First of all, I have to thank Daniel Levin Becker for the Sisyphean task of seeing this to publication. I know that I'm indebted to him, and to a bunch of other people at the Believer who I haven't been in direct contact with. They assidiously fact-checked everything in here, a very old-world and conscientious thing to do. My gratitude.
In short, this is an Orwell essay that I rewrote in the context of Snowball's Chance, which is my parody of Animal Farm that was recently rereleased (tenth anniversary) by Melville House.
"George Orwell’s 'the Freedom of the Press,' a proposed preface to Animal Farm, expurgated and footnoted (with a bias)."
- Penguin’s 2000 edition of Animal Farm included the essay “The Freedom of the Press,” which was identified as “Orwell’s Proposed Preface to Animal Farm” and dated 1945. The essay was first published in The Times Literary Supplement, 15 September 1972. You are reading a footnoted and elided version of that essay. By reading further, you risk participating in a crime; what I am doing here may be technically illegal.