What makes it particularly interesting is that it was written by a socialist who volunteered to go and literally fight fascists (with bullets, not fists), and it was written in the immediate aftermath of WW2. You'd think that a person like that, at a time like that, would be very sympathetic to the kinds of arguments that are being paraded on the left today - that, basically, once politics gets sufficiently extreme, immediate concerns about that should trump any abstract freedoms. And yet, Orwell criticizes the treatment of Oswald Mosley (of the British Union of Fascists) during the war...
The irony is that the essay was effectively censored itself - it was meant to be a preface to the Animal Farm, but no publisher was willing to publish it as such. It was eventually published on its own, 27 years after it was written.
https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
What makes it particularly interesting is that it was written by a socialist who volunteered to go and literally fight fascists (with bullets, not fists), and it was written in the immediate aftermath of WW2. You'd think that a person like that, at a time like that, would be very sympathetic to the kinds of arguments that are being paraded on the left today - that, basically, once politics gets sufficiently extreme, immediate concerns about that should trump any abstract freedoms. And yet, Orwell criticizes the treatment of Oswald Mosley (of the British Union of Fascists) during the war...
The irony is that the essay was effectively censored itself - it was meant to be a preface to the Animal Farm, but no publisher was willing to publish it as such. It was eventually published on its own, 27 years after it was written.