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[–] 3 points 6 months ago* (1 child)

'Orwells List' is rightfully controversial. Im not gonna try and fully defend him siding with the British Goverment against anyone

But I do think to judge him fairly you gotta understand a couple things

  • it was written in 1949

  • it called out people who he thought were too closely tied to Stalin's Russia

  • the British Establishment at the time were nominally friendly with the Stalin government

  • Orwell was unhappy with Soviet Communists due to their liberal collaboration and repression of anarchist Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War

  • Orwell was always explicitly anti-stalinist

So I don't think he's immune from historical judgement, but I do think that modern conclusions of Orwell as a kind of 'counter-revolutionary' miss a lot of valuable context

He definitely wasn't just informing on people whom he thought were 'too socialist', even if from a 2026 perspective he had more in common with the communists he was listing

And it's worth noting that this was years before American McCarthyism and the associated witchhunt

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