Sandy Hook Redux: ‘Obama officials confirm that it was a drill and no children died’

By Jim Fetzer (with Sofia Smallstorm and Paul Preston)

“I have a lot of sources in regards to as to what’s going on with the president and the administration and so on, and every one of my sources said it was a false flag”--Paul Preston

Sofia Smallstorm, who produced and directed the documentary, “Unraveling Sandy Hook”, which many regard as the best video study of the Sandy Hook event, recently interviewed a Los Angeles school expert, Paul Preston, about Sandy Hook and his knowledge of what had transpired.

Governor Malloy had held a press conference that day, explaining that he and the Lt. Governor had been “spoken to” that something like this might happen, which raised the question, what “something like this”? Did he mean he had been told a school shooting massacre would take place? or a drill that would be presented as a real event?

Remarkably, we now have confirmation from an unexpected source. Paul Preston had obtained information from officials in the U.S. Department of Education of the Barack Obama administration, who confirmed to him on the basis of their own personal knowledge that:

(1) it had been a drill;
(2) no children had been killed; and,
(3) it had been done to promote an anti-gun agenda.

Given his background of 41 years in the California public school system (from custodian to district superintendent) and having served as a teacher, coach, vice-principal and principal before retiring in 2012 as the superintendent of two charter schools, I thought what he had to say about Sandy Hook deserved widespread dissemination.

So when did a two-hour show on Revolution Radio, “False Flags (9/11, Sandy Hook and the Boston bombing)” on 30 May 2014, as the third segment, I included the second 30-minutes of Sofia’s interview with Paul Preston, which is archived on “The Real Deal” and can be heard here.

Because Preston is also highly trained in school safety issues and had himself organized drills of many kinds, including active-shooter drills, what he has to say is especially telling. He has a website of his own at www.Agenda21Radio.com, which he created to alert listeners to the perils of Agenda 21.

Transcript of 30-minute clip of Sofia Smallstorm interviewing Paul Preston

Transcription by Jeannon

S  =  Sofia Smallstrom

P = Paul Preston

S – Welcome back everyone to the Speed of Light on the Pure Momentum Network. This is Sofia Smallstorm and we’re listening to a very interesting discussion – Paul Preston, school principal, school safety consultant, teacher, coach, and superintendent. He has been in the California system for 41 years.  He is now retired.

So Paul, let’s continue. Can we get a little bit into Sandy Hook now and what set off your antenna about it?

P – Well, you know I’ve been involved in many many situations at schools that have been, you know, emergency type situations and was involved even to some degree with the Columbine situation in that we had an individual who as trying to blow up the school, our school, at the time. In a similar fashion to what was a predicted bomb threat that occurred at Columbine thee days before the Columbine shooting, and that’s how we kind of got in touch with the Columbine people. They got in touch with us because it turned out to be a similar neo-Nazi group that was related to the Trench Coat Mafia, of all people.

And so learning and watching ad seeing all these incidences play out, all these school shootings, I took an enormous interest in because we were doing a study trying to determine because the neo-Nazis we had been working with in our school along the same time of the Columbine incident were telling us that there was going to be some big event take place. And so our staff, myself, we all wanted to sit down and figure where this was all going to and we studied a lot of the Nazi websites and so on, and we figured out that yes, something big was going to happen.

Well then Columbine happened. So we watched with a lot of intensity and under with my own circumstances and also with watching the videos and replays of the other active shooter situations, I became sort of a specialist in that and applied it to my own active-shooter training that I was doing and conducting with my own people.

S – Right. And now can we get in to Sandy Hook?

P – Well yes. Of all the hundreds of hours that I spent watching these scenarios and investigating and reporting on them on my radio show, the first thing I noticed when I heard about Sandy Hook when I turned on the TV like everybody else …now I have always told everybody when you’re seeing these things play out in real time, the best news reporting is what’s happening in real time – that day of, you know, the moments that are around the incident. But document for yourself what’s going on because you’ll never see it again.

And the first thing that caught my eye as I was watching everything play out was the lack of intensity with which people were moving and that really disturbed me. It hit me within the first few minutes, watching the video, the helicopters flying around and so on. Things just didn’t seem to be right, like I would always understand in an incident command system. People weren’t rushing around.  People weren’t panicking.  They ran that one guy off into the woods and then they arrested him. They took him away and there was no connectedness to that.

I was also wondering why all the emergency equipment wasn’t around the school. And I didn’t see any students either and that really bothered me.

S – So, it was almost like too slow motion for a real event. Not enough panic. Not enough chaos. You had mentioned chaos earlier being a part of these real situations. And a lot of support people rushing around like press and police but not running fast enough, not running with intensity and alarm and panic and concern, I think.

P – None of that was there.

S – Yes.  So all right, and then what did you start thinking?

P – Well, just within the first 10 or 15 minutes, it just all looked too staged to me, and I know about staging these things since I’ve staged a number of them. And, like I said, then you stage something there’s a complete lack of intensity as you would have in a real scenario when there’s panic really taking hold of people and they’re really afraid and they’re screaming and yelling and so on.

But the one thing that really bothered me was where were the kids. You know they had how many hundreds of kids there at the school. I didn’t see them.

S – Right.

P – And there was lack of accounting for them.

And right away – and I’ll juxtaposition this with the situation that happened in Pennsylvania. You saw the kids right away. I know it’s a high school, but you know, you saw the kids right away and you saw their plan of evacuation of the school unfolding.

Now this is where it really falls apart with Sandy Hook for me.  saw…I saw no evidence of a real plan of student evacuation taking place. And that stuck to my head like crazy when I was in the moments watching this whole thing play out in real time.

S – That’s very interesting. No evidence of a real plan. Because only someone…I mean everybody had their own response to it. Some of us were already clued in from previous kinds of situations. All this has got to be not what they’re telling us it is. But you come from the industry, the business, and you felt that there is… I would say you knew … It probably was not even a feeling. It was like, you know, set in stone in your head. Where’s the plan?  I don’t see the plan playing itself out.  Right?

P – I saw same of your evacuation centers and I saw some of your colored tarps on the ground, the colored taps and so on, but even that pretty odd because normally if you have the tarps out there…in every active shooter situation you have ever see, there’s somebody on the tarp or there’s been some help that’s been given to somebody when somebody has been wounded, but none of that was even evident. And I don’t see anybody trying to rush to anybody’s help at all in a mass casualty situation.

