Orwell’s true heir

[dudeness]

although a book review, I thought this was worth posting in light of the recent criticisms of F9/11 by such as those like Hitchens..

In 1949, George Orwell, a celebrated foe of “Big Brother”, supplied a list of 38 names of intellectuals he thought were dangerous “crypto-communists and fellow-travellers” to British intelligence, through a friend in the Labour government’s Information Research Department, which worked closely with the Foreign Office and MI6.

In 2001, Christopher Hitchens, self-styled radical “contrarian” and self-proclaimed Orwell heir, launched a public campaign of denunciation and ridicule against those on his list of supposed “Islamo-fascist” apologists and “defenders of totalitarianism” who dared to critique US foreign policy in the wake of the September terrorist attacks in New York and Washington.

Hitchens and Orwell, argues Scott Lucas in The Betrayal of Dissent, both saw themselves as guardians of political purity, “honourable liberals” uncorrupted by what Orwell called the “smelly little orthodoxies” of the “totalitarian” Marxist left. It was the flawed liberal politics of both writers that allowed them to spring to the defence of capitalist imperialism.

Among the 135 “communist dupes or agents” Orwell had placed on the master blacklist from which he selected the 38 for state surveillance, were actors Charlie Chaplin and Michael Redgrave, historians E. H. Carr and Isaac Deutscher, singer Paul Robeson, former New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, theologian Reinhold Niebuhr and numerous Labour MPs, Nobel Prize-winning physicists, novelists and journalists. Hitchens’ list includes such noted progressive writers as Noam Chomsky, John Pilger, Howard Zinn, Harold Pinter, Tariq Ali, Robert Fisk and Susan Sontag.

http://www.greenleft.org.au/back/2004/587/587p25.htm

[pretzel4gore]

1. i don't care about hitchens....

but george orwell.....i know enough about him to know he was dying of tb in 1949, had problems with his $ estate and simply could not have been a rat even if he had the psychic energy to do so. THe secret intelligence community budget was some 40 billion/yr during the investigations following the vietnam debacle and revealed by senate inquiries.....now the retrenchment has gone on for 25 years and even in the late 70's the real budget was secret.....point is there's lotsa money to smear orwell, jfk, che, etc.....and 'they' are still spreading disinfo about the jfk/mlk assassinations.....
george orwell was about the last person on earth to care about orthodoxy.....
he would have hated hitchens if only because hitchens rides on his snob class advantages not to mention hitchen's blatant mediawhoring.....
i'm not criticisning you, just defending a true hero.....

[muriel_volestrangler]

2. Article by the historian to first see the complete Orwell list

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/16550

Garton Ash doesn't think the Orwell list was a horrible thing, clearly.
It shouldn't be that surprising that the author of Animal Farm and 1984 would be against people he thought supported the Soviet Union and Stalin. The list was asked for, by a close friend of Orwell's, ostensibly to name people who shouldn't be used by her department as propagandists themselves. But Orwell should have realised the list might be used for surveillance as well. I don't know if anyone has any proof that it was used for surveillance. The blacklisting of Swingler may or may not have happened without Orwell's list - he acknowledged his membership of the Communist Party of Great Britain. And it doesn't seem to have affected all their careers - Michael Redgrave was knighted in 1959, after, as Garton Ash points out, playing O'Connor in the film of 1984.

[dudeness]

3. thanks for your reply

indeed, orwell is a favourite of mine,,his life ,essays and books make for fascinating reading..as i pointed out this is a book review and I felt worthy of posting here at DU..doubtless hitchens deserves the pasting he receives in this book..treatment of orwell may be unfair..but that is open to debate amongst DUers..cheers..

[bemildred]

4. Hitchens is not fit to lick Orwell's behind clean.

The primary question this raises in my mind is what Mr. Lucas'
motive is in smearing Mr. Orwell in this way. Selling books comes
to mind, but it's hard to be sure that that is all of it. A
single example:

"Hitchens and Orwell ... both saw themselves as guardians of
political purity".

This is hogwash. Whatever Orwell thought himself, it was not
a guardian of "political purity", rather the opposite. It is
quite clear that Orwell had "reservations" about the British
left of the time, he writes about it extensively in between the
times he is criticizing the Nazis.