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George Orwell (Censorship (Ready Reference series))

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During the 1930’s and 1940’s, when few English socialists had awakened to the full horrors of Soviet totalitarianism under Joseph Stalin, Orwell was an exception. He was aware not only of the threat to intellectual freedom that totalitarianism—of the Left as well as the Right—posed, but also of the peculiar nature of that threat: the totalitarian concept that the past is not unalterable, but can be continually recreated to suit prevailing orthodoxies. Censorship was then becoming a matter of the manipulation of language and thought, rather than such...

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