty sure it's a satirical jab at the perceived takeover of Britain by the United States.  Just as in real life the US has filled Britain with its airbases, in the world of 1984 the entire country is seen as just a minor offshoot of US military power, a mere "airstrip" for the USAF to launch their warplanes from. We already know that the United States has taken over Britain; this is stated explicitly at the very start of Chapter III (War is Peace) of Emmanuel Goldstein's magnum opus:'

RUSSIA: WHEN THE NEEDLES GOT STUCK?

  International Brigade deplores EU Remembrance Resolution

 YOU'VE certainly got to hand it to those few people on the British left who still stick with the idea that Russia offers some form of hope for human civilisation.  It is an idea that somehow a remnant of a golden age ideal rooted in historical Marxist-Leninism, will emerge through the person of  Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin; (a former student of law at Leningrad University and later a KGB foreign intelligence officer going on to be Director of the Federal Security Service (FSB), the KGB's successor agency). 

In this country the International Brigade Memorial Trust (IBMT) is seemingly one of those bodies dedicated to upholding the myth of this new Russian Saint Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.   As evidence of this on the 5th,  October 2019, at the LONDON AGM of the Chair Jim Jump moved a motion expressing dismay at the decision of the European Parliament to approve a remembrance resolution. 

The actual text of the EU resolution,  of which the IBMT so violently disapproves, reads as follows:

'This strand supports activities inviting reflection on European cultural diversity and on common values. It aims to finance projects reflecting on causes of totalitarian regimes in Europe's modern history (especially, but not exclusively, Nazism that led to the Holocaust, Fascism, Stalinism and totalitarian communist regimes) and to commemorate the victims of their crimes.

'This strand also concerns other defining moments and reference points in recent European history. Preference will be given to projects encouraging tolerance, mutual understanding, intercultural dialogue and reconciliation.'

Now the International Brigade resolution, which was agreed unanimously,  begins sa follows:  

'The European Parliament’s recent decision to equate communism with Nazism and to ignore British appeasement of fascism as one of the key factors leading to the Second World War has been roundly condemned by the IBMT.'   

This is the opening wording with which the International Brigade AGM motion begins condemns European Parliament’s remembrance resolution as an ‘insult’ to anti-fascists!   What this IBMT motion blatantly ignores is the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact,^[a] officially known as the Treaty of Non-Aggression between Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics,^[b] was a non-aggression pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed in Moscow on August 23, 1939, by Foreign Ministers Joachim von Ribbentrop and Vyacheslav Molotov, respectively.^[8]

In the end it was the Germans that broke with this pact not the Soviets.  The British International Brigade.  However, it would good if we could conclude the crimes of the Soviet Union with a dodgy pact taken out with a neighbouring regime in the difficult circumstances of the1930s.  Any disinterested observer of 20th century history must know this cannot be the case.  As I write this I am reviewing a book 'THE RESPONSIBILITY OF INTELLECTUALS: Reflections by Noam Chomsky & others after 50 years' which which deals with what honest journalists and academics ought to be doing to tell truth to the powerful.  In this book Craig Murray* writes about 'The abdication of responsibility':  'It is worth noting the clear-eyed recognition in Chamsky's work that the Soviet Union was also a rival empire.  Even while deporing Russophobia and continual threat posture of encirclement - which Chomsky also note in his essay - I always find it is worth reminding people that Russia itself still is an empire.  Much of its current land - and I mean Russia itself, not the former Soviet Republics - was acquired in the nineteenth century by imperial conquest precisely contempororary with British acquisitions in India or indeed the westward expansion of the USA.  These territories are majority Muslim.  Russian imperialism is quite real.'  

This is indeed an inconvenient truth which the IBMT and those who sell the Morning Star may wish to forget.  It's harder to forget the mountains of  corpses in the  Ukrainian Famine of 1933-4 or Stalin's Show Trials and purges in the later 1930s, but George Orwell described in December 1945 in a penetrating essay entitled 'Through a Glass, Rosily', an attack on a Tribune's Vienna correspondent for revealing 100,000 rape cases owing to the inappropriate misbehavior of the Russian occupying troops with the local citizenship.  At that time Orwell argued that some readers of  Tribune seemed to imply that (even if true) the '100,000 rape cases in Vienna are not a good advertisement for the Soviet regime:  therefore, even if they happened, don't mention them.  Anglo-Russian relations are more likely to prosper if inconvenient facts are kept dark.'

