this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2023
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that and Nazi Germany. Or as Orwell said it was... Totalitarianism.
Yeah, he was basically warning Socialists off getting in bed with Stalinists and similar regimes just because their causes appeared to align. The cure must not be worse than the disease.
i would argue that he saw the soviets as the bigger threat at the time, considering the Nazis got beat a few years beforehand and a lot of the left in the west were fanboying the Soviet Union at the time (1947-1948)
He was a socialist which contrary to American reactionary rhetoric is incompatible with communism.
You are missing the point of the book IMO. The threat is not necessarily external.
It was pretty easy to see totalitarianism as a dangerous global trend at the time, since it was in Germany, Italy, Spain, Soviet Union, China, Eastern Europe. Apart from Eastern Europe, these countries all "chose" it for themselves.
I never said anything about the threat coming from the soviets, after all it was never about Russia invading the UK, but rather he modelled the dystopian government based on the inner workings of the Soviet Union, because he witnessed it during his time in Spain before the Stalin aligned republic and the anarchist split.