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Yogthos

George Orwell is a far worse person than you likely thought

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_

In 2003, declassified British archives belonging to the British Foreign Office revealed that George Orwell secretly accused Chaplin of being a secret communist and a friend of the USSR.[289] Chaplin's name was one of 35 Orwell gave to the Information Research Department (IRD), a secret British Cold War propaganda department which worked closely with the CIA, according to a 1949 document known as Orwell's list.[289] Chaplin was not the only actor in America Orwell accused of being a secret communist. He also described American civil-rights leader and actor Paul Robeson as being "anti-white".[289]
29 Dec 2022 at 15:12 | Open on mas.to
8 comments
Electroduende21
Simon Brooke

@yogthos bear in mind that Blair (Orwell was a pseudonym) fought in Catalonia in a Trotskyite unit allied to Anarchist units, and that strongly influenced his feelings about orthodox communists of the period (although whether Chaplin was orthodox in that sense I do not know).

29 Dec 2022 at 15:28 | Open on mastodon.scot
Yogthos

@simon_brooke I did know about that, but honestly I've developed a general dislike for Orwell as a person

29 Dec 2022 at 16:35 | Open on mas.to
Simon Brooke

@yogthos I'd be surprised if you were wholly wrong. He went to ETON, for any sakes, and there are not many decent people there. His father was a British civil servant supervising the production of OPIUM to sell to China, and that's not a decent trade.

But people are complex, and he was certainly a very complex person. We're all complicated mixtures of good and bad.

29 Dec 2022 at 17:18 | Open on mastodon.scot
Adamas Nemesis

@yogthos Hmm...a lot of these anti-Soviet types were rats.

30 Dec 2022 at 0:21 | Open on social.adamasnemesis.com
Yogthos

@adamasnemesis it's as if these people weren't principled

30 Dec 2022 at 1:00 | Open on mas.to
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