See, when you don’t see that…I mean…I’ll go back to the example that I have before about the 13 who overdosed. We had people everywhere, and we had people everywhere until everybody was safe, which was 35, 40 minutes, almost an hour. And that was never happening there at Sandy Hook. You didn’t see the mass of people doing that.

S – Yes, it’s more like the press filled in for that missing element. The press sounded more concerned and panicked on TV as they reported but the actual participants were not so …And got, you know, long after the fact we got the supposed 911 calls, we got various people giving their versions of it on television as they got interviewed. But we didn’t see it on the ground. And so how long did you watch it for? Over a period of days, weeks? And what were your thoughts?

P – You know, I make it a study. I study these things intensely, and what really, what really put me over the top was the next morning with Robbie Parker going out there, and I saw that clip as it happened. And I said there’s something really wrong here.

And that’s when I started thinking about the …the actors. You can actually rent these actors out. In fact that put these things up for training all the time.

And I just said ‘this is not…first of all, his demeanor was terrible. I would never go out…and I know sometimes this happens but…to send a parent out to talk to the press in that fashion about the daughter that he just lost. None of that seemed to be appropriate.  None of it seemed to fit. And his behavior with the smiling laughing thing and getting into character that you could see. I said ‘ hmmm, I’m not buying this. I’m just not buying it.’

S – Yes, I know. Very few other people did.  So, did you contact anyone? Did you speak to anyone? I don’t mean officially but in your own network of friends.

P – Yes.

S – And what were their thoughts.

P – Almost everybody was unanimous that it was a false flag.

S – And when did you start looking it up on the Internet because I think people started posting immediately. You know, they were making YouTubes. The community began to express online. So when did you start looking into all of that?

P – We–a side note to this is that I have a lot of sources in and around and in that area. I have a lot of sources in regards to as to what’s going on with the president and the administration and so on, and every one of my sources said it was a false flag.

S – Now these are quasi-official… what kind of sources are these?

P – Let me say that there are the sources that are very close to this administration who knows what’s going on.

S – Really. So they are really like almost insiders then?

P – Oh yes.

S – And they all….they say it was a false flag because they figured it out like you did, or they had actually factual knowledge of such..

P – They had factual knowledge of such. That’s part of the plan.

S – I see. And so how much were they willing to tell you, and what else were they willing to tell you? Anything?

P – Oh, they told me quite a bit, and some of it I can’t reveal to you, but it fits the narrative of the anti-gun movement and the disarmament of America and that’s what the focus was.

S – And you realized that that’s part of the broader picture? That’s the Agenda 21 society?

P – Absolutely.

S – So do you want to tell us a little but about that or do you want to stick with the Sandy Hook material? I’ll let you decide.

P – Well, let’s go ahead with the Sandy Hook material and then we can jump into that.

S – OK, so we’re past Robbie Parker now, and what about the funerals? You must have known then that …Did you have any concept about victims or no victims, et cetera?

P – Well, that whole thing was pretty shaky. What was really starting to filter in in the system and was just confirming what I was already being told about these charity sites that had been developed. By the way, they were put up the day before the shooting. And I had gotten some screen shots, and I had confirmed with my sources. Some of them were thinking that it was a very sloppy operation actually.

But there were reassurances to me that there really were no victims and that everything’s being staged.

And of course the funerals to me…you go and look at the whole funeral process. It looked like they were all staged, from the Robbie Parker one in Utah, or the Sarah Parker one with the Parker family.

And then I started getting information from people that actually had attended that funeral who lived in Utah and said that was something very funny about it.

S – Now I would like to ask you whether your sense is that these are real families even, or are they patched together?

P – Well, you know, that’s a good question because, you know, the thing that rolls around in my head, you know, the actors type of thing, you know. You know because you can put families together and these acting programs will do that under certain training scenarios.  And so, it’s a good question. It really is a fair question to ask whether or not they were real families.

S – And then of course because they continue to speak and organize and be called upon to comment, they have to be formed into these family groupings over time. And remain grouped like that whether they are truly married or not.

You know, here’s one thing that I noticed. When you see a couple, if they seem really like an odd couple, then that kind of strikes you as weird.  And I saw that. I saw a very odd coupled-ness with lots of these Sandy Hook families. It seemed to me, why would this person marry this person and live with them?  They’re so totally different. That happens sometimes but in this content it really jumped out at me…myself anyway. I didn’t know if you noticed that…

P – It’ different to say, you know, when you saw them together whether they are natural families or not. That’s…I’m suspicious of that. And like I say, I’m suspicious because I know that you can put these families together, you know, with some of these acting companies out there. And that just kind of blends in with what I was already being suspicious about.

And so, there’s a lot of things that would go into the details of examining this. And I’ve see a lot of the pictures and so on, and some of the pictures don’t match up, especially the one of the Parkers in the White House. And it looks like to me that’s Sarah Parker sitting there that’s, you know, supposed to be a victim.

S – There’s no Sarah Parker…

P – Which one is it…maybe it’s not the Parker…

S – Oh, you mean with Obama…

P – Yes, right.

S – Emily or Madeline …those are the two order sisters, and a lot of people felt that that was Emily Parker leaning on Obama.

P – Yes, that was Emily Parker…

S – Have you seen the Super Bowl video?

P – Yes, I have seen that.

S – Well, there is a girl who looks a lot like an older Emily Parker in that video. So if that was Emily at the White House, or actually  I think…I don’t know if it was at the White House…but with Obama, she couldn’t be six in one picture and then just a month or two later, twelve or thirteen.

P -  Right.

S – That’s where we have to make a decision.

But what did you think of all the photographs of the children? Did you notice anything – the portraits that we were shown that these were  the victims? Did you notice anything about those portraits?

P – No, other than some of the malformations of different parts of their bodies – seemed to be a pretty obvious thing.

The whole thing …when you take a look at the totality of this, in my opinion, it’s very sloppily done.

S – Why would it have been sloppily done though?

P – Well, you know, when …and again, it’s kind of like sometimes there’s order that comes out of chaos. And when you have these chaotic situations, people want to put things back together as best they possibly can to feel more comfortable or to recover from it. And I didn’t see any of that. I don’t know if that makes any sense to anybody.  People don’t want to have that chaos. They want to heal. They want to come back together. They want to solve a problem so that they can move forward.

