#mic wright

The protagonist of Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston Smith, is a worker in the Ministry of Truth’s Records Department; he’s charged with rewriting documents and doctoring photos to match the ever-shifting party line. It’s a thuddingly obvious reference for a hack columnist to grab for when churning out a piece about Dahl being ‘censored’, pretending publishers don’t care most about corporate interests and that activists — who they never name — have all culture in an inescapable headlock.

In today’s Daily Telegraph, Simon Heffer — Beaker’s bumptious cousin, the most malignant of all Muppets — contributes a column under the headline:

George Orwell’s chilling prediction has come true – it’s time to make a stand

Here are some examples of other columnists using the same schtick from just the past five years:

Why Orwell’s 1984 could be about now BBC News, 7 May 2018 [conclusion: Trump is Big Brother]

Orwell v Huxley: whose dystopia are we living in today? FT, 18 January 2019 [conclusion: Facebook is Big Brother]

George Orwell’s chilling prediction has come true – it’s time to make a stand, Spiked, 14 June 2019 [conclusion: people who don’t like Brexit are Big Brother]

In Our Rush To Combat "Fake News" We Are Heading Towards Orwell's 1984 Forbes, 9 July 2019 [conclusion: fact-checking is Big Brother]

2010s = 1984: The decade we finally understood Orwell Mashable, 27 December 2019 [conclusion: Johnson, Trump, and Bolsonaro are Big Brother]

The woke left is the new Ministry of Truth The Times, 11 July 2020 [conclusion: Billy Bragg is Big Brother]

Biden’s new Ministry of Truth puts US on fast track to an Orwellian nightmare The Telegraph, 14 May 2022 [conclusion: Joe Biden is Big Brother]

Despite the many versions of the argument I’ve read, Heffer still manages to be worse; he has a kind of carnival mirror genius for twisting words into the most unhinged arguments possible. He begins:

What is it about the past that some young people find unbearable? After all, no one is expecting them to live through it. Indeed, some of us who did find the present infinitely worse. The vandalism of Roald Dahl’s writings for children by “sensitivity readers” to make them “suitable”, has brought the wickedness of rewriting, or eliminating, the past and evidence of it to the forefront of our discourse.

While avoiding being rude to Francesca Dow, the MD of Penguin Random House Children’s, and Jane Griffiths, leader of Puffin’s Dahl publishing team, who are now the targets of newspaper stories about their personal tastes, neither of them is young young. Nor are the changes to Dahl’s book about finding the past “unbearable”; they’re defensive moves by a corporation to ensure the past stays sellable. If Puffin, The Roald Dahl Story Company, and Netflix thought the virulent racist and antisemite author was “unbearable” they probably wouldn’t keep selling his work and adapting it for TV and film.

In his actually unbearable grammar and style guide Strictly English: The correct way to write ... and why it matters, Heffer says:

The language of tabloid exaggeration is apparent on every page of what the trade calls the “red-top” newspapers. Prices soar, and then they crash. In politics, rows about issues are always erupting, and they are inevitably furious. The key participants in them clash, and they evince rage. The consequence of an outrage is that there will be a probe, leading up to a damning report. Its shock findings will be followed by a clampdown (or a crackdown). The opponents of the transgressors will slam their behaviour and seek to topple them.

The Heffer of 2010 would surely be outraged by the harrumpher of 2023 with his howls about “the sickness of rewriting” and the “vandalism” of books being edited, and cry of “Why tolerate this lunacy?”.

It’s after that rhetorical flounce that Heffer attempts to deputise long-dead George to his cause:

George Orwell, to whom the Thought Police (a term he invented in Nineteen Eighty-Four) have yet to apply themselves, wrote in that very novel of a Britain in which “every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”

While Heffer — the editor of Chip Channon’s diaries — considers himself quite a historian, his glib comment that Orwell has yet to be subjected to censorship is particularly silly. Even putting the banning of his books in the Soviet Union and other Communist states (too anti-Communist) and US states (too pro-Commie!) aside, Orwell himself wrote about attempts to censor him by the British state.

In ‘Freedom of the Press’, an introduction to Animal Farm written in 1945 but not published until 1975 by The Times Literary Supplement, Orwell explained:

This book was first thought of, so far as the central idea goes, in 1937, but was not written down until about the end of 1943. By the time when it came to be written, it was obvious that there would be great difficulty in getting it published (in spite of the present book shortage which ensures that anything describable as a book will ‘sell’), and in the event, it was refused by four publishers. Only one of these had any ideological motive. Two had been publishing anti-Russian books for years, and the other had no noticeable political colour. One publisher actually started by accepting the book, but after making the preliminary arrangements he decided to consult the Ministry of Information, who appear to have warned him, or at any rate strongly advised him, against publishing it. Here is an extract from his letter: “I mentioned the reaction I had had from an important official in the Ministry of Information with regard to Animal Farm. I must confess that this expression of opinion has given me seriously to think… I can see now that it might be regarded as something which it was highly ill-advised to publish at the present time. If the fable were addressed generally to dictators and dictatorships at large then publication would be all right, but the fable does follow, as I see now, so completely the progress of the Russian Soviets and their two dictators, that it can apply only to Russia, to the exclusion of the other dictatorships. Another thing: it would be less offensive if the predominant caste in the fable were not pigs. I think the choice of pigs as the ruling caste will no doubt give offence to many people, and particularly to anyone who is a bit touchy, as undoubtedly the Russians are.” This kind of thing is not a good symptom. Obviously, it is not desirable that a government department should have any power of censorship (except security censorship, which no one objects to in wartime) over books which are not officially sponsored. But the chief danger to freedom of thought and speech at this moment is not the direct interference of the MOI or any official body. If publishers and editors exert themselves to keep certain topics out of print, it is not because they are frightened of prosecution but because they are frightened of public opinion. In this country, intellectual cowardice is the worst enemy a writer or journalist has to face, and that fact does not seem to me to have had the discussion it deserves.

