Posted on 06/23/2003 7:04:14 AM PDT by dead
The British left-wing writer George Orwell gave the government a list of 38 suspected or actual communist sympathisers in 1949, including the comedian Charlie Chaplin, The Guardian reported.
Orwell, author of the political satires Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, who would be 100 years old on Wednesday, sent the list to a friend, Celia Kirwan, who worked for the information research department, a section of the Foreign Office, The Guardian said.
Kirwan had asked for Orwell's help in countering waves of communist bloc propaganda in the intensifying Cold War, the left-of-centre Guardian reported.
Among those singled out for suspicion by the author in the late 1940s, sometimes highly tentatively, were Chaplin, the bestselling novelist J. B. Priestley, the actor Michael Redgrave, the Soviet historian E. H. Carr, the historian of Trotsky Isaac Deutscher, and a left-wing Labour MP, Tom Driberg.
Orwell, who was terminally ill with tuberculosis that would lead to his death aged 46 a year later, said these figures "in my opinion are crypto-communists, fellow-travellers or inclined that way and should not be trusted as [anti-communist] propagandists".
The list was revealed by Timothy Garton Ash, a political historian and commentator, who said that what motivated Orwell was his love of Kirwan - "or at least his quest for her affection".
When Kirwan died last year her daughter found among her papers a copy of Orwell's list, which she then sent to Garton Ash, The Guardian said.
Lesser known names include three Guardian journalists active in the 1940s.
Subsequent evidence has lent weight to the view that Orwell was spot-on with one suspect, and probably right about two others, including Driberg, a one-time Labour Party chairman and longstanding member of the Labour national executive.
A Dailly Express journalist, Peter Smollett, has been identified as a Soviet agent, recruited by Kim Philby, by study of the Mitrokhin archive of documents revealed by a KGB librarian.
Smollett headed the Russian section in Britain's wartime information ministry.
Agence France-Presse
The list was revealed by Timothy Garton Ash, a political historian and commentator, who said that what motivated Orwell was his love of Kirwan - "or at least his quest for her affection".
Oh yeah, it was all about sex.
Maybe he gave her the list because he correctly assessed the dangers posed by the communists in his midst.
Orwell was an idealist who in his early years saw socialism as a means of healing the world's ills. After Spain, and as he matured politically, the totalitarian dangers of Communism frightened him more and more. I like these observations about Orwell by Clive James:
"But the facts were hard at work on a mind whose salient virtue was its willingness to let them in...he had come to suspect that the democratic part [of bourgeois democracy] might depend on the bourgeois part." After scanning the whole of Orwell's writings, James continues: "...In this strictly chronological arrangement of his writings we can watch him gradually deconstructing his own ideology in deference to a set of principles."
"Animal Farm" and "1984" were clear warnings of the totalitarian dangers of Communism although Leftist intellectuals like Gore Vidal try to deny that to this day. But as Orwell himself wrote: "One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool."
Orwell seems to be on target about all these people, i.e., none of them spoke for anti-communism. Driberg was actually a Soviet agent. NY TIMES reporter Walter Duranty (someone said he was on the list) was probably not an agent but was rewarded by the Soviets and even got access to the reclusive Stalin when nobody else did.
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