And that’s part of what happens when you do these drills is that you take a day or so and you talk about what happened so that you can improve upon and make it better. People do that naturally even when there’s chaos and there’s an emergency situation because they want to seek normalcy again.

I didn’t see the same kind of emotions, if you will, or the same kind of communications between parents, kids, that you would normally see in these situations. It just didn’t look…it looked phony to me.

S – So you mean the community itself, they did not try to repair in the organic way…?

P – I would say that is true, from the parents to the kids, to the entire community.

S – What do you think of this privacy issue that has been bandied about by the authorities, that all the privacy needs to be respected, and you can’t reveal this or that…?

P – That to me just adds more fuel to the fire because that’s not what you do in the normal situation of an incident command system. You get the facts out because you know oftentimes when you get the facts out, you’re also looking for criminal behavior, and the more information that you can get out that that’s way, the better.

And I’m certainly not buying the notion that the parents weren’t allowed to see the kids.

S – The bodies, identifying the…

P – I just…that to me…that should be a red flag to anybody who has looked in to Sandy Hook. The parents weren’t allowed to do that. What’s up with that?

S – And what did you think of the coroner’s behavior at his press conference?

P – Well there’s many things about him. I just …I …first of all, I didn’t understand why all of a sudden there’s 26 bodies and then there’s no coroner or doctor who’s looked at the bodies and they’re declared dead. And then all of a sudden the coroner comes out and everybody says that there was an automatic gun or a handgun that was used, and the coroner, on his own, comes out and says ‘oh no, that was an AR15 that was used.’

So there’s a lot of confusion, you know, about that coroner, his report, his reporting out.  Nothing seems very clear and concise to me. And you know I would argue that, you know, as I looked at him and watched what was going on, he seemed to be just answering question on the fly without a lot of knowledge behind the questions.

S – And this suggested to you that this was a sloppily created event?

P – Absolutely.

S – And would you say that that was because of the portent of the whole thing that they…there were people involved in this…let’s say Dr. Carver, the coroner, who had some idea, if it was a scripted event, it was going to go big, and really big? So do you think that the sloppiness of it was because in being organized, it’s very difficult to juggle how people are going to perform given that they know how big this thing could get?

P – Well, you know, what happens is that you…if you’re going to do these things and carry it through with the lie, everybody’s got to be telling the same lie at the same time all the time.

And I think with my judgments about the parents and the kids, and seeing them lie, I was seeing a big lie being perpetrated right in front of me because nothing seemed to be consistent. And like you said, which I thought was interesting, is that oftentimes the media would fill in a lot of the blanks for you.

A classic example of the blanks comes up when you talk about where are the kids that are evacuating the school. There were helicopters that were circling overhead. They certainly would have been able to show, you know, hundreds of kids exiting the school.

That was never shown. But you did see a picture out in a parking lot, which by the way if you take a long look at this picture of all these kids being led out, about 15 or 20 kids being led out by teachers and adults from this parking lot, if you take a look at the parking lot from the aerial views, you can see that there are different cars in the parking lot in that area. So obviously that was done during some sort of drill. That’s my opinion. And it didn’t match with what was going on at the time. So nothing is matching in real time for me.  That’s just another thing.

But where are the kids? Where were the kids? They weren’t present. They just weren’t there. So that’s the kind of stuff that wasn’t worked out and, you know, they were doing things on the fly. That’s why I say…I would say it was very amateur, very amateurish as to what was going on.

S – Which is surprising because in the powers that would have designed this thing – that it would be so amateur – but…

You are familiar with the character, Gene Rosen?

P – Gene Rosen – which one was …?

S – Gene Rosen was the man who was very close to the school and he took the kids in and offered them juice and cookies, and he gave many different…he recounted  his rescuing or fielding these kids differently in many interviews. So can you comment on that?

P – I can comment on this because this points to this proves my point that these kids …did they get off a bus? Where did they go? OK, I think that one of the stories was that the kids got off the bus and they made their way to his house, and there was all this panic or whatever was going on. OK, there’s something really wrong with that picture to begin with.

First of all, when you’re doing these scenarios and this school had to have been trained for this because FEMA requires these trainings, and if you’re getting safety monies from the federal government, which every school does, they have to follow the proper protocols and that’s the proper release of the students to their parents.

S – Right. He said, that children showed up on his lawn and they were with a bus driver, in one story. In another story, they were just there by themselves and they were repeating babbling that there teacher was dead. So what…would the protocol be that the children…the children, according to the story, left the school on their own.

P – Well, that to me, that’s very suspicious in and of itself.

S – Right, I mean the cops had not gotten there in the first five minutes. Apparently some of them could still hear shooting going on, and how did the kids get out and just run down the road, you know?

P – All that seems to be …and again, I want to go into the thing about the incident command system, evacuation, walk-outs and so on. None of that fits that protocol. None of it.

The story of Gene Rosen or any of that stuff — None of that fits. That to me is just more evidence that there were no students other than the actor students that were there.

S – Then what was the purpose of having the Gene Rosen player?

P – Diversion.

S – From what?

P – A diversion from the other realities going on and to add more hype about the story.  It’s the same thing about the guy that was chased through the woods. You know, they had a couple of guys that were chased through the woods. What were they all about?

And there were no answers about any of that, about where they came from and even my people couldn’t come up with an answer about that. Some of my people say it was very sloppily done.

S – These are your insider people, right?

P – Right.

S – Now did you see any of the videos of the people circling through the firehouse?

P – Yes.

S – And did that strike you …what did you think of that?

P – Well, I had already come to my conclusion that this was a drill, and again, being very suspicious of the Obama administration, Diane Feinstein, Second Amendment issues, using Agenda 21 in particular, I had not see that for quite some time afterwards, maybe a couple of weeks after.

We were engaged in our own things that we were doing in terms of investigations and stuff like that. We’re pretty intense about what we’re doing here on Agenda 21 Radio, and we have some very highly placed sources of information that comes to us and which we’re very grateful for.

I, for one reason or another, hadn’t seen that video maybe two or three weeks until after the incident.

There’s more evidence right there because what in the world were all those people doing there to begin with? You see, if you’re doing an incident command situation, there’s a place for those people and those people can be moved on rather than seeing that circus that was going on, which is what that was. That was all staged.

