1/On the 70th anniversary of Orwell’s death, 1/21/1950, worth noting that a year before he passed, Orwell gave the British govt a list of people he thought were Stalinist “crypto-communists, fellow-travelers or inclined that way & should not be trusted” https://web.archive.org/web/20160305071504/http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2003/09/25/orwells-list/

2/ Per the late Christopher Hitchens, the list “included at least one KGB agent,” & “was compiled at a time when the worst excesses of Stalinism were denied, defended, or laughed off by many British intellectuals” https://www.newspapers.com/image/513644476 

3/ Not surprisingly, the revelation of Orwell’s list engendered bogus charges https://www.newspapers.com/image/513644476  of the canard of “McCarthyism”, for the same uninformed, ahistorical, Communist-abetting “reasons” behind that canard https://humanevents.com/2014/01/29/mccarthyism-by-the-numbers/