February 14, 1996

Noam Chomsky on Propaganda - The Big Idea - Interview with Andrew Marr
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Noam Chomsky - 1996-02-14 - Interview with Andrew Marr
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Any fairminded person with journalistic experience will admit that during this war official censorship has not been particularly irksome. We have not been subjected to the kind of totalitarian ‘co-ordination’ that it might have been reasonable to expect. The press has some justified grievances, but on the whole the Government has behaved well and has been surprisingly tolerant of minority opinions. The sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary.

Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. Anyone who has lived long in a foreign country will know of instances of sensational items of news—things which on their own merits would get the big headlines—being kept right out of the British press, not because the Government intervened but because of a general tacit agreement that ‘it wouldn’t do’ to mention that particular fact. So far as the daily newspapers go, this is easy to understand. The British press is extremely centralised, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics. But the same kind of veiled censorship also operates in books and periodicals, as well as in plays, films and radio. 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. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.

- George Orwell: The Freedom of the Press (Literary Censorship in England) (1945)
[Proposed preface to Animal Farm, first published in the Times Literary Supplement on 15 September 1972 with an introduction by Sir Bernard Crick. Ian Angus found the original manuscript in 1972.]
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Q: I came across this quote from George Orwell which perhaps relates to the manufacture of consent. He says, “Circus dogs jump when the trainer cracks his whip, but the really well-trained dog is the one that turns his somersault when there is no whip.”

Noam Chomsky: I suspect he was talking about intellectuals. The intellectual class is supposed to be so well trained and so well indoctrinated that they don’t need a whip. They just react spontaneously in the ways that will serve external power interests, without awareness, thinking they’re doing, honest, dedicated work. That’s a real trained dog. I bet if you look back at the context it’s something like that.

- Noam Chomsky: Propaganda and the Public Mind (2001) – For Reasons of State (1999)
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It is not only in war-time that the British press observes this voluntary reticence. One of the most extraordinary things about England is that there is almost no official censorship, and yet nothing that is actually offensive to the governing class gets into print, at least in any place where large numbers of people are likely to read it. If it is ‘not done’ to mention something or other, it just doesn’t get mentioned. The position is summed up in the lines by (I think) Hilaire Belloc:

You cannot hope to bribe or twist
Thank God! the British journalist
But seeing what the man will do
Unbribed, there’s no occasion to.

No bribes, no threats, no penalties — just a nod and a wink and the thing is done. [...]

Nowadays this kind of veiled censorship even extends to books. The M.O.I [Ministry of Information], does not, of course, dictate a party line or issue an index expurgatorius. It merely ‘advises’. Publishers take manuscripts to the M.O.I, and the M.O.I, ‘suggests’ that this or that is undesirable, or premature, or ‘would serve no good purpose’. And though there is no definite prohibition, no clear statement that this or that must not be printed, official policy is never flouted. Circus dogs jump when the trainer cracks his whip, but the really well-trained dog is the one that turns his somersault when there is no whip.

- George Orwell: As I Please, Tribune, 7 July 1944
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