S – Right.  And these were far too many adults, no children whatsoever, no panic. And to me the people that were there-–they weren’t dressed for December. So some people have suggested that that particular drill, the circling in and out of the firehouse, took place a lot earlier, and it matches the time frame and the clothing of the children evacuated from the school. They did not have their coats.

And I was going to ask you, is it normal when there’s an emergency for the teacher to evacuate the children without letting them get their coats, or would they take the extra time and say ‘children go put your goats on as fast as you can.’ How does that work?

P – Well no. If there’s a signal to get them out of the building, and there’s always a signal of some sort to get them out of the building safely, they go directly out. Period. End of subject.

And if they can get their coat, that’s great, but the safety thing is to get them away from where there potentially is a threat and that would be the key thing. And again, you pointed to something else and I brought this up earlier about the drill that we used to run and people would always, you know, screw up the drill because they would knock on the door in an active shooter situation and the teacher would open the door.

Well, you know, how does that all play out? I was looking at things pretty much in real time within minutes of news being broadcast as it was happening from a helicopter. Now I am a real-time kind of guy. So I’m looking at maybe 15 minutes into the shooter, maybe 20 minutes into the shooter situation. I’m looking at clear video of the campus and so on.  I’m not seeing anything happening.

Where are the kids? The kids aren’t there.

S – Right.

P – And they should be released or what’s going on with them?

S – And there were some people said that they were in closets for up to four hours. That doesn’t make any sense either.

P – That does not many any sense to me because what happens, and again it goes back to the police, and back to Columbine, they will go in and check every nook and cranny. And quite frankly, I know how that’s done. We used to do that. We always used to look and check to see where people were.

S – Right. And you would not miss large adults hiding in small closets.

And the idea of Katelyn Boyd and some of these teachers bundling up all their kids into the bathroom and having a few sit on the toilet…I even heard the toilet roll holder, my God, that’s pretty tough to do even for a six year old. But what do you think of that?  That doesn’t make sense to me.

Sofia Smallstorm, “Unraveling Sandy Hook in 2, 3, 4 and 5 dimensions”

P – Well, you know, we tell people in an active shooter situation to seek…to hide or …if there is a shooter there to take the challenge. We used to do these things where we had these dummy books and we’d bring in an active shooter as the stage person and throw books at them, you know, because that really throws them off. You’re taught those kinds of little techniques to throw the active shooter off.

But I can imagine some people getting holed up in a closet or something like that if they haven’t been able to lock the door. And that’s one of the things we tell our people all of the time. Lock the door. And we made sure in all schools, and all schools should have the, the doors should have the inside key on them, you know, so you can use an inside key on them also as we could on the outside.

S – So we have a couple of minutes left at this first hour.  Do you have anything to say about Adam Lanza – fiction, non-fiction, real?

P – Well, just on the surface of it, and again I would throw out I’m highly specialized trained in drugs and alcohol recognition, obviously looks like he has some meds onboard just by the look. But you know if you couch that along the same lines that that this may be a fictional event, that he’s a fictional character, which fits his description of what I see there.

And of course if you’re doing a fictionalized event like this, you want to have the most crazed individual that you can have looking at you through the picture there, and that’s exactly what you have. That’s my speculation. I think that’s what they wanted. That’s what they did.

And he has a history and what is the history? We’re not real clear on the history. You know, first of all, they found out that he’s got his brother’s driver’s license. Then there’s some confusion. And you know it one of these kind of scenarios that just didn’t quite fit.

And as a school person that to me was one of the big pieces of evidence. Why does he have his brother’s license? And then they made contact his brother that I guess was in Jersey some place, wherever he was, and there was an investigation. That all seemed to be tracking with me as a distraction about what was really happening at the school.

See, the more they under this situation… this is just my speculation – the more they could distract from the actual Sandy Hook school site itself and stage things away from there, the more they could sell the story of Sandy Hook on the whole.

S – That’s a very very good point, Paul. Excellent. And we should add that the mug shot that they gave us of Adam Lanza was very painterly. It wasn’t even a photo, and it did have that, you know, ghoulish expression on it to make us think this is a real lunatic.

But we are now at the end of our first hour and I really really thank you, Paul Preston, for being with us. And we will take up a second hour discussion in the Members Section. So this is Sofia Smallstorm thanking everyone for listening to this first hour and please do come to PureMomemtum.net and join us for the second hour in the Members Section with Paul Preston, 41 years in the public schools and someone who has been through a lot of staging of drills and has a lot of drill understanding and experience.

94% OF ALL TERRORIST ATTACKS ARE INVENTED BY THE FBI – NEW STUDY SHOWS

Of the hundreds of convictions made foiling acts of terror over the last few years, 94% of them were actually fabricated by the Holy Roman Empire FBI, a new study by Project Salam shows.

The FBI is entrapping people that ‘look like’ they could commit terrorist acts by offering money and coercing them into committing these acts. They then step in and make busts for acts they have completely set up.

“What they were trying to do is to convince the American public that there is this large army of potential terrorists that they should all be very-very scared about. They are very much engaged in world-wide surveillance and this surveillance is very valuable to them. They can learn a lot about all sorts of things and in a sense control issues to their advantage. And the entire legal justification for that depends on there being a war on terror. Without a war on terror they have no right to do this. So they have to keep this war on terror going, they have to keep finding people and arresting them and locking them up and scarring everybody,” states Steven Downs, attorney for Project SALAM.

Orwell’s 1984 in China: Big Brother in every Bookshop

As I was researching Nineteen Eighty-four in Chinese, I wondered whether Orwell ever wrote about China. His interest in India, where he was born in 1903, is well known, and he served in the Burma Police after leaving school and before becoming a writer, but my guess was that China didn’t concern him greatly. But when I went to the British Library to check in his massive, 20-volume Complete Works [CW], I was surprised to discover that he wrote quite a lot about China and its fate under Japanese occupation, in particular when he was working for the BBC’s Eastern Service during World War II.

And of direct relevance to this article, it turns out that he asked his publishers to send a copy of Nineteen Eighty-four to his colleague, the literary critic William Empson in Peking, where he was teaching English literature. When he was seriously ill in a sanatorium in Gloucestershire in 1949, Orwell wrote to his agent Leonard Moore:

“William Empson in China has asked for a copy of 1984 [sic]. I think it might be wise to get two copies sent, one from London and one from New York. He already seems uncertain as to whether his letters are being opened, so could you ask both publishers not to enclose the usual card saying ‘Compliments of the Author’, as this might just conceivably be embarrassing to him.”

