Post #1780687

2026-04-28 22:11 UTC

I learned recently that although identifing as a socialist, Orwell was kind of a crappy dude. He sold out a ton of people he saw as too communist to the British intelligence service in a weird dossier with kinda bigoted descriptions of people. He was apparently on his deathbed and dying of a disease (I think TB?) That some have said makes you not all mentally there, but it seems unlikely to me that the bigotedness was fabricated entirely by the impact of disease on his mind. It kinda made me reconsider how I interpreted parts of 1984. He seemed to kinda look down on lower socioeconomic groups and indigenous populations as like baser more animal, less human creatures, and you can kinda see a bit of his McCarthyism in 1984. I found it kinda odd what groups he said he thought would form the authoritarian bougiosie class (sorry I dont feel like looking up how to spell that right now, so you get my horrible butchered spelling)

Replies (3)

@Kobibi@sh.itjust.works 2026-04-28 22:31

‘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

Open ##1780686
@Cethin@lemmy.zip 2026-04-29 05:37

He grew up in the British Raj, with his father supporting the opium war in China. He also worked as a radio host for the British government to spread propoganda (insisting that him not doing it would mean someone worse would). This makes his assertion that things like 1984 media influence of opinion a little insane, with him saying it wasn’t happening then, but it could happen soon. He was literally a part of it. A lot of his views seem to come from when he went to Spain to fight in their civil war against the Fascists. He ended up joining the Anarchists (not by choice, but because this was the option available), and the Communist faction treated them poorly, saying they weren’t really leftist enough (as usual). This is why he ended up focusing almost all of his energy on anti-USSR/anti-authoritarian stuff, rather than anti-empire or anti-capitalist. He was a leftist, just one with a massive grudge against “the wrong leftists”.

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@Eric@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2026-04-29 00:06

redsails.org/on-orwell/

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