Police watched Orwell for leftist leanings, records show

[dArKeR]

George Orwell's novel 1984 provides a fictional warning of the dangers of a totalitarian society in which the hero, Winston Smith, struggles with the thought police.

It now appears that his vision of blanket surveillance in the service of Big Brother was more prescient than even he could have known: a secret Metropolitan police file newly released at the British National Archives shows that Orwell was himself the subject of repeated special branch reports for more than 12 years of his life.

The file, from the police department dealing with political security, shows that it was Orwell's journey north in 1936 to research the living and working conditions of the working class for The Road to Wigan Pier that aroused the suspicions of the security services. Wigan's chief constable, Thomas Pey, reported to Scotland Yard that Orwell, the nom de plume of Eric Blair, was staying in "an apartment house in a working-class district" arranged by the local Communist Party.

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/world/archives/2005/07/19/2003264136

[wli]

1. Orwell was right except for expecting it 21 years early

[bananas]

2. longer version at the guardian

The original article at the Guardian is 12 paragraphs longer.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/guardianpolitics/story/0,,1530728,00.html

<snip same portion>

The file also reveals that special branch was also watching a close friend of Orwell's, Francis Westrope. Orwell spent much time in his secondhand bookshop in South End Green, Hampstead, which featured in his novel, Keep the Aspidistra Flying. Westrope was "known to hold socialist views, and considers himself an 'intellectual'." They believed he was forwarding "correspondence of a revolutionary character" to his socialist friends.

<11 more paragraphs>

[thegreatwildebeest]

3. I treally shouldn't be a surprise...

...considering that he fought in the Spanish Civil War, and basically wrote a glowingaccount of how socialists and communists stabbed the anarchists in the back during it (its funny to note that many socialist and left leaning publishers refused to publish it because it outed them for what they were...authoritarians).