Helpfully he gave Empson’s address as 11, Tung Kao Fang, Near Peking Normal University, Peiping 9, China (30 August 1949, CW, vol 20, p 162).

It so happens that a neighbour of mine was a close friend of the Empsons and a couple of years ago she introduced me to their son Jacobus, who has written a book about his parents’ unconventional marriage and his childhood in Peking. Jake tells me that not only did at least one copy of Nineteen Eighty-four arrive safely in Peking, but that he remembers his parents reading it so eagerly that “they had to tear it in half so they could both read it at once!” (J. Empson, email to the author, 8 March 2014).

Orwell had written three months earlier that

“I had vague ideas of writing [to Empson], but thought it might be embarrassing for foreigners in China to get letters from outside at the moment. Hetta, Empson’s wife, is or used to be a Communist, & he himself is not particularly hostile to Communism, but I doubt whether that would do much good under a Chinese Communist régime”

(letter also from Gloucestershire, to his American publisher Robert Giroux. Orwell adds that “I have been horribly ill for the last month or so…” 19 May 1949, CW, vol 20, p 117). Orwell seems to have been somewhat bemused by the Empsons’ departure for Peking, and in another letter to Giroux, he says: “I’d like to know what he [Empson] has to say about “[King] Lear,” (a reference to Empson’s recent essay on Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool). He has disappeared into China the way people do…” (14 April 1949, CW, vol 20, p 84). Jake says Orwell’s assessment of his parents’ political stances is accurate.

“My mother was a member of the Communist Party from 1937 until 1956, so Orwell was quite correct in her case – my father’s political opinions were more nuanced, as they say these days, but he could have been rightly described as a sympathiser – wearing his Chinese communist uniform when attending a conference in the U.S. in about 1950, for instance.”

But despite Orwell’s suspicions about the Empsons, he did not include them in his famous (or infamous) list of alleged communists that he drew up for the Information Research Department, a branch of the British Foreign Office, a year or two before he died (CW, vol 20, pp 240-259). This list of 135 “crypto-Communists & fellow-travellers” sparked a furore when it finally came to light in the late 1990s, with some denouncing Orwell as a government informer and others defending him because he viewed the Communist Party as a totalitarian menace. The list includes comments such as “Half-Caste…Main emphasis anti-white but reliably pro-Russian on all major issues”.. Empson was a highly influential literary critic who taught in Peking and Kunming in the late 1930s and returned to teach at Peking Normal University from 1947 to 1952, witnessing the last years of the Chinese civil war and the Communist takeover.

Orwell’s main interest in China was related to its attempts to resist the Japanese, who had first invaded the northeast in 1931 and the rest of the country six years later, and he voiced his anger in several BBC scripts. He was appalled at the eye-witness stories of extreme Japanese cruelty that came to his attention at the BBC. With unusual insight, he dated the beginning of World War II not to the German invasion of Poland in 1939 but to the Japanese invasion of China.

“[The war] started, properly speaking, in 1931 when the Japanese invaded Manchuria, and the League of Nations failed to take action. From then onwards, we have seen a long series of aggressions … [I]t was inevitable that Soviet Russia, however anxious to remain at peace, should sooner or later be drawn into the war on the side of the democracies. It was inevitable that Britain and China should ultimately find themselves fighting on the same side, whatever differences there may have been between them in the past …”

Predictably perhaps, Orwell does not seem to have been sympathetic to the Communists, and gives the Nationalists the credit for China’s success in resisting the Japanese. He notes that when the Japanese invaded Manchuria in 1931, “China was in a state of chaos, and the young Chinese republic was in no condition to resist. Six years later, however, when the invasion of China proper began, order had been restored under the leadership of Marshal Chiang Kai-shek, and a powerful national spirit had grown up.” Orwell adds that the main reason the Chinese kept on fighting against enormous odds is that “they are fighting for their liberty, and the will to surrender does not exist in them” (16 May 1942, CW, vol 13, p 324).

He also noted that “This is [Japan's] third war of aggression in 50 years. On each occasion they have wrenched away a piece of Chinese territory and then exploited it for the benefit of two or three wealthy families who rule Japan, with absolutely no regard for the native inhabitants” (17 January 1942, CW, vol 13, p 127).

It was surely Japanese cruelty towards the Chinese that angered Orwell the most.

“By almost universal agreement it is a regime of naked robbery with all the horrors of massacre, torture and rape on top of that. The same will happen, or has already happened, to all the lands unfortunate enough to fall under Japanese rule. Perhaps the best answer to the propaganda which the Japanese put out in India and other places is simply three words LOOK AT CHINA” (13 March 1943, CW, vol 15, p 28).

In Nineteen Eighty-four Orwell envisaged a world divided into Eurasia, Eastasia and Oceania which are continually at war against each other, and shortly after the end of World War Two he envisaged how “More and more obviously the surface of the earth is being parcelled off into three great empires, each self-contained and cut off from contact with the outer world, and each ruled, under one disguise or another, by a self-selected oligarchy.”

“The haggling as to where the frontiers are to be drawn is still going on, and will continue for some years, and the third of the three super-States–East Asia, dominated by China–is still potential rather than actual,” Orwell declared. “But the general drift is unmistakable,” he said, adding rather puzzlingly that “every scientific discovery of recent years has accelerated it” (‘You and the Atom Bomb,’ Tribune, 19 Oct 1945, CW, vol 17, p 320). This seems to be the closest that Orwell got to linking current politics to the horrific world of his final novel.

Orwell is famous for his interest in political language, and this includes the use of appropriate words for various ethnicities, not a matter that troubled many writers of his time but one which concerned him a great deal and which he returned to again and again. In 1943 he wrote to Penguin Books with the corrected proofs of the forthcoming Penguin edition of his first novel, Burmese Days. Apart from correcting a few misprints, “I have also made a few minor alterations,” Orwell says, adding that

“I draw attention to these as it is important that they should not be missed. Throughout, whenever it says in the text, ie. not in the dialogue, I have altered ‘Chinaman’ to ‘Chinese’. I have also in most cases substituted ‘Burmese’ or ‘Oriental for ‘native’, or have put ‘native’ in quotes. In the dialogue, of course, I have left these words just as they stand. When the book was written a dozen years ago ‘native’ and ‘Chinaman’ were not considered offensive, but nearly all Orientals now object to these terms, and one does not want to hurt anyone’s feelings.” (21 November 1943, CW, vol 15, p 338).

