[Marxism] "Big Brother: How MI5 kept watch on Orwell"

[Lueko Willms]

  The MI5 (British Secret Police) files on the decades long
surveillance of George Orwell have been released to the public. 
 
  Some quotes from an article on this from the London daily "The
Independent" at

> <http://arts.independent.co.uk/books/features/article2924398.ece>

<quote>
students of Orwell believe he would have been astonished at the
closeness and the extent of the scrutiny of his private life. His
biographer, Bernard Crick, said: "It is clear from these documents
that Orwell was being watched as early as the late 1920s, when he was
a complete unknown. It says something about how worried, or indeed
almost paranoid, the British state was about communism.
</quote>

  They show that the secret services started to follow Orwell since
he left the colonial police 

<quote>
A subsequent Scotland Yard report hinted at his status as a suspected
potential dissenter, stating: "Blair gave no official reason for
terminating his appointment but is reported to have told his intimate
friends he could not bring himself to arrest persons for committing
acts which he did not think were wrong."
</quote>

 
<quote>
t was the arrival of the journalist in the less exotic climes of
Wigan in February 1936 to research a book on the privations of the
working classes in the North that next brought Orwell to the
attention of Special Branch.

The Wigan chief constable wrote to Scotland Yard reporting that
Orwell had attended a communist meeting in the town and been found
accommodation by local party members while collecting information on
matters from the number of churches to the state of the surrounding
mines.

In return, the Yard sent a detailed account of its information on the
"ex-Indian policeman/journalist", explaining how he had spent time
researching "Down and Out in London and Paris, his account of life as
a derelict, before returning to Britain to work as prep school
teacher before becoming ill in 1933 "principally through his
experiences as a 'down and out'".

The steady stream of memos from Special Branch, which included
reports on Orwell's female acquaintances and his visits to a friend
who owned a bookshop in Hampstead, continued until January 1942, when
the author seems to have set alarm bells ringing by complaining about
a security vetting process while working for the BBC.

Orwell, who used his experience of heading the unit responsible for
wartime broadcasts in English to India as the basis for the Ministry
of Truth and Room 101 in 1984, made clear his displeasure when the
Indian Office turned down a friend and Marxist novelist, Mulk Raj
Anand, for a post and vowed to challenge the decision.
</quote>

  But various branches of the British police apparatus had differing
views about Orwell: 

<quote>
the documents show that support for Orwell came from an unexpected
source while he was still working for the BBC. Noting that his recent
books had been printed by the avowedly anti-communist publisher
Victor Gollancz, whose Left Book Club funded his visit to Wigan, MI5
flatly contradicted the findings of Sergeant Ewing and his superiors.
</quote> 

  Read the full article at the source given above and repeated here
again: 

> <http://arts.independent.co.uk/books/features/article2924398.ece>


Comradely yours, 
Lüko Willms 
Frankfurt/Main 
/ Lueko.Willms at T-Online.de