επειδή βλέπω οτι δεν βγάζει το link παραθέτω το άρθρο της gurdian ( αρθρογράφος John Ezard )George Orwell, venerated as "the wintry conscience of a generation", gave the British government a list of 38 suspected or actual communist sympathisers, the Guardian reveals today.A carbon copy of the document - which the government still treats as secret 54 years later - is reproduced for the first time in today's Review.The find confirms evidence first raised seven years ago. Among those singled out for suspicion by the author of Animal Farm and 1984 in the late 1940s, sometimes highly tentatively, were the comedian Charlie Chaplin, the bestselling novelist JB Priestley, the actor Michael Redgrave, the Soviet historian EH Carr, the historian of Trotsky, Isaac Deutscher, and the leftwing Labour MP Tom Driberg.The list is revealed in a 4,000-word article in Review by the political historian and commentator Timothy Garton Ash. He says that what brought the creator of Big Brother and the foe of bureaucratic power into the hands of a real-life bureaucracy was the love of a beautiful woman - "or at least his quest for her affection".The woman was Celia Kirwan, a friend of Orwell's who worked in 1949 for a secretly funded Foreign Office section, the information research department (IRD).She asked his help in countering waves of communist bloc propaganda in the intensifying cold war. Orwell, whose real name was Eric Blair, offered to compile from his notebooks a list of those "who should not be trusted as propagandists [for the west]".The writer, already terminally ill with tuberculosis and desperate about the then Soviet Union, died in 1950. When Kirwan died last autumn, her daughter, Ariane Bankes, found among her papers a carbon of the list which Orwell had finally sent her. Ms Bankes asked Garton Ash to write about it.Conclusive evidence appears to exist that the typescript is genuine. It has a Foreign Office document number, with the words Not Released written in red ink, indicating it was thought too sensitive to be made public when the carbon was sent to Ms Kirwan, apparently in 1994.Its discovery proves Orwell, after conscientious second thoughts and deletions, did send the Foreign Office some names from his notebook drafts.The existence of these drafts was first disclosed in Peter Davison's 20-volume edition of the author's complete works in 1998. Prof Davison does not doubt the list's authenticity.It contains 38 names of journalists, scholars and actors who "in my opinion are crypto-communists, fellow-travellers or inclined that way and should not be trusted as [anti-communist] propagandists".Some of the most famous names including Chaplin, Carr, Priestley and Redgrave, have only questions marks or brief remarks against them. Lesser known names include three Guardian journalists active in the 1940s.Subsequent evidence has lent weight to the view that Orwell was spot-on with one suspect, and probably right about two others including Tom Driberg, a one-time Labour party chairman and longstanding member of the Labour national executive.The Daily Express journalist Peter Smollett has been identified as a Soviet agent, recruited by Kim Philby, by study of the Mitrokhin archive of documents revealed by a senior KGB librarian. Smollett headed the Russian section in Britain's wartime information ministry.In a twist of fate, Garton Ash writes that he was "almost certainly" the civil servant on whose advice the London publisher Jonathan Cape rejected Orwell's Animal Farm as an unhealthily anti-Soviet text. The rejection was a severe blow to the author. Driberg is identified in the Mitrokhin archive as recruited by the Soviets in 1956 after a homosexual indiscretion in Moscow. He was a "doubtless deeply unreliable agent", Garton Ash says.One man on the list, Alaric Jacob, later had his BBC pension rights suspended for two years but no evidence has so far emerged that Orwell's naming of him caused this.Yet - says Garton Ash - nobody knows how IRD staff used Orwell's information in their contacts with MI6. "What remains unsettling about the actual list sent to Celia is the way in which this symbol of political independence and journalistic honesty is drawn into collaboration with a bureaucratic department of propaganda, however marginal the collaboration".Orwell had earlier proposed to Celia Kirwan. In 1949 he ended a letter to her "with much love".Yesterday Garton Ash said: "To me, Orwell's reputation is barely blemished. It is a tremendously human story. If if he had recovered from TB, and you and I had been sitting with him five years later, I think he might have said 'It was a mistake'."