What the wrong-headed motion, which originates from the International Brigade Memorial Trust, and is now being promoted by the Morning Star salesmen, is doing is to throw historical facts down the Orwellian 'Memory Hole'.  What these people are saying is 'don't reveal inconvenient facts' like the Ukrainian Famine in 1933-4 or mass rapes by Russian troops of citizens in occupied wartime Vienna or the purges, simply it because it will play into the hands of the enemy.

 But the trouble with this kind of cover-up is that when it gets out that it is false then people tend not to believe you even when you are telling the truth.  The Morning Star itself has few readers and it little credibility in intellectual circles.  By contrast the International Brigade has retained some degree of integrity over the years, but now by associating itself with the motion it risks bring its own organisation into disrepute:  any body who is willing to weigh the management of the Russia's Soviet gulags more favourably than the gas-chambers of Nazi Germany has surely an unenviable task?

Orwell introduced the term 'Inverted Nationalism', to explain how some people came to embrace either Germany or Russia in contrast to their own countries in the 1930s.  With some people on the left somehow the needle got stuck, and despite Russian regime now being committed to the Orthodox Church and passionate Slav nationalism these same people still cling emotionally to this Oriental despotism.  It's as if there is some deep physological need for these attachments.

*****************

*  Craig Murray is author of Murder in Samarkand (Mainstream Publishing, 2006).  Became well known when he resigned as British ambassador to Uzbekistan in protest against British collusion with the Uzbek dictatorship during the 'war on terror'.  He received the Sam Adams Award for Integrity in Intelligence in 2006.

Derek Pattison on class & delusion

I THINK both Wallace and David Selbourne would do well to read Orwell's 'Politics and the English language'.  Much of what Wallace has written here along with the quotes from Selbourne, would be barely comprehensible to most people. It is pretentious academic verbiage that doesn't illuminate at all.

The cloth cap Tory or the Tory in clogs, is a well known archetype within the English working class and I meet them frequently. We've always known there were plenty of Tory voters who lived in council houses and why do you think the Irish socialist, Robert Tressell called his famous book the 'Ragged-Trousered Philanthropist'? You can't read Tressell's book without being fully aware that his socialist character, Owen, (Tressell himself), is largely contemptuous of many of his fellow workers for their political ignorance and apathy, their conservative outlook and the fact that they acquiesce, in their own exploitation. "They were the enemy" Tressell wrote, they not only "submitted like so many cattle to the existing state of things, but defended it, and opposed and ridiculed any suggestion to alter it."

It is often said of the book that you can identify many of the characters with people you know and that is perfectly true.  The same arguments that you find Tressell's working men having between themselves, you can still hear played out to this very day.

However, it would be a great mistake to tar all the working class with the same brush as middle-class academics, who write about them,are inclined to do. Anyone who has been involved in English left politics, will know, that most of the participants are middle-class university types, the sort who make up the bulk of the Labour Party membership today.

Yet, the people who most influenced me politically, were not academics like Dave Selbourne, who I knew as a student, but ordinary working-class people, like the anarchist copytaker, Jim Pinkerton, from Ashton-under-Lyne and the opera buff, Jack Macpherson, who lived in a council house with his wife Margaret, in Dukinfield. Both these men were representative of what I would call, the class conscious working-class, politically savvy, as well as highly cultured.

I think Brexit is a big mistake, for a variety of reasons, and though it seems to have politicised many working class people, who previously may have been indifferent or apathetic to politics and felt powerless, I suspect it will be economically damaging to many of the Brexiteers in the long run. Yet, one can't deny, that with Brexit, the worm has turned; the working-class voter has found a voice and far from feeling impotent and powerless as they used to do, they now know they have some influence and can make a difference. Now the genie is out of the bottle it might be difficult to put it back.

Bookfair 2020: Trans Totalitarian Anarchism?

Editorial Note:

IN January 1946, George Orwell wrote an essay entitled 'The Prevention of Literature' in which he addressed the indifference of the public to the promotion of free expression and what Orwell calls 'the right to report contemporary events truthfully, or as truthfully as is consistent with ignorance, bias and self-deception from which every observer necessarily suffers'.

 The reader will observe the humility here in Orwell's tone and will no doubt contrast it with the self confidence and even arrogance of much contemporary  commentary.  