Of course “Oriental” is now almost – or just as – objectionable as “Chinaman”, and the words “racist” or “racism” would be bound to crop up in any modern discussion of such terms, but Orwell was surely ahead of his time in his sensitivity to such issues. The word Negro is now archaic, but in Orwell’s time it was a word of respect, and he insisted (more than once) that it should be written with a capital N: in a review of a special supplement to New Republic magazine, entitled The Negro: His Future in America he highlighted how “the facts it reveals about the present treatment of Negroes in the U.S.A. are bad enough in all conscience. In spite of the quite obvious necessities of war, Negroes are still being pushed out of skilled jobs, segregated and insulted in the Army, assaulted by white policemen and discriminated against by white magistrates….

“In Asiatic eyes the European class struggle is a sham. The Socialist movement has never gained a real foothold in Asia or Africa, or even among the American Negroes: it is everywhere side-tracked by nationalism and race-hatred…

“The word ‘native,’ which makes any Asiatic boil with rage, and which has been dropped even by British officials in India these ten years past, is flung about all over the place. “Negro” is habitually printed with a small n, a thing most Negroes resent.” He adds how he has been substituting “Chinese” for “Chinaman” in Burmese Days, adding: “The book was written less than a dozen years ago, but in the intervening time ‘Chinaman’ has become a deadly insult. Even ‘Mahomedan’ is now being resented: one should say ‘Moslem.’ These things are childish, but then nationalism is childish. And after all we ourselves do not actually like being called ‘Limeys’ or ‘Britishers.’” (‘As I Please’, 2, Tribune, 10 December, 1942, CW, vol 16, pp 23-24).

Orwell holding his adopted son Richard

Orwell returned to this theme in 1947, devoting an entire ‘As I Please’ column to it. It has an added poignancy because the reason he was looking at a child’s illustrated alphabet is no doubt because he was by now a widower with a small adopted son, Richard. It’s a forceful piece without a wasted word:

Recently I was looking through a child’s illustrated alphabet, published this year. It is what is called a “travel alphabet.” Here are the rhymes accompanying three of the letters, J, N and U.

J for the Junk which the Chinaman finds

Is useful for carrying goods of all kinds.

N for the Native from Africa’s land.

He looks very fierce with his spear in his hand.

U for the Union Jacks Pam and John carry

While out for a hike with their nice Uncle Harry.

The “native” in the picture is a Zulu dressed only in some bracelets and a fragment of leopard skin. As for the Junk, the detail of the picture is very small, but the “Chinamen” portrayed in it appear to be wearing pigtails.

Perhaps there is not much to object to in the presence of the Union Jack. This is an age of competing nationalisms, and who shall blame us if we flourish our own emblems along with all the rest? But is it really necessary, in 1947, to teach children to use expressions like “native’ and “Chinaman”?

The last-named word has been regarded as offensive by the Chinese for at least a dozen years. As for “native,” it was being officially discountenanced even in India as long as twenty years ago.

It is no use answering that it is childish for an Indian or an African to feel insulted when he is called a “native.” We all have these feelings in one form or another. If a Chinese wants to be called a Chinese and not a Chinaman, if a Scotsman objects to be called a Scotchman, or if a Negro demands his capital N, it is only the most ordinary politeness to do what is asked of one. (27 Feb 1947, Daily Herald for Tribune, CW, vol 19, pp 50-51).

As the article below is about translation, I would also like to add Orwell’s touching words that he added to a list of translations of his works (he lists no translation into Chinese but does mention editions of Animal Farm in Japanese and Korean, produced by the U.K. Liaison Mission, Tokyo and the U.S. Army, respectively). He added as a note:

“Some of the above translations, chiefly of ANIMAL FARM, were not paid for. I most particularly do not wish payment to be demanded for translation of any book, article, etc., by any groups of refugees, students, working-class organisation, etc., not in any case where translation will only be made if the rights are given free.

Ditto with reprints in English (I don’t think Braille versions are ever paid for, but in any case I don’t want payment for any that may be made).”

Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four with a banner advertising Murakami Haruki’s 1Q84

George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four is just the kind of book that you would expect to be banned in China, all that talk of Big Brother, Newspeak and the rewriting of history is far too close to the bone, surely. So I was amazed to come across it on open sale in a state-run bookshop in Yanji 延吉on the North Korean border in fact.

Nineteen Eighty-four is all over the place in China in fact. A Chinese website lists no fewer than 13 translations published in the PRC between 1985 and 2012, and it’s easy to find at least three or four downloadable or online translations on a quick internet search. Apart from anything else I’m speechless at the amount of reduplicated effort all these translations involve, and also wonder how much “borrowing” has taken place between the various translations. And in addition to all the Mainland translations, about 10 have been published in Taiwan or Hong Kong, according to a University of Hong Kong M. Phil. thesis. (There is some overlap between the two categories as some translations first published in Taiwan have since been reprinted in the PRC).

I’m not sure why the Chinese government takes such a relaxed attitude to a book that condemns totalitarianism in such ferocious terms, or why there are so many different translations. It’s certainly quite unlike the Soviet Union, where the novel was banned. Certainly the squalid, Dickensian atmosphere of Nineteen Eighty-four doesn’t remotely evoke the glitzy skyscrapers of 21st century Beijing or Shanghai, but it is remarkable that the authorities are so nonchalant about a book that is supposed to frighten the wits out dictators everywhere. Perhaps it’s the fact that the book is by a foreigner and is set explicitly in London that makes the Chinese Communist Party feel that it can brush it off so casually. Orwell’s other masterpiece, Animal Farm, translated literally as 动物庄园, seems also to be widely available in China, which is equally surprising, and the translator of Animal Farm has thrown some light onto why the authorities have taken such a relaxed attitude to Orwell. David Goodman of the University of Sydney quotes his late friend Fu Weici 傅惟慈 (1923-2014) as saying: “I recall talking to Fu about Animal Farm and its translation a long way back. He said that as long as one equated the dystopia with the USSR there was no problem. This was presumably if asked, outside the text Fu was always…healthily cynical.” This Chinese Wikipedia entry says the first Chinese translation of Animal Farm was published by the leftist Commercial Press 商务印书馆 in 1948 and lists seven subsequent translations. It’s hard to imagine an original Chinese dystopian novel or political allegory being remotely tolerated.

