From: cryofan (cryofan@mylinuxisp.com)
Date: Tue Jan 15 2002 - 05:28:00 MST
In a preface intended for the first edition of Animal Farm, George
Orwell wrote that "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." Orwell, of course, was less concerned with sartorial
observation than with the fog of intellectual fashions, the
orthodoxies that could induce otherwise liberal and tolerant minds to
censor public discourse of disagreeable facts and opinions. In what
remains as a vivid defense of the freedom of the press, he concluded
that "if liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell
people what they do not want to hear."
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