Orwell is famous for his searching and sardonic 
critique of the way thought is controlled by force
under totalitarian dystopia. But much less 
known is his discussion of how similar outcomes
are achieved in free societies – he's speaking 
of course of England, and he wrote that although
the country is quite free, nevertheless, unpopular
ideas can be suppressed without the use of force
He gave a couple of examples, provided a few  
words of explanation which were to the point
One particularly pertinent comment was 
his observation on a quality education in the
best schools where it is instilled into you that
there are certain things that it simply wouldn't
do to say, or we may add, even to think. 
One reason why not much attention is paid
to this essay is that it wasn't published. It was
found decades later in his unpublished papers
It was intended as the introduction to his famous 
“Animal Farm” – a bitter satire of Stalinist
totalitarianism. Why it wasn't published is apparently
unknown, but I think perhaps you can speculate..
One of the best descriptions of the Spanish Revolution,
although he didn’t know what was going on,
was George Orwell. But he was writing from
the point of view of the POUM, the semi-Trotskyite
militia, and that’s what he saw. So he didn’t 
understand the anarchists at all. He didn’t
know anything about them. But he gave a very
vivid portrayal of what it was like, he’s never
seen anything like that. You go thorough 
Barcelona, nobody's calling anyone “sir”
People are comrades, there’s no hierarchy, 
people are participating. He said, I don’t
understand what it was, lot of things I don’t
like, but it’s just something you just have to
appreciate He came back a couple of months
later, and he said it’s totally different
It was back to the bowing and scraping, the orders.
Stalinist leadership was in the
process of crushing the revolution, with the support of the West and Franco. But, you know, even
from his kind of skewed perspective,
just as a perceptive human being, he saw something of real importance.
I didn't think that “1984” was one of 
Orwell’s best work. To tell you the truth
I could barely finish it. I thought it was kind 
of obvious and wooden, you know where it’s going.
But he had some nice comments about Newspeak
and this and that, some good useful phrases, but I didn’t think it was much of a book
So what does it mean to be a liberal or a 
communist or anything else?
The point that Orwell made: one way of trying
to undermine independent thought and creative
approaches to the world is to simply destroy the
way of talking about things, so the words almost
literally have no meaning. In fact, by now just about
every word that’s used in political discourse has at least 
two meanings, a literal meaning and its opposite, and it's the opposite that’s normally used
So take a contemporary debate that's going on 
right now: you see headlines in newspapers
about a report on foreign fighters in Iraq. 
Condoleezza Rice announces, she’s asked a
question about how can we settle the problem in Iraq. She says "quite easy: just keep the foreign fighters out,
keep the foreign weapons out, and it'll all be settled." 
And nobody bats an eyelash. Are there 150,000 
US troops there? Are they bringing in weapons?
They're not foreign, because anything we do is 
not foreign. If we invaded Canada, they would be
enemy combatants, and we would be there by right.
So concepts like aggression, invasion, terror,
anything you mentioned doesn't exist.
Take “democracy”. George W. Bush was in Egypt 
yesterday praising President Mubarak. The Egyptians
are writhing…at the same time he's giving talks about
how we have to promote democracy and so. They just
came from Saudi Arabia, one of the most extreme 
fundamentalist tyrannies in the world. You see a
picture of him with King Abdullah 
watching a horse show and so on and
so forth. I mean, what are we to make
of all of this? The terms for discussing
things have been almost evacuated of content.
..actually comes from Orwell, who made
a distinction between what he called “people”
and “unpeople“. People are those who count, 
unpeople are not human, you can do anything to them
you like. Actually, that came up to me vividly
a couple of hours ago. I happen to be in a video
conference in London and the moderator of the
group there and the questions he asked, he
brought up the horror in the West over the 
beheadings that are taking place, the
beheadings of journalists, there was another
one in Algeria a day or two ago, and he said
this is creating such extraordinary outrage in the West
that we just have to do something about
it, and he said that – and this was pretty liberal
group, he said that we recognize that the
US/British/Israeli atrocities are pretty awful, 
but even during the Israeli attack on Gaza you didn't see things like beheadings.
Didn't you? In fact, during the Israeli 
attack on Gaza, if you look at the sectors
of Gaza that were subjected to really vicious
murderous attacks, like Shafia, after the attack
kind of relented, people went in and were picking
up pieces of bodies to try to identify who was
murdered. All of that was reported, but he was 
correct, that didn't horrify the West. When we
carry out atrocities like smashing people up so
that their body parts are scattered around so you
can't even identify who they were, that's not a
crime. It can be a mistake. You're sometimes
allowed to say it’s a mistake. Just like the drone 
assassination campaign which undoubtedly does
worse things than beheadings to its victims, 
it's a mistake, maybe it's a mistake, but it's
not a crime. On the other hand, if ISIS or 
whatever offshoot it is in Algeria beheads people
that offends us to the heavens. And it is
horrendous undoubtedly, though it's a tiny fraction
of what we and our clients do. But that's the 
people/unpeople distinction.
Michael Albert: There’s a relatively small
number, almost infinitesimal of people who fulfill 
the responsibilities of intellectuals. They use their
credibility, they use their access, they use
their tools etc. to try and discuss reality in
a way that actually is consistent with human 
well-being and consistency and so on. Then
we have virtually everybody who has those attributes, 
who has those advantages, who is capable of
understanding when it serves their interests, 
so they'll search far and wide for something about
somebody who they wish to prosecute, but is 
completely incapable, as you describe it, even
incapable of hearing the words when it's contrary
to this background of interests. Ok, now it might
not matter because the fact is the crucial thing. 
But lots of people hear that and the way that they
dismiss it is to say it can't be, because what would
explain it? Why would all those people behave
in such a way? How could they possibly have the
mental capacity to see the truth and not see the truth,
you know, it must be the small number of people who
are confused, not the large number of people.
How do you answer that?
Noam Chomsky: Actually, Orwell had a word 
for it, he called it “doublethink”. Doublethink is the
capacity to hold two contradictory ideas in mind
and believe both. That's practically a defining
characteristic of intellectual history. Secondly, I’m
not talking about the United States. As far as I know
this is close to historically universal. I find very
few exceptions. And furthermore, it goes back to the
earliest recorded history; furthermore, every person
who asks this question knows the answer. All they
have to do is look at themselves. How many people
have failed to go through an experience like for example
when you're, you know, 6 years old, and your little brother takes a toy and you want the toy, and your mother's not
looking, and you're bigger than he is, so you grab the toy. 
And then the kid starts yelling and your mother comes
in and she starts centring you for taking the toy, 
and how do you answer? You say, I took the toy because
I wanted it, and he's smaller than me. Or you say, look he
didn't want the toy anyway, besides it was mine
and he really stole it from me, so I was right. 
Do you know anybody who hasn't gone through 
such experiences in their life?
Michael Albert: And you give the 
second answer, not the first.
Noam Chomsky: Yeah, so we all know
the answer to the question.
There are easy ways to rationalize whatever happens 
in a usually complicated world, so as to protect
yourself. Furthermore, the fact that intellectuals 
act like this is close to tautology. You don't become
a respected intellectual unless you do this kind of 
thing, not like Kissinger, just servility the master, 
but because you internalize it.