Fu Weici holding a copy of his translation of Animal Farm (courtesy of David Goodman)

The first, and probably the best known, of the many Chinese translations of Nineteen Eighty-four published on the Mainland is by Dong Leshan 董乐山 (1924-99), who, like Orwell, was an independent-minded socialist and who like almost all Chinese intellectuals suffered badly during the Cultural Revolution. Dong, who translated the first PRC edition of the novel that was published in 1979, wrote a remarkably frank introduction which is downloadable here in an edition published by the Liaoning Educational Publishing House in 1998.

“Orwell is not a so-called anti-communist writer in the general meaning of the phrase, and Nineteen Eighty-four is not simply a so-called anti-Soviet work….Orwell was first and foremost a socialist, and next he was anti-totalitarian and his struggle against totalitarianism is the inevitable result of his belief in socialism,”

Dong declared. “He believed that only if totalitarianism is defeated can socialism be victorious.” Dong’s condemnation of the Chinese Communist Party’s brutality and authoritarianism is clear enough, and becomes even more direct when he praises Orwell for not being like those Western intellectuals in the 1930s who “paid homage to the ‘new Mecca’ [Stalin's Soviet Union] and were led by the nose through ‘Potemkin villages’ and when they returned raved how they had seen the bright sunshine of a new world.” (Dong was too astute to mention the Western leftists who praised Mao’s China in the 1960s and 70s in similar awestruck terms). But Dong saved his most daring critique for last, concluding with the words:

“The twentieth century will soon be over, but political terror still survives and this is why Nineteen Eighty-four remains valid today. In any case so far as we are concerned, only if we thoroughly negate the terror of totalitarianism associated with the ‘Cultural Revolution’ can those people who fought for socialism for so many years bring about true socialism which is worth aspiring to.”

Although the Cultural Revolution is now officially regarded as one of Mao’s greatest mistakes, open discussion of the period remains strictly banned, and Dong was extremely brave to mention the direct parallel between it and the terrifying world of Nineteen Eighty-four.

It’s widely claimed that Dong’s translation of Nineteen Eighty-four was first published one year after the eponymous year, in 1985, but that isn’t correct. David Goodman has kindly provided me with the introduction and editor’s note to the first edition of Dong’s translation, which was published in neibu 內部 (internal/restricted) form in 1979. This would have been available only to senior officials and intellectuals deemed politically reliable enough to be permitted access to such material. It was published in three installments in the “irregularly published” periodicalSelected Translations from Foreign Literature 国外作品选译 and is marked “Internal publication. Look after carefully” 内部刊物 注意保存. The first installment appeared on April 15, 1979, with further installments in May and July.

Dong says in his short introduction that Nineteen Eighty-four “accorded with the needs of the Cold War that was then taking place and has long been a classic anti-communist work that is highly influential, and anyone who takes an interest in contemporary international political material will almost inevitably encounter this book.”

Orwell holding a puppy in Spain during the Spanish Civil War

Orwell is a “bourgeois intellectual” who fought on the Republican side in the Spanish civil war, while the novel is “modeled on how [Orwell] imagined the future of Soviet society and enormously exaggerated some aspects which were incompatible with his bourgeois individualist liberalism.” The 1979 introduction, published just three years after the death of Mao and the official ending of the Cultural Revolution, is notably more orthodox than the highly outspoken foreword published a decade later. The earlier introduction refers to Orwell as a ‘bourgeois intellectual” and his “bourgeois individualist liberalism” while the later one seems to have been written during a brief cultural thaw – in Liaoning at least – which Dong took full advantage of. It also notes how expressions such as “big brother” and “doublethink” have entered the English language, “which shows how great its influence is.” The (anonymous) editor’s note makes a similar point, noting that the phrase “‘Orwellian society’ is a frequently used English expression”, and says “Western newspapers and magazines even directly or indirectly refer to this book as an anti-communist ‘classic’”. It says Orwell “changed from a ‘left-wing’ to an extreme right-wing writer”, and adds: “The way the book exaggerates and distorts all aspects of this future society under totalitarian rule is used to incite anti-Soviet and anti-communist feelings in the service of the Cold War and ideological war that was then waging.”

It may seem surprising that a book by an anti-communist “extreme right-winger” was published in China, even in a neibu edition, but heretical works, including books by Trotsky and Bakunin, were made available to top officials, often labelled 反面教材 (negative teaching materials). (See here for a discussion of this in Chinese). I recall seeing the best-selling novel Jonathan Livingston Seagull as well as Gone with the Wind in neibu editions when I was a student at Fudan University, Shanghai in 1975-76, and I believe other Western novels were also published at this time as “negative teaching materials”.

There is an interesting account here of how Dong’s translation of Nineteen Eighty-four was first published. Dong’s friend and fellow translator Wu Ningkun 巫宁坤also recalls Dong and his efforts to translate Nineteen Eight-four. Dong joined the underground Communist Party in Shanghai in 1940, but like most intellectuals he was persecuted and imprisoned during the 1957 Anti-rightist campaign and during the Cultural Revolution. He was allowed to return to Beijing after injuring himself on a tractor, and this is when he came across The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich 第三帝国的兴亡 by William Shirer. According to Wu he saw close parallels between the Nazi period in Germany and the Cultural Revolution. He secretly translated at night Shirer’s eye-witness account of Nazi Germany which after the Cultural Revolution was published as a neibu publication for senior officials and was later published openly. He first encountered Nineteen Eighty-four in the early 1970s when he had found a job in Beijing at Xinhua news agency 新华社 where he had worked in the 1950s. He came to the notice of the deputy director of the agency, Chen Shiwu 陈适五, who was editing a periodical with the title Selected Translations from Foreign Literature 国外作品选译. Chen seems to have been quite an independent-minded official for he told Dong he was looking for “material which has reference value and is quite long and is unconventional in character, for leaders and other comrades to refer to.”. Dong decided that Nineteen Eighty-four was the ideal candidate, and as mentioned above it was published in installment form in 1979. Only 5,000 copies of the periodical were printed. The novel was first issued in book form in China in Guangzhou in 1985, again as a neibu publication. This was the idea of Cai Nüliang 蔡女良, an editor at Huacheng Publishing House 花城出版社, who had it published in a set together with Brave New World and We. It was republished openly by Huacheng three years later. It is worth noting that although Wu quotes from Dong’s introduction in which he states how Nineteen Eighty-four remains valid today, for clearly political reasons he omits the reference to the Cultural Revolution.

