Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious.

From George Orwell's review of Power: A New Social Analysis by Bertrand Russell in The Adelphi, January 1939.

If there are certain pages of Mr Bertrand Russell's book, Power, which seem rather empty, that is merely to say that we have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men. It is not merely that at present the rule of naked force obtains almost everywhere. Probably that has always been the case. Where this age differs from those immediately preceding it is that a liberal intelligentsia is lacking. Bully-worship, under various disguises, has become a universal religion, and such truisms as that a machine-gun is still a machine-gun even when a "good" man is squeezing the trigger — and that in effect is what Mr Russell is saying — have turned into heresies which it is actually becoming dangerous to utter.

It is marginally reassuring that the will to ignorance by the chattering class was as prevalent in 1939 as it is today. We are inclined to see the purveyors of fake news, and twitter mobs, and ideologues intolerant of blatant truths as some modern phenomenon. But there they were, way back then. Their bullhorns might have been smaller, but they were still standing on the street corner braying that the obvious was untrue.