party to atoms, if in some way it could have been published to the world and its significance made known.

Of course, it was never published to the world, and the hero himself is later bludgeoned, tortured, and brainwashed into believing that he had never seen the clipping, that it had, indeed, never existed.

It is, of course, not our society. It is worth saying that today. It will not be our society in 1984. Or, we may hope, thereafter.

It is worth pausing for a moment on why that is so. In good part, it is because we live under a system of law with a Bill of Rights which protects against just the elements of "1984" we find most offensive-in short, a State that directs us, controls us and ultimately rules us. We are, need I say, not tortured because we hold different views than our Government.

In fact, so far does our constitutional protection go that truthful statements are almost totally insulated from Government sanctions of any sort. So far does our protection go that we are free to express any opinion without fear of governmentally imposed sanctions. There is no such thing in this country, Justice Lewis Powell has said for the U.S. Supreme Court, "as a false opinion."

Our law, then, goes far toward protecting us against the "1984" nightmare becoming a reality. The absence of such legal protection is evident abroad. Consider one portion of the public interrogation at the trial of Soviet dissident Sinyavsky, a portion which-fittingly-could be annexed to an updated version of "1984." Accused of anti-Soviet behavior, the prosecutor asked this great author the following: Prosecutor, "Please don't lecture us on literature. I asked you one simple, concrete question: Why did you portray Lenin in such an unattractive way?"

Sinyavsky: "I said that you cannot make a cult of Lenin. To me Lenin is a human being; there is nothing wrong about that."

Judge: "What did you mean in this passage about the deification of Stalin?"

Sinyavsky: "I am being ironical about making a cult of him. If Stalin had lived a little longer, it might well have come to that." And on and on and on, with Mr. Sinyavsky being persecuted and prosecuted for the expression of his views.

To cite the Sinyavsky example is simply and sadly to say that "1984" continues to have more than allegorical relevance in totalitarian states such as the Soviet Union. But the question, Mr. Chairman, I think is whether it has genuine relevance here at home.

And I believe it does. For if our Constitution affords us enormous protection in the areas of freely expressing our opinions and freely telling the truth-even when the Government prefers that we not do so there are some areas that we cannot look to the Constitution for much in the way of refuge or comfort. They relate to the availability of information itself, the basis of the formation by the public of its views and its expression of them.

In this area we must not look to our almost 200-year-old Constitution but to our living representatives in the Congress and in the executive branch. Of them and of you, I believe the public has much to ask. For if the public does not have information, it cannot play a meaningful role in the formulation of policy. When informa

tion is suppressed by the Government, the legally guaranteed freedoms to think and to speak become meaningless. Carried to its ultimate end, it would be "1984" without cruelty, without terror, but nonetheless without freedom.

Let me offer some examples. The administration's efforts to censor the speech of former Government officials who have had access to certain kinds of classified information strikes at the heart of the notion that an informed public is an essential ingredient of a free people.

According to the terms of the contract which is to be signed by in excess of 100,000 Government employees and officials, all writings of theirs of any sort that concern explicitly or implicitly intelligence activities, sources or methods must first be cleared by the Government itself for the rest of the lives of those employees.

Such information need not even be classified to be subjected to governmental censorship. Thus, if a former high-level Government employee who would sign such an agreement wanted today to criticize the failure of intelligence in Lebanon or in Grenada, he would first have to clear his statements-even if it contained no classified information at all-with the very people he wanted to criticize.

Orwell would have understood. In response to this risk, we are urged by the proponents of the new censorship agreement to trust the Government to enforce it fairly, to trust the Government not to use it for political purposes, to trust the Government not to censor too much.

Orwell knew better. He teaches us-to put the point mildly-a government can hardly be trusted in judging criticism of itself. Orwell also teaches us that the effect of censorship is a powerless, uninformed, and utterly cynical public. "Who cares," asks Julia, the heroine of "1984," whether the Government was now telling the truth about past events. "It's always one bloody war after another, and one knows the news is all lies anyway."

I referred earlier to the freedom afforded by our Constitution to form and express opinions. But in recent years, and to a lesser extent, still farther back years, that freedom has been frustrated by the use of our Government of the McCarran-Walter Act to deny visas to speakers whose views were sought by American audiences. How can the administration's denial of a visa to Mrs. Hortense Allende, the widow of the former Chilean prime minister, be justified when some of our fellow citizens wish to hear her? Or, more recently, the denial of visas to Sandinista leaders that Members of Congress, among others, wished to hear?

Orwell surely would have understood a mindset which effectively intrudes upon the ability of our citizens, not to say our elected representatives, to decide for themselves what to think after hearing those with whom we may differ.

I could cite numerous other examples which trouble me about the ability of the public to receive information. The exclusion of the press from Grenada at a time when it was especially urgent that the public have nongovernmental information about the invasion; the efforts to limit the flow of information to the public under the Freedom of Information Act; the inhibition of the flow of films into and even out of our country based on their content; revisions in the classification system to ensure that more and not less infor

mation will be classified; threats to universities with respect to their right to publish and discuss unclassified information.

