There are a lot of tweets about Orwell being an "anti-fascist" showing up on my timeline because of his journalistic work in Homage To Catalonia, and I find this bothersome…

Let's be clear, Orwell's "anti-fascism" was a journalistic conceit. Let us not forget that, before this, he worked as a colonial bureaucrat and never saw the connection between fascism and colonialism…

And then after his journalistic flirtation with anti-fascism, which was largely driven by petty-bourgeois aesthetics rather than a real understanding of the meaning of fascism, he embraced anti-communism…

Yet again, he worked as a snitch for the MI-6. He named people as "communist" and his understanding of communism had to do with people being Jewish or gay. He also called Paul Robeson "anti-white". What an amazing "anti-fascist"!

Animal Farm and 1984 thus should be understood in this context of working for the MI-6, giving names, and also having the background as a colonial bureaucrat. He was never an actual anti-fascist. He just reported on anti-fascism and misunderstood its meaning…

At the end of the day he was a petty-bourgeois imperialist who thought he was more left than he actually was, and tried to justify his snitching with a really warped understanding of being a progressive. Honestly, stop celebrating this man.

There's some great stuff about Orwellian dystopian discourse and capitalism here: https://necrocapitalism.wordpress.com/2020/06/03/chapter-seven/