'If publishers and editors exert themselves to keep certain topics out of print, it is not because they are frightened of prosecution but because they are frightened of public opinion.  In this country intellectual cowardice is the worst enemy a writer or journalist has to face, and that fact does not seem to me to have had the discussion it deserves.'

This lack of guts, this fear to challenge the latest orthodoxy still prevails in the anglo-saxon countries today.  But it's not the general public that are setting the agenda for acceptable opinions, it is a kind of fashionable elite view which bullies and bamboozles dissidents who either refuse, or are slow to swallow the latest flavour of the month.

2020 BOOKFAIR

The charming Tweets below from the proponents of the 2020 BOOKFAIR in London beautifully illustrate a naive mentality which is all too prevalent today.  In a way I feel sorry for the poor souls who churn out such stuff.  Do they really believe that they can silence criticism of Trans mania by such crude bans at Bookfairs?  All they have accomplished so far is to close down successful bookfairs as in London or to be forced to do deals as at the recent Manchester People's History Museum Bookfair.  Their every ban or censorious step tottering with the 'cocks in frocks' creates more opposition.

George Orwell, in the preface intended to accompany his book Animal Farm, which was not published in the first edition and remained undiscovered until 1971, wrote:
If publishers and editors exert themselves to keep certain topics out of print, it is not because they are frightened of prosecution but because they are frightened of public opinion. In this country intellectual cowardice is the worst enemy a writer or journalist has to face, and that fact does not seem to me to have had the discussion it deserves.

The 2020 Bookfair organisers are desperately trying to keep the debate over the business of the Cocks in Frocks off the agenda.   It seems they can't cope with having to defend their curiosities of their position.  

Freedom & Professor Chomsky

When we had to take on Professor Chomsky in 2001, with our publication of the Alternative Raven, entitled 'Language, Mind & Society: Chomsky & His Critics' (2001)*, we were met with a more serious and subtle resistance.  In that case pressure was applied slyly through Milan Rai to get Freedom Press to block publication, after the great man Chomsky became aware that we were going to publish some essays challenging to his linguistic ideas on the universal grammar in what was then The Raven.  Milan Rai had been for a time closely associated with Chomsky and now edits Peace News. 
Milan worked behind the scenes on Professor Chomsky's behalf to get the then editor of Freedom to prevent the agreed publication of The Raven critical of his theory on language.   In the end a group of northern anarchists and academics brought out an Alternative Raven, which included the articles challenging Chomsky's theories.  Later Freedom even refused to review the Alternative Raven. when Donald Rooum over-ruled the then editor Toby Crowe.  Later in a letter to me, Chomsky came to admit that he had throughout been in touch with with Milan Rai over that issue, but in mitigation said he only contacted him as a friend.

None of the people involved in trying to suppress the criticism of Chomsky's linguistics at Freedom covered themselves with glory over this matter, and Freedom lost some of its integrity by first agreeing to publish The Raven on Chomsky's linguistics, and to later when Milan Rai got involved to withdraw its offer.  

Self-censorship & 'uncomfortable truths'

When Orwell writes about the 'discomfort' of intellectual honesty, he meant that even during the Second World War, with the Ministry of Information’s often ham-fisted attempts at press censorship, 'the sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary.'   Self-censorship came down to matters of decorum, Orwell argues—or as we would put it today, 'civility.'   Obedience to 'an orthodoxy' meant that while 'it is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other… 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,' not by government agents, but by a critical backlash aimed at preserving a sense of 'normalcy' at all costs.


At stake for Orwell in the 1940s was no less than the fundamental liberal principle of free speech, in defense of which he invokes the famous quote from Voltaire as well as Rosa Luxembourg’s definition of freedom as 'freedom for the other fellow'.  'Liberty of speech and of the press,' Orwell writes, does not demand 'absolute liberty'—though he stops short of defining its limits.  But it does demand the courage to tell uncomfortable truths, even such truths as are, perhaps, politically inexpedient or detrimental to the prospects of a lucrative career.  'If liberty means anything at all,' Orwell concludes, 'it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.'

Unlike in the 1940s, when Orwell was around trying to get Animal Farm published, we are not being nudged into a vulgar Marxist or pro-Soviet totalitarianism.  The kind of totalitarianism of the Trans mania we are now expected to civilly swallow is the decorum of the Cocks in Frocks.

*  http://radicalanthropologygroup.org/sites/default/files/pdf/class_text_117.pdf