Heffer engages in a common elision of changes made to books by the people who hold the copyright on them — a right that has been frequently extended in the favour of large companies and authors’ beneficiaries — and censorship by the state. His point is a clumsy, clodhopping thing compared to the precision of Orwell’s discussion of the effects of self-censorship.

There’s a reason Heffer would not be inclined to quote ‘Freedom of the Press’: One of its central arguments is that the British media censors, distorts, and deceives by omission:

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.

And that’s why we get a flattened, trimmed, and docile zombie Orwell in Heffer’s telling. The man who wrote at such tedious length about how “tabloid language highlighted above is that it devalues the currency” in Straight English, has no problem with putting a publisher making changes to some children’s books on the same footing as the Cambodian genocide:

We have arrived at our own endless present, or Year Zero, where the record, historical and otherwise, is readily falsified. Its rules are designed to prevent what that arrogant and self-regarding minority who feel obliged to police and alter the thoughts of the rest of us consider the ultimate crime: giving offence. Most of us have spent our lives encountering things that could, if we wallowed in self-regard, offend us deeply. We were trained to ignore them and get on with life. Now, suddenly, we cannot be trusted to do that. Therefore books, art, films and television programmes must be censored or suppressed, statues taken down as though the lives they commemorate never happened, streets and buildings renamed to eradicate thought criminals. Like Pol Pot, that minority feels a moral duty to erase the past to attain Year Zero. Sadly for us, their main qualifications are an overbearing self-righteousness, a profound ignorance of history and a deep misunderstanding of the idea of liberty that few of us share.

Heffer writes in a paranoid style that the Telegraph often delights in; it’s a means of instilling fear and disquiet in the reader, the print equivalent of ominous music turning a seemingly normal movie scene into a spine-chiller.

Simon Heffer and The Telegraph as an institution take themselves very seriously but comparing a commercial publisher making edits to children’s books — no matter how stupid some of those changes may be — to the murderous dictator Pol Pot attempting to “erase the past to attain Year Zero” is so deeply unserious it stinks of grease paint and squeaks when it walks.

In his 1995 New York Review of Books essay, ‘Ur-Fascism’, Umberto Eco wrote:

… at the root of the Ur-Fascist psychology there is the obsession with a plot, possibly an international one. The followers must feel besieged.

… followers must be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.

Heffer, in common with many of his Telegraph columns, plays both tricks all the time. Notice how he moves quickly from discussing the specific issue of the changes to Dahl’s books into glomming together other ‘fears’ that the Telegraph picks at daily like scabs: art; film; TV; statues taken down; streets and buildings being renamed. And how he attributes these changes to enemies barely named but many and various.

In his grab bag of deceptively presented examples, Heffer includes one claim that particularly caught my eye:

A suggestion that Brent Borough Council would rename Gladstone Park after Diane Abbott, because of the Gladstone family’s links with slavery, has so far not been acted upon.

The claim repeated there first started doing the rounds in April 2022; on 19 April 2022, the Telegraph’s most gleeful ‘you couldn’t make it up’ correspondent, Michael Deacon filed a piece headlined Naming a park after Diane Abbott may delight the Left…but there’s one small problem. Only, there was no such plan and, two days later, the local newspaper, the Ham & High wrote:

Reports that a North West London park will be renamed after Hackney MP Diane Abbott are false, the local council has confirmed… … Brent Council has previously noted that any name change of Gladstone Park would be subject to a public consultation and conversations with the park’s friends group.

Heffer knows the story isn’t true and, if he doesn’t, whatever desperate gang of sub-editors remain at the Telegraph should. The kicker to that sentence — “… has so far not been acted upon.” — is a sneaky means of covering his arse (which can be an expensive business).

Though he cannot avoid mentioning brutal editing and censorship in the past — of course, Thomas Bowlder gets a name check and the Chatterley Trial is dragged up again — Heffer still pretends it was better ‘then’:

At least you could still buy the unexpurgated Shakespeare and Gibbon if you wished: the late Georgians believed in choice.

He mutters that “we thought we had all grown up” after the Chatterly verdict; he was born in the year it came down and was 14 when Philip Larkin published

Annus Mirabilis with its famous opening:

Sexual intercourse began In nineteen sixty-three (which was rather late for me) - Between the end of the Chatterley ban And the Beatles' first LP.

