Apparently you didn't read the article, as you haven't commented on its main points.
Proctor wrote:Orwell was hardly a reactionary, and if you reread his stuff, he never actually denounces Communism. What he does denounce is Soviet style Communism. There is a great difference.
If that was true, if "Animal Farm" didn't have an anti-communist content, it wouldn't be among the favourites of the bourgeoisie all over the world. If it was a "communist" book that only attacked some "deviation" of communism and counterposing it with some "real" communist positions, it wouldn't be in every bourgeois school curriculum, though probably it would even then get the sympathies of the capital (as it attacks the first victorious socialist revolution of world history).
Here's some excerpts from the article I posted:
-"Orwell, following the pattern already set by that notorious renegade from the cause of the October Revolution, namely, Trotsky, pretended to be a supporter and defender of the founding principles of the revolution, merely protesting at the alleged corruption of its ideal in the Soviet Union by Stalin. Anyone who knows of the actual course of development of the Soviet Revolution - of the miraculous achievements of socialist construction in the USSR, in industry as well as in agriculture and of her cultural achievements, of the might and world historic contribution of the USSR to the defeat of Nazi Germany - could not be misled by Orwell's scurrilous lies. Unfortunately there are hundreds of millions of people around the world who are ignorant about the actual developments in the USSR of those days and who have gained their 'knowledge' from the 'learned' writing of bourgeois hacks such as Orwell. Having read anti-communist trash such as Animal Farm, they feel sufficiently well-equipped to become experts on the former USSR and to pontificate about the degeneration of the ideals of the Russian Revolution from every platform and through every medium provided to them courtesy of the imperialist bourgeoisie."
-"What attracted the bourgeoisie to this third-rate writer was not his pretended support for the ideals of the October Revolution, but his real driving hatred for the ideals of communism. Had Orwell's characterization of Stalin, and the CPSU that he led, corresponded to the truth, that would have made Stalin the darling of the imperialist bourgeoisie; had there been a steady erosion of revolutionary principles and had the dictatorship really collapsed into the dictatorship of a cynical few, Stalin's Russia would have been warmly embraced to the point of suffocation by imperialism. Precisely because the Russian reality did not accord with Orwellian reactionary fables, as the Soviet Union was busy tearing down her miserable capitalist and feudal past and constructing a bright socialist future for her people, imperialism waged a life and death struggle, ranging from economic blockade to armed intervention, against her."
-"Orwell was even more reactionary, if such a thing is possible, than Winston Churchill. The latter at least had the sense to wait until the end of the Second World War before publicly resuming his anti-communist crusade. Orwell by comparison could not contain his anti-communism even at the height of the war when the fate of humanity was being decided in the titanic trial of strength between Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany in the battle of Stalingrad. He wrote his Animal Farm in 1943. Publisher after publisher rejected the book. Even bourgeois publishers, at least during those days when the dark forces of Nazism hovered ominously threatening to devour mankind, had more regard than Orwell. Faber rejected the book as did Victor Gollancz. The latter's reaction was: 'We couldn't have published it then. Those people [the Soviets]... had just saved our necks at Stalingrad.' "
-"Notwithstanding his 'left' veneer, every class-conscious proletarian all over the world has regarded Orwell as an anti-communist diehard and an agent, paid or otherwise, of the imperialist bourgeoisie. As was to be expected, the Trotskyist 'left', taking, as ever, its cue from the imperialist bourgeoisie, praised Orwell to the skies, it ignored Orwell's anti-communism with the assertion that Orwell was only an anti-Stalinist and not an anti-communist.
And now the bourgeoisie embarrasses these poor little counter-revolutionaries by revealing that after all Orwell was a policy spy - a fine anti-communist indeed!
Documents released by the Public Record Office on Wednesday 10 July 1996 reveal that Orwell offered to provide a secret Foreign Office Propaganda Unit linked to the intelligence services with the names of writers and journalists he regarded as 'crypto-communist' and 'fellow travellers' who could not be trusted. Orwell made this offer in 1949, shortly before his death, to the covert anti-communist propaganda unit set up in 1948 by the Attlee government - that darling of the Trotskyite, revisionist and labour 'left' - allegedly in response to the 'developing communist threat to the whole fabric of Western civilization [i.e. imperialism].' The reader will remember that the paper released by the Public Record Office in the Summer of 1995 revealed that this Unit, called the Information Research Department (IRD), used writers, labour leaders and politicians to disseminate misinformation about the former USSR, the East European People's Democracies and against the Communist Parties of the West, notably those of Britain, France and Italy. Well-known literary figures such as the philosopher Bertrand Russell, the poet Stephen Spender, and Arthur Koestler (another darling of the Trotskyite fraternity) were enlisted by the IRD to produce anti-communist propaganda material during the cold war. The highly-placed Labour politicians used by the IRD included Attlee, Christopher Mayhew, Denis Healey and Vic Feather. Staffed by 300 officials, the IRD channelled most of its misinformation through ministerial statements, the ever-so-'objective' BBC, the press and British diplomatic missions abroad. The IRD, according to the documents released, singled out articles from the Tribune, the 'left wing' anti-Soviet weekly, to back up its covert anti-communist campaign. The IRD successfully, although not surprisingly, conscripted the BBC into the MI 6's anti-communist crusade, giving the BBC detailed advice about propaganda to the Soviet Union itself. In a memorandum of Major General Sir Ian Jacob, the then director of the BBC Overseas Service, one IRD official warned: 'Phrases like 'the Kremlin' in a hostile context should never be used. The Kremlin is an evocative symbol to most Russians,' adding, as if wanting to leave no room for doubt as to the counter-revolutionary credentials of Trotsky, Zinoviev and Bukharin, that 'Russian revolutionary anniversaries should be made the occasion for references to Trotsky, Zinoviev, Bukharin and other 'close friends' of Lenin'!!
It was to this nasty imperialist anti-communist unit, the IRD, that the 'socialist' Mr. Orwell, the darling of counter-revolutionary Trotskyites, made his offer to provide it with names of writers and journalists who could not be trusted because of their communist sympathies as well as the names of the anti-communist writers who could be trusted to produce anti-communist propaganda. According to the documents just released, in March 1949, an IRD official, Celia Kirwan, visited Orwell in a Sanatorium in Cranham, Gloucestershire, where he was suffering from tuberculosis. After visiting Orwell, she (Kirwan) told her colleagues: 'I discussed some aspects of our work with him in great confidence. He was delighted to learn of them, and expressed his whole-hearted and enthusiastic approval of our aims.' Do you -hear all this, gentlemen Trotskyists! Being too ill to write himself, he provided Kirwan with the names of potential contributors. At the beginning of April, shortly after he had been visited by her, Orwell wrote to Kirwan offering to provide her with 'a list of journalists and writers who in my opinion are crypto-communists, fellow-travellers or inclined that way and should not be trusted'. He went on to state that the notebook containing these names was at his London home and insisted that the list was to be treated as 'strictly confidential' for it would be defamatory to call someone a 'fellow traveller.' From the papers released this list is missing, but a card placed next to Orwell's letter to Kirwan says that a document has been withheld by the Foreign Office."
I ask you to read the rest of the article aswell. Anyway, Orwell's anti-communism is clear.
- By Potemkin
- By KurtFF8
- By wat0n