What I would like to leave you with, Mr. Chairman, is not a catalog of my complaints, but a suggestion as to the way to view expressions of the executive branch that national security requires the denial of information to the public. Only if you view those statements with intense skepticism, with a presumption that a denial of information to the public is, in the most real sense, unAmerican, will you avoid a serious, continuing deprivation of relevant information by the public.

For the problem is that just about everything worth knowing can be viewed in one way or another as possibly impacting adversely on national security-by discouraging our citizens, by depressing our allies, by running counter to someone's notion of the national interest. Of course, there are some real secrets, but hardly as many as the executive branch would have us believe.

A colleague of mine at the Columbia School of Law, Prof. Vincent Blasi, in a recent speech he gave observed that he thought that the courts in adjudicating first amendment disputes ought to adopt what he called a pathological perspective. The "overriding objective at all times," he argued, "should be to equip the first amendment to do maximum service in those historical periods when intolerance is most prevalent and when governments are most able and most likely to stifle dissent systematically."

I would urge the same perspective on you as you view efforts to deny the public information. You should adopt a view which focuses on the loss to the public of information in the worst of times. You should assume a government at its worst, its most repressive, its least tolerant. George Orwell created for us the model of that government, and as we move toward 1984, I urge upon you that the best way to avoid "1984" is by assuring a public informed enough that it can do so.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

[The complete statement follows:]

PREPARED STATEMENT OF FLOYD ABRAMS

Chairman Kastenmeier and members of the subcommittee, I am honored by your invitation to testify today. Apart from my pleasure at being here, I do admire your choice of topic. Indeed, you have chosen as your topic a central one for the future of our country. As we meet virtually on the eve of 1984, the Orwellian nightmare, lucid and terrifying as it is, offers us a basis for learning and for comparison.

Permit me, at the outset, to recall for you Orwell's grim vision of 1984. It is of a nation, Oceania (of which we and the United Kingdom are a part) which is perpetually at war with one or another of the other two superpowers in the world-Eastasia and Eurasia. It is of a society premised on terror, totally dominated by its totalitarian rulers, in which any who differ are tortured, brainwashed and ultimately either vaporized or left, as was the hero Winston Smith, utterly drained of humanity and filled with only those thoughts that the state chose that he have. "If you want a picture of the future," Smith is told by his torturer, "imagine a boot stamping on a human face-forever."

1984 is also a vision of a state with the clearest possible views about the dangers of truth. It is one in which the state had not only redefined falsehood as truth, but in which the definition of truth continually changed. A society in which the hero finds an old newspaper clipping conclusively proving that confessions of three supposed traitors were fraudulent-that they were, in fact, not at the place at which they had confessed to being during their supposedly treasonous act. And in which he then thinks the following to himself:

"There was only one possible conclusion: the confessions were lies."

"Of course, this was at a reef a discovery Even at that time Winston had not imagined that the people who were we out in the purges hat actually committed the crimes that they were accused of But this was concrete endence, it was a frapment of the abousted past like a foss bone which turns up in the wrong stratum and destroys a geological theory. It was enough to blow the Party to stons, if in some way it could have been published to the world and its significance made known."

Of course, it is never published to the world and the hero himself is later Nude eoned, tortured, and brainwashed into believing that he had never seen the clipping. that it had, indeed, never existed.

It is, of course, not our society. It is worth saying that today It will not be our society in 1984. Or, we may hope, thereafter

It is worth pausing for a moment on why that is so. In good part it is because we live under a system of law with a Bill of Rights which protects against just the ele ments of 1984 we find most offensive-against, in short, a state that directs us, controls us and ultimately rules us. We are need I say-not tortured because we hold different views than our Government. In fact, so far does our constitutional protec tion go that truthful statements are almost totally insulated from governmental sanctions of any sort. So far does our protection go that we are free to express any opinion without fear of governmentally imposed sanctions there is no such thing in this country, Justice Lewis Powell has observed for the Supreme Court, “as a false opinion."

Our law, then, goes far towards protecting us against the 1984 vision becoming a reality. The absence of such legal protection is evident abroad. Consider the public interrogation of the Soviet dissident Sinyavsky, one which-fittingly-could well have been annexed to an updated version of 1984.

Prosecutor. "Please don't lecture us on literature. I ask you a simply concrete question: Why did you portray Ilyich [Lenin] in such an unattractive way?"

Sinyavsky: "I said that you cannot make a cult of Lenin. To me Lenin is a human being, there is nothing wrong about saying that."

Judge: "What did you mean in this passage about the deification of Stalin?” (Reads excerpts.)

Sinyavsky: "I am being ironical about making a cult of him. If Stalin had lived a little longer, it might well have come to this."

Prosecutor. "Do these three words reflect your political views and convictions?" Sinyavsky: "I am not a political writer. No writer expresses his political views through his writings. An artistic work does not express political views. You wouldn't ask Pushkin or Gogol about their politics. (Indignation in the courtroom.) My works reflect my feelings about the world, not politics."

Prosecutor: "I had a different impression

And:

Sinyavsky: ・・・ I should point out that sometimes he moves away from Lenya

and at other times he comes back to him ⚫

Prosecutor: "You are trying to move away from the point!"