In an effort to create a ‘censorship’ row involving Larkin last year, Heffer wrote a piece headlined Philip Larkin deserves to be celebrated, not cancelled:

Perhaps, as I predicted last year, he is being shunned for his bilious private doggerel – written for like-minded friends – that poured abuse on trades unions, Labour ministers and immigrants. Is our last great poet in the process of being cancelled? Surely not: but we shall know for certain by August 9.

Now, Heffer’s desperate attempts to make the Dahl changes part of an elaborate conspiracy, he pulls in the “censorship” of Telegraph contributor Nigel Biggar, whose book Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning was dropped by Bloomsbury and… picked up by William Collins and has become a bestseller with the help of articles about how thoroughly cancelled he has been. He also imagines future bannings of Dickens and Trollope:

Before long a “sensitivity reader” – someone of a mindset incomprehensible to most of us – will decree it best we do not read these works at all. The climate has changed violently, precisely because we have allowed it to.

The familiar Telegraph complaint that old TV shows — available on streaming, download and DVD — are not broadcast anymore also makes an appearance:

Repeat channels on television warn viewers they may encounter “language and attitudes” they find offensive: but at least, for now, these programmes are still shown. There are no repeats of It Ain’t Half Hot Mum, because an actor blacked up in it (the fact that the satire’s main target was the British Army, and its officer class, seems not to have registered). Nor can Till Death Us Do Part be shown, even though Johnny Speight, its writer, was a Leftist who wished to highlight racism through his brilliant creation, Alf Garnett. By far the best Carry On film, Up the Khyber, can’t appear because Kenneth Williams and Bernard Bresslaw black up as the Khasi of Kalabar and his henchman Bungdit Din, in mocking the hated Raj. And Guy Gibson’s faithful labrador in The Dam Busters has his name bleeped out.

But look at that last line in particular, which indicates what Heffer is really angry about: He’s not ‘allowed’ to say the n-word without consequence and nor are all his ruddy-faced straight-talking pals. Does the lack of reference to a labrador named after a slur make The Dam Busters less thrilling for you? If it does: Turns out, you’re a racist who might have enjoyed Till Death Us Do Part’s Alf Garnett for less than satirical reasons.

Heffer writes one of those ‘man never looks in a mirror’ type conclusions:

It does not bear saying often enough that these are a small, unrepresentative minority whose undue influence is wrecking free expression. They seek to distort and even eliminate our past, a past they deem too unsafe for us to encounter, and in doing so squash the vital impulse of intellectual curiosity. It starts with censoring a few children’s books. If we don’t make a stand, it will end with destroying our democratic right to liberty, and sooner than we imagine.

He will never even consider that Telegraph columnists are an “unrepresentative minority [with] undue influence” nor that he and his paper spend a great deal of time “[distorting] and even [eliminating] our past”.

Heffer’s huffing that “it starts with censoring a few children’s books” came back into my mind unbidden when I read the latest column by his colleague Allison Pearson which, inevitably, is also about Dahl.

After filling up her word count with synopses of Matilda, James and the Giant Peach, and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and gloopy reminiscences of reading to her own children (have they not suffered enough?), Pearson writes:

We should be very worried. The same smug forces that want to castrate Dahl because he’s supposedly a malign influence on young readers are the ones who are indoctrinating children in our schools with a pernicious, highly political creed that would appal most parents, if they only knew. To take a recent example, a dismayed teacher at one primary school in rural East Anglia shared a photograph of a display of books. They had hastily been put up by a panicky head of English who’d been told by a visiting school improvement officer that the pupils’ reading wasn’t diverse enough. (One of the more egregious titles often cited by concerned mums and dad is My Skin, Your Skin: Let’s talk about race, racism and empowerment by Laura Henry-Allain. Children as young as five are being exposed to the book’s “meaningful discussions” about racism, which must surely be meaningless to such tiny tots.)  Every single book on the display is about slavery or some aspect of race or colour yet, as the teacher pointed out, the majority of children at her school were from Eastern Europe. Absurd, yes, but also profoundly dangerous.

Having performatively ‘railed’ at “censorship”, Pearson moves on to implying which books she thinks should be banned. The clunky irony emerges when you click on the link and realise it sends you to the Telegraph Media Group Book Shop page for My Skin, Your Skin…(it may as well say, “Allison Pearson HATES this picture book! Why not buy it?”)

Subjects that Pearson dislikes (the existence of children of colour and trans people) are “indoctrination” but changing Roald Dahl or simply not wanting to read him at all are unthinkable assaults on British culture and her future grandchildren’s “understanding of their history”.

Of course, Pearson has written her share of “this is just like Nineteen Eighty-Four” columns in the past; her most recent was NHS trans guidelines are straight from 1984 in March 2022. She plumped for one of the most over-used quotes from the novel: The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.

If Pearson and Heffer read or re-read Orwell’s ‘Politics and the English language’, I doubt they’d realise how well it describes them:

When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases — bestial atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder — one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy.