MOST people are familiar with George Orwell’s more successful novels, Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), but few have read his essays and private letters. Ironically, Orwell’s ideas are often claimed by the Right on account of having predicted the control and manipulation of language, something that we now observe as political correctness, but in reality Orwell spent his life wavering between anarchism and libertarian socialism.

Having fought against the Fascists during the 1936-1939 Spanish Civil War, Orwell knew all about the struggle against capitalism in its most totalitarianism guise, but his experiences with the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification (POUM) – alongside whom he fought in Aragon and Catalonia – also exposed him to the horrors of Stalinist repression and helped him to develop his anti-authoritarian beliefs. One crucial part of Orwell’s character was his remarkable honesty.

In a January 1948 letter to the Canadian anarchist, George Woodcock, Orwell remarked that he hoped the Freedom Defence Committee was “doing something about these constant demands to outlaw Mosley and Co.” Aware that the left-wing journal, Tribune, was turning a blind eye to the British State’s efforts to curtail freedom of speech for all political groups outside the mainstream, Orwell put his hatred of Fascism to one side in order to explain that the

“whole thing is simply a thinly disguised desire to persecute people who can’t fight back, as obviously the Mosley lot don’t matter a damn and can’t get a real mass following.”

Orwell knew that the case against restricting the rights of Fascists was centred around the apparent danger of allowing those who, in theory at least, were planning to use freedom as a means of destroying freedom itself, but nonetheless stated that whilst Fascists and Communists do ultimately intend to erode freedom

“if you carry this to its conclusion, there can be no case for allowing any political or intellectual freedom whatsoever.”

More importantly, and this clearly has important ramifications for the members of the more contemporary neo-nazi group, National Action, many of whom were deliberately set-up by the police and jailed over the last few years, he continued that

“it is a matter of distinguishing between a real and a merely theoretical threat to democracy, and no one should be persecuted for expressing his opinions, however anti-social, and no political organisation suppressed, unless it can be shown that there is a substantial threat to the stability of the state.”

Orwell, as the author of Nineteen Eighty-Four, should have been aware that the state has at its fingertips the distorting lens of the mass media and that it can therefore arrange for a certain political faction to appear in any way that it likes. There are, as some of you know, people serving lengthy prison sentences for ‘terrorism’ at this very moment, when their actions really amount to little more than owning a crossbow, making racist comments or performing a nazi salute. Needless to say, there is no accounting for the stupidity of those who believe everything they read in the newspapers but Orwell must undoubtedly be admired for both his honesty and his consistency.