© GrantaGeorge Orwell
The Independent recently ran an article asking if Orwell was 'secretly a reactionary snitch'. It recounts how in 1996 the declassification of a Foreign Office file chronicling a meeting between Orwell and an agent of the FCO in 1949 shocked many readers and admirers of Orwell's writings.
Orwell had met with his friend Celia Kirwan, who worked for the Information Research Department - an FCO unit devoted to gathering information on suspected communists and carrying out anti-communist propaganda operations. He provided her with a list of 38 names of people he suspected to be pro-Stalin or fellow travelers.
Even before the list itself became available, left-wing critics laid into Orwell for his supposed racism. Alexander Cockburn, who is otherwise an excellent writer and journalist, said:
There seems to be general agreement by Orwell's fans, left and right, to skate gently over Orwell's suspicions of Jews, homosexuals and blacks.When Cockburn wrote that in 1998 he was right - there was a tendency for Orwell's fans to simply avoid this question. However, by the time Ben Norton arrived on the scene trying to draw attention to himself by endorsing the idea that Orwell was a secret bigot, that opinion had spread all over the internet.
Norton's article is full of attention-grabbing phrases like 'reactionary snitch', 'outright counter-revolutionary snitch' and 'the first in a long line of Trots-turned-neocons.'
What is missing from his analysis is any facts. Norton writes:
For years, the cat has been out of the bag: George Orwell secretly worked for the UK's Foreign Office. At the end of his life, he was an outright counter-revolutionary snitch, spying on leftists on behalf of the imperialist British government.This is a misrepresentation of simple facts. Orwell was never employed to spy on Leftists on behalf of the government - there was one meeting between Orwell and a friend of his who worked for the government. It's the difference between telling the police something that you saw, or your opinion of who might have done a crime, and being a police informant. A basic distinction, lost in an ocean of liberal revisionist hyperventilating.
Norton goes on:
The list includes dozens of suspected communists, "crypto-communists," socialists, "fellow travelers," and even LGBT people and Jews - their names scribbled alongside the sacrosanct 1984 author's disparaging comments about the sensibilities and impulses of those blacklisted.The comment 'even LGBT people and Jews' is included to make it look like Orwell was somehow an arch Right-winger, full of prejudice. Again, this is typical of liberal reactionaries, as though snitching on someone who is gay or Jewish is somehow worse than snitching on someone who isn't. Not that Orwell was snitching, but the target should make no difference.
Norton continues:
"Orwell's List" is a term that should be known by anyone who claims to be a person of the left. It was a blacklist Orwell compiled for the British government's Information Research Department, a propaganda unit set up for the Cold War.Norton's problem is that he's never studied the original source material he's talking about. The Foreign Office file makes clear that Orwell never 'compiled a blacklist' for the government - he had one conversation, on the basis of which the IRD drew up the list of 38 names. The remarks were not 'scribbled', they were printed.
Page 2 of Orwell's list
In reality, the ethnicity of around half of the people on Orwell's list is noted in the remarks, but it is only those that are objectionable by today's standards that are used by 'leftists' as an excuse to shit on a vastly superior and more important writer.
Secrets of MI5 Files
As the Independent's article notes, this wasn't a blacklist of any kind. These weren't people who Orwell was saying should be placed under surveillance or have their lives interfered with in any way. They were simply names of people who worked in various media who were considered inappropriate for the IRD's propaganda work.
Essentially, an anti-communist intelligence unit asked Orwell if he knew any communists, so they wouldn't waste their time trying to recruit them for anti-communist propaganda.
Somehow, some idiots have turned this into 'Orwell was a fake socialist who was spying on the Left for British intelligence'. Mostly through sheer ignorance and kneejerk reactions.
The Independent also points out that the list was, it seems, never passed onto MI5 and MI6, though they do miss an element of this story. Several of the names on Orwell's list have MI5 and/or FBI files, including actors Charlie Chaplin and Michael Redgrave. There is nothing in those files to indicate that they were investigated because of Orwell's naming them in his list.
The other aspect of the story that almost everyone misses is that Orwell was himself the subject of lengthy investigations and surveillance by British intelligence.
From 1936 to 1944 Orwell was the subject of British intelligence inquiries and vetting requests. His files were only closed in 1952, shortly after his death.
None of the articles slandering Orwell as an anti-Semitic crypto-conservative make any reference to these files, let alone factors them into the equation when assessing Orwell's relationship with the British secret state.
So, no need to consider that a Special Branch officer described Orwell as having 'advanced Communist views' because he agreed with some of the Communist platform but wasn't a member of the party or an adherent to its ideology:
Special Branch report on George Orwell
Similarly, Orwell's MI5 file contains his responses to a 1941 questionnaire by the Independent Labour Party, asking whether World War 2 was primarily an imperialist war, whether socialists should support the war, and so on. The MI5 note says that his answers show he was not sympathetic towards the Communist Party.
1941 Independent Labour Party Questionnaire, Orwell’s responses are highlighted
As you will notice, Orwell's answers and those of others who responded to the questionnaire are quite varied, illustrating how the Left (both in the 1940s and now) is a multifarious entity with no dominant consensus. The efforts to brand Orwell a crypto-rightist or a bigot and a racist are part of a larger dynamic whereby the socialist Left is being subsumed by the liberal Left.
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Left faced a quandary. It could either jump aboard the liberal capitalist bandwagon, usually with a left-of-centre social democrat tinge, or it could break with Marxism altogether and try to find a new way to be both anti-imperialist and pro-economic rights at the same time. In Orwell's time it faced the option of signing up to some or other form of Communism or finding another way to challenge the Western colonialist order.
Orwell chose the latter, and proved himself both willing and able to criticise the Left of his time for the ease with which it slipped into authoritarianism and violent repression. This is, perhaps, the true reason that contemporary liberal revisionists seek to eliminate him from their reconstructed 'Left'. They are not truly anti-war or anti-imperialist, and bourgeois capitalism suits them fine, with all its petty distractions from the vast pollution and environmental destruction it leaves its in wake.
In accusing Orwell of being a racist spy, these revisionists become de facto apologists for the security state, by ignoring how Orwell was the target of these agencies for over 10 years and only provided them with information on one occasion. This makes them hypocrites, but far more importantly it reveals the unstable foundations of the current attempt by liberals to subsume and redefine the Left.
Any political movement that shrieks louder when a long-dead writer is revealed to have written the word 'negro' in private correspondence than they do when over 10,000 Yemenis are killed in an imperialist war by a fundamentalist state cannot last very long. Hyperbole sees rapidly diminishing returns over time, and the more times liberalism reinvents itself for PR purposes the more people realise it's just the same product being re-branded.
That is to say: Irrespective of revisionist myths, the Spirit of Orwell lives on, both in the sense of questionable fixations on Jews and in the sense of genuine resistance to the imperial order.
Tom Secker is a journalist, Investigative historian, podcaster and author. Support him at patreon.com/tomsecker
If his work didn't acquire any 'fame' ,it's doubtful anyone would be criticizing him now.... Fame comes with a cost, even after death... as Osama BinLaden is known for.... and he was working for western intel... but they used him for the other side... and look at Trosky... our guy before, later part of the 'Red Menace'.... it's just one of the hazards of working for them... even when you aren't... if they deem you useful, they'll make it look like you did, and in hindsight, most will never know the difference... especially as most aren't paying attention.