Posted by Nicholas at March 3, 2006 08:43 AMWhen my friend Vladan Sir first heard George Orwell's Animal Farm broadcast on either the Voice of America or Radio Free Europe (it's hard to remember which, he listened to both so much), he was 15 or 16, living in the mining-scarred region of northern Bohemia in Communist Czechoslovakia, in or around 1987. "It was amazing," he recalls, "how a fable could be so precise."
His parents, party members both, hadn't gotten around to letting him know that the entire system he'd been raised on was a fable in its own right, so when the same illegal source that delivered Billboard's Top 40 finally produced the forbidden anti-totalitarian classic he'd heard such excited rumors about, it carried the force of revelation. Within two years he was watching excitedly as his own high school teachers "cried during classes and apologized [that] they were teaching us bullshit."
Matt Welch, "Old Propaganda and New", Reason, 2006-02-28
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