From Garrick Alder
Re: John Newsinger’s ‘Orwell and the IRD in Lobster 38
The appearance since Lobster 45 of further details of Orwell’s dealings with the IRD has reminded me how very interested I was by Mr Newsinger’s admirable reappraisal of the Orwell/IRD incidents. Two things have struck me that seems to have escaped comment anywhere.
Firstly, that the March 1949 meeting between Orwell and Kirwan (during the former’s tubercular confinement in Gloucestershire) resulted in a list of potential recruits to IRD, and the so-called ‘blacklist’ was sent, apparently unsolicited, a month later.
Newsinger’s suggestion that Orwell was in all probability unaware of IRD’s nature is supported by a comment from Kirwan to superiors after the initial approach: ‘I discussed some aspects of our work with him in great confidence […] He was delighted to learn of them, and expressed his wholehearted and enthusiastic approval of our aims.’ (emphasis added)
I think one may safely guess that Kirwan did not tell Orwell the whole truth about the nature of IRD.
Secondly, I cannot comprehend why Michael Foot, a friend of Orwell’s in the 1930s and 1940s, said he found the letter ‘amazing’. At the most basic reading of the evidence, Orwell was effectively trying to prevent Soviet penetration of a government department.
Why this leads to the idea that he had abandoned Socialism, or had turned stool-pigeon, is unfathomable. Orwell knew that the 1940s ‘peace’ was no peace, and foresaw a nuclear war (which was close enough to the mark to earn him the cigar). He also knew enough to be sure in himself that letting actual or potential Soviet agents into a government anti-Soviet propaganda outfit (as he saw it) would be to allow enemy agents to reconnoitre and possibly subvert UK defences.
The month’s gap between the first list (of potentially useful people) and the unsolicited second list (of suspected ‘fellow-travellers’) suggest that a certain amount of wrestling went on between Orwell’s principles and ethics. And in the end, he decided it was far better to tell what he knew than to keep quiet and allow even a small Soviet victory.
A (agonised) patriot and a fervent anti-communist: how does this contradict what we know about Orwell, or lead us in any way to reappraise him? It’s certainly not as though he could have believed the people on the list would actively suffer through being named.
In short, with no evidence that Orwell had knowingly snitched to the spooks, and no indication that he was betraying his beliefs, I cannot see what all the fuss is about. The only possible value it seems to have is ironical, in that it could be seen as a ‘spin’ on Big Brother’s use of loved ones to betray. Which just goes to show that Orwell, as so often, was way ahead of the pack