Dong Leshan

Fu Weici translator of Animal Farm, recalled in a moving tribute to Dong how his friend was in the 1970s reluctant at first to propose that Nineteen Eighty-four be translated into Chinese because of the all too clear parallels with recent Chinese history including the Cultural Revolution, and much later, in 1997, he had trouble getting a two-volume selection of Orwell’s writings published. There seems to have been no problem with the first volume, which was a collection of essays and criticism, but the second volume was to have consisted of Nineteen Eighty-four andAnimal Farm, the latter translated by Fu. At the time Fu wrote the memoir, his translation of Animal Farm had still not been published, although it has since appeared, both alone and in combination with Nineteen Eighty-four. Incidentally Fu notes that Dong’s later translations include Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy 锅匠、裁缝、士兵、间谍 by John Le Carré, The Last Temptation of Christ 基督的最后诱惑 by Nikos Kazantzakis (co-translated with Fu, this was particularly controversial apparently, though Fu doesn’t give details) and Darkness at Noon 正午的黑暗 by Arthur Koestler.

The first ever Chinese translation of Nineteen Eighty-four appeared in Taiwan in 1950, according to Walter Tsang Ka Fa’s 曾家輝 master’s thesis, A study of three Chinese translations of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four (2005), which is based mainly on translations by Qiu Suhui 邱素惠 (Taipei, 1975), Joseph S.M. Lau (Liu Shaoming) 劉紹銘(Taipei, 1984) and Dong Leshan (Guangzhou, 1985). Lau is perhaps the best known of the translators in the west, and is co-editor of Classical Chinese Literature: An Anthology of Translations (New York, 2000) and author of Hong Kong Remembered (Hong Kong, 2002). Most of the translations listed by Tsang have been published in several different editions. In fact, he lists no fewer than 16 different translations, although he says Qiu’s translation is “grossly abridged”, which has not stopped it from being published in 15 different editions, and this does not include recent Mainland reprints. Tsang compares how different translators translate particular passages (including the famous slogan “Big Brother is watching you”) and says “there is no noticeable distinction between the translations that may be attributable to political considerations.” Regarding Dong’s Mainland translation, he says that

“It seems the political environment at the time of translating the novel does not bother Dong at all. This is because he resolutely declares in his preface to the translation that he abhors totalitarianism and would like to warn readers – presumably readers in China in particular as it was first released by a Guangzhou publisher – of such horror with Orwell’s novel” (pp. 125-6).

Tsang doesn’t consider the possible influence of censorship on the various translations, and one should bear in mind that Taiwan in the 1950s and 60s was almost as authoritarian as the PRC.

Here’s my translation of the short foreword to the 2010 edition I bought in Yanji which was published by Qunyan Press 群言出版社 in Beijing. The translation (and presumably the foreword) are by Fu Qiang 富强, which is a pseudonym meaning “rich and strong”. I have uploaded the Chinese original here.

Foreword

George Orwell (1903-1950) was a British novelist. Among world novels there are the so-called “dystopian trilogy, consisting of We 我们 by the Soviet Union’s Zamyatin, Brave New World 美丽新世界 by Britain’s Huxley and the present work by Orwell, 1984.

To put it briefly, this book is a political satire. The plot is strange, grotesque, but it seems to obey certain rules of social development. The novel describes the evil development of totalitarianism which has developed to an appalling degree – human nature has been strangled, freedom has been eradicated, thought has been suppressed and life has become extremely monotonous.

Just like this book, the book that made Orwell famous, Animal Farm, is a very accurate – but similarly biased – novel. All the characters are animals, and the plot is strange and original, with a strong comic element, and to this extent it is pervaded by fear. But Nineteen Eighty-four is entirely lacking in comedy and a bone-chilling sense of fear fills the entire work.

The fear isn’t gory and physical however but reflects a hopeless feeling that human nature has been extinguished. For example, the novel describes an official language called Newspeak 新语言 whose use is compulsory and whose purpose is to reduce the number of words in the language to the smallest possible number so that people will not be able to think except in terms of concepts that the state has decided. Furthermore, no Party member can avoid being officially monitored and there is an electronic screen in every room that cannot be turned off, and the screen accurately transmits each sound [that it hears] to the “Thought Police”.

Nineteen Eighty-four is Orwell’s [most] enduring work. Not only do readers love it but it is deeply respected by scholars. Some of the words and phrases invented in the book, such as Big Brother 老大哥，Doublethink 双重思想，Newspeak and Thought Police 思想警察are listed in authoritative English dictionaries and are even in world circulation. Everybody acknowledges that Nineteen Eighty-four is an extremely graphic description of totalitarianism, and is also an extremely fierce retort 反抗 to totalitarianism. The New York Times praised this book: “No other work of this generation has made us desire freedom more earnestly or loathe tyranny with such fullness.” Many people are convinced that “if one more person reads Orwell, there will be one more guarantee of freedom.”

In fact, Nineteen Eighty-four isn’t purely a political novel but is a journey that asks questions about good and evil and beauty and ugliness in human nature and about reality. But while it cares about human nature it does not turn the novel into a dry textbook or manifesto. If that’s all it was it wouldn’t have attracted so many readers from all around the world. Even though what it talks about is politics, what it is really concerned about is human nature. Mixing and human nature together so they are inseparable is Orwell’s most successful achievement.

This is a book which reveals great truths and no matter how many times you read it you will reach a deeper understanding each time. So far as the reader is concerned, this is a challenge to his or her intelligence and is also a rare opportunity to gain wisdom.

It’s worth noting incidentally that the comments about human nature being strangled, freedom eradicated, thought suppressed and life becoming extremely monotonous seem to have been taken straight from Fu Weici.

Recommended Citation: Michael Rank, “Orwell in China: Big Brother in every bookshop,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 11, Issue 23, No. 2, June 9, 2014.

Michael Rank is a British journalist and translator. He graduated in Chinese Studies from Downing College, Cambridge in 1972 and was a British Council student in Peking and Shanghai from 1974 to 1976. He was a Reuters correspondent in China from 1980 to 1984, followed by two years in east and southern Africa. He has written about an English school in Tibet in the 1920s for the Bulletin of Tibetology as well as news reports.