Date: Sun, 28 Oct 2001 13:08:36 -0500
From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood-AT-panix.com>
Subject: Re: AUT: Taliban apologetics


Michael Handelman wrote:

>I heard that Orwell was working for MI5, the British
>intelligence agency, anyone know anything about this?


[From Franc es Stonor Saunders' The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and 
the World of Arts and Letters.]

But Orwell himself was not entirely innocent of such Cold War 
manipulations. He had, after all, handed over a list of suspected 
fellow travellers to the Information Research Department in 1949, a 
list which exposed thirty-five people as fellow travellers (or 'FT' 
in Orwell-speak), suspected front men, or 'sympathizers', amongst 
them Kingsley Martin, editor of the New Statesman and Nat, 'on 
('Decayed liberal. Very dishonest'), Paul Robeson ('Very anti-white. 
Wallace supporter'), J. B. Priestley ('Strong sympathizer, possibly 
has some kind of organizational tie-up. Very anti-US.'), and Michael 
Redgrave (ironically, given his later appearance in the film 1984). 
Deeply suspicious of just about everybody, Orwell had been keeping a 
blue quarto notebook close to hand for several years. By 1949, it 
contained 125 names, and had become a kind of 'game' which Orwell 
liked to play with Koestler and Richard Rees, in which they would 
estimate 'to what lengths of treachery our favourite betes noires 
would go'. The criteria for inclusion seem to have been pretty broad, 
as in the case of Stephen Spender, whose 'tendency towards 
homosexuality' Orwell thought worth noting (he also said he was 'very 
unreliable' and 'Easily influenced'). The American realist John 
Steinbeck was listed solely for being a 'Spurious writer, 
pseudo-naif', whilst Upton Sinclair earned the epithet 'Very silly'. 
George Padmore (the pseudonym of Malcolm Nurse), was described as 
'Negro [perhaps of] African origin?', who was 'anti-white' and 
probably a lover of Nancy Cunard. Tom Driberg drew heavy fire, being 
all the things Orwell loved to fear: 'Homosexual', 'Commonly thought 
to be underground member', and 'English Jew'.

But, from being a kind of game, what Orwell termed his 'little list' 
took on a new and sinister dimension when he volunteered it to the 
IRD, a secret arm (as Orwell knew) of the Foreign Office. Although 
the IRD's Adam Watson would later claim that 'Its immediate 
usefulness was that these were not people who should write for us', 
he also revealed that '[their] connections with Soviet-backed 
organizations might have to be exposed at some later date'. In other 
words, once in the hands of a branch of government whose activities 
were not open to inspection, Orwell's list lost any innocence it may 
have had as a private document. It became a dossier with very real 
potential for damaging people's reputations and careers.

Fifty years later, Orwell's authorized biographer, Bernard Crick, 
stood firmly by Orwell's action, claiming it was 'no different from 
responsible citizens nowadays passing on information to the 
anti-terrorist squad about people in their midst whom they believe to 
be IRA bombers. These were seen as dangerous times in the late 
forties.' This defence has been echoed by those determined to 
perpetuate the myth of an intellectual group bound by their ties to 
Moscow, and united in a seditious attempt to prepare the ground for 
Stalinism in Britain. There is no evidence that anybody on Orwell's 
list (as far as it has been made public) was involved in any illegal 
undertaking, and certainly nothing which would justify the comparison 
to Republican terrorists. 'Homosexual' was the only indictment which 
bore any risk of criminal conviction, though this does not seem to 
have deterred Orwell in his bestowal of the word. British law did not 
prohibit membership of the Communist Party, being Jewish, being 
sentimental or stupid. 'So far as the Right is concerned Orwell can 
do no wrong,' Peregrine Worsthorne has written. 'His judgement in 
these matters is trusted absolutely. So if he thought the Cold War 
made it justifiable for one writer to be positively eager to shop 
another, then that is that. End of argument. But it shouldn't be the 
end of argument. A dishonourable act does not become honourable just 
because it was committed by George Orwell.'

This is not to say that Orwell was wrong to be concerned about what 
he called 'the poisonous effect of the Russian mythos on English 
intellectual life'. He of all people knew the cost of ideology, and 
the distortions performed in its name by 'liberals who fear liberty 
and the intellectuals who want to do dirt on the intellect'. But by 
his actions, he demonstrated that he had confused the role of the 
intellectual with that of the policeman. As an intellectual, Orwell 
could command an audience for his attacks on British Russomania, 
openly, by engaging his opponents in debate on the pages of Tribune, 
Polemic, and other magazines and papers. In what way was the cause of 
freedom advanced by answering (suspected) intellectual dishonesty 
with subterfuge?

'If I had to choose a text to justify myself, I should choose the 
line from Milton: "By the known rules of ancient liberty",' Orwell 
wrote in the preface to Animal Farm. The phrase, he explained, 
referred to his strong faith in the 'deep-rooted tradition' of 
'intellectual freedom . . . without which our characteristic Western 
culture could only doubtfully exist'. He followed with a quote from 
Voltaire: 'I detest what you say; I will defend to the death your 
right to say it.' Months before his own death, Orwell seemed to be 
saying, 'I detest what you say; I will defend to death your right to 
say it; but not under any circumstances.' Commenting on what she saw 
as Orwell's move to the right, Mary McCarthy remarked it was a 
blessing he died so young.


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