Sinyavsky: "I'm not making fun of Communism, but of Proferansov."

And this:

Prosecutor: "Let's go back to your essay on Socialist Realism. Let's take your political views: What did you have in mind when you wrote: "To do away with prisons, we built new prisons ⚫. We defiled not only our bodies, but our souls"? What has this got to do with socialist realism?"

To cite the Sinyavsky example is simply and sadly to say that 1984 continues to have more than allegorical relevance in totalitarian states such as the Soviet Union. Does it have genuine relevance here at home?

I believe it does. For if our Constitution affords us enormous protection in the areas of freely expressing our opinions and freely telling the truth-even when the Government prefers that we not-there are some areas in which we cannot look to the Constitution for much in the way of refuge or comfort. They relate to the availability of information itself, the basis of the formation by the public of its views and its expression of them. In this area, we must look not to our almost 200-year old Constitution but to our living representatives in the Congress and in the executive branch. Of them, of you, I believe the public has much to ask.

For if the public does not have information, it cannot play a meaningful role in the formulation of policy. When information is suppressed by the government, the legally guaranteed freedoms to think and to speak become meaningless. Carried to its ultimate end, it would be 1984 without cruelty, without terror, but nonetheless without freedom.

Let me offer some examples. The administration's efforts to censor the speech former Government officials who have had access to certain types of classified info mation strikes at the heart of the notion that an informed public is an essenti ingredient of a free people. According to the terms of the contract (which is to i signed by in excess of 100,000 Government officials and employees) all writing theirs of any sort that concern-explicitly or implicitly-"intelligence activitie sources or methods" must first be cleared by the government itself for the rest the lives of those employees. Such information need not even be classified to be sul jected to Government censorship. Thus, if a former high-level Government officia who had signed such an agreement wanted today to criticize a failure of intelligenc in Lebanon leading to the death of our Marines or of one in Grenada, he would firs have to clear his statement-even if it contained no classified information at allwith the people he wanted to criticize. How George Orwell would have understood In response to this risk, we are urged by the proponents of the new censorshi agreement to trust the Government to enforce it fairly, to trust the Government no to use it for political purposes, to trust the Government not to censor too much Orwell knew better. He teaches us-to put the point mildly-that Government car hardly be trusted in judging criticism of itself. Orwell also teaches us that the effect of censorship is a powerless, uninformed and utterly cynical public. “Who cares, asks Julia, the heroine of 1984, whether the government was now telling the truth about past events. "It's always one bloody war after another, and one knows the news is all lies anyway."

I referred earlier to the freedom afforded by our Constitution to form and express our opinions. But in recent years (and, to a lesser extent, previous years) that freedom has been frustrated by the use by our Government of the McCarran-Walter Act to deny visas to speakers whose views were sought by American audiences. How can the administration's denial of a visa to Mrs. Hortense Allende, widow of the former Chilean Prime Minister, be justified when some of our fellow citizens wish to hear her? Or, more recently, the denial of visas to Sandinista leaders that Members of Congress, among others, wished to hear? Orwell surely would have understood a mindset which effectively intrudes upon the ability of our citizens, not to say our elected representatives, to decide for themselves what to think after hearing those with whom we may differ.

I could cite numerous other examples which trouble me about the ability of the public to receive information: the exclusion of the press from Grenada at a time when it was especially urgent that the public have nongovernmental information about the invasion; the efforts to limit the flow of information to the public under the Freedom of Information Act; the inhibition of the flow of films into and even out of the country based on their content; revisions in the classification system to assure that more and not less information will be classified; threats to universities with respect to their right to publish and discuss unclassified information. I have already set forth my views on most of these matters in a recent magazine article (New York Times Magazine, September 25, 1983) and will not burden you with a repetition of them now.

What I would like to leave you with is not a catalogue of complaints, but a suggestion as to the way to view expressions of the executive branch that national security requires a denial of information to the public. Only if you view those statements with intense scepticism, with a presumption that a denial of information to the public is, in the most real sense, un-American, will you avoid a serious, continuing deprivation of relevant information by the public. For the problem is that just about everything worth knowing can be viewed, in one way or another, as possibly impacting upon national security-by discouraging our citizens, by depressing our allies, by running counter to someone's notion of the national interest. Of course, there are some real secrets, but hardly as many as the executive branch would have us believe.

A colleague of mine at the Columbia University School of Law, Professor Vincent Blasi, has given an extraordinary speech that I would like to mention in conclusion. First delivered at Columbia earlier this year (and now being prepared in article form) it was entitled: The First Amendment in the Worst of Times. Simply put, Professor Blasi's thesis was that courts, in adjudicating first amendment disputes, ought to adopt what he called a pathological perspective. The "overriding objective at all times," he argued, "should be to equip the First Amendment to do maximum service in those historical periods when intolerance is most prevalent and when governments are most able and most likely to stifle dissent systematically."

I would urge the same perspective on you as you view efforts to deny the public information. You should adopt a view which focuses on the loss to the public of information in the worst of times. You should assume a government at its worst, its