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Over the decades Stalinists and other Marxist-Leninists have attempted to blacken Orwell’s reputation, but with remarkably little success. But was he, as they tend to suggest, in his final decade on an inexorable journey to the political right? Would he, if he had survived into old age, have ended up cheerleading for Thatcher? The question is, of course, unanswerable. But was he already in his lifetime becoming a renegade? Much has been made of his supplying, in 1949, the names of people he suspected of being communist fellow travellers to his friend Celia Paget, who worked for the Information Research Department, a branch of the Foreign Office whose brief was to write anti-communist propaganda for use in continental Europe in the immediate postwar era. But here Orwell’s action seems quite harmless: no one was being fingered, no one seemed likely to disappear; the advice he gave Paget was simply not to employ people for work they might not be naturally sympathetic to (or trustworthy in). And what exactly is wrong with not wishing to abet communists in dissolving liberal democracy and civil freedoms?
-- Enda O’Doherty, Dublin Review of Books
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And Orwell wasn't a communist. He was a socialist. Why wouldn't he do what he can to keep totalitarians from influence and power, and do what he can to keep "1984" from happening?
Over the decades Stalinists and other Marxist-Leninists have attempted to blacken Orwell’s reputation, but with remarkably little success. But was he, as they tend to suggest, in his final decade on an inexorable journey to the political right? Would he, if he had survived into old age, have ended up cheerleading for Thatcher? The question is, of course, unanswerable. But was he already in his lifetime becoming a renegade? Much has been made of his supplying, in 1949, the names of people he suspected of being communist fellow travellers to his friend Celia Paget, who worked for the Information Research Department, a branch of the Foreign Office whose brief was to write anti-communist propaganda for use in continental Europe in the immediate postwar era. But here Orwell’s action seems quite harmless: no one was being fingered, no one seemed likely to disappear; the advice he gave Paget was simply not to employ people for work they might not be naturally sympathetic to (or trustworthy in). And what exactly is wrong with not wishing to abet communists in dissolving liberal democracy and civil freedoms?
-- Enda O’Doherty, Dublin Review of Books
>>>>>>>>>>>>>
And Orwell wasn't a communist. He was a socialist. Why wouldn't he do what he can to keep totalitarians from influence and power, and do what he can to keep "1984" from happening?
