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Nineteen Eighty-Four.
    This is by no means to exhaust the utter distortion of Orwell’s motives and methods that is involved in the rapid but shallow dissemination of this “disclosure.” The simple facts of the case are these. Together with his friend Richard Rees, Orwell had for some time enjoyed playing what Rees himself called a “parlor game.” This game consisted of guessing which public figures would, or would not, sell out in the event of an invasion or a dictatorship. Orwell had been playing this game, in a serious as well as a frivolous way, for some little time. On New Year’s Day 1942 he wrote, in a lengthy dispatch for Partisan Review , about the varieties of defeatist opinion to be found among British journalists and intellectuals. His tone was detached; he noted the odd alliances between widely discrepant factions. He also analyzedthe temptation among intellectuals to adapt themselves to power, as instanced by developments across the Channel:
    Both Vichy and the Germans have found it quite easy to keep a façade of “French culture” in existence. Plenty of intellectuals were ready to go over, and the Germans were quite ready to make use of them, even when they were “decadent.” At this moment Drieu de la Rochelle is editing the Nouvelle Revue Française , Pound is bellowing against the Jews on the Rome radio, and Céline is a valued exhibit in Paris, or at least his books are. All of these would come under the heading of kulturbolschewismus , but they are also useful cards to play against the intelligentsia in Britain and the U.S.A. If the Germans got to England, similar things would happen, and I think I could make out at least a preliminary list of the people who would go over [my italics].
    Notice the date of this. It should be borne in mind here that until recently the Soviet Union had been in a military alliance with Hitler—an alliance loudly defended by Britain’s Communists—and that Moscow Radio had denounced the British naval blockade of Nazi Germany as a barbaric war on civilians. The German Communist Party had published a statement in 1940 in which it was discovered that for dialectical reasons the British Empire was somewhat worse than the National Socialist one. Orwell never tired of pointing these things out; they were the sort of illusions or delusions that could have real consequences. Nor did he omit to mention and specify the sorts of intellectual—E. H. Carr being a celebrated instance—who could transfer his allegiance with sinister smoothness from one despotic regime to another.
    No less to the point, he had discovered in Spain that the Communist strategy relied very heavily upon the horror and terror of anonymous denunciation, secret informing, and police espionage. At that date, the official hero of all young Communists was PavlikMorozov, a fourteen-year-old “Pioneer” who had turned in his family to the Soviet police for the offense of hoarding grain. The villagers had slain him as a result; statues of the martyr-child were commonplace in the USSR and it was the obligation of a good Party member to emulate his example.
    Orwell’s disgust at this culture of betrayal was not confined to the visceral style by which he portrayed and condemned it in Nineteen Eighty-Four. He showed a lifelong hatred for all forms of censorship, proscription, and blacklisting. Even when Sir Oswald Mosley was released from prison at the height of the Second World War—a piece of lenience which inspired many complaints from supposed antifascists—Orwell commented that it was unpleasant to see the left protesting at the application of habeas corpus. He took the same line with those who objected to lifting the government ban on the publication of the Daily Worker , only taking time to notice that this habit of intolerance had been acquired by many people from the Daily Worker ’s own editors. In May 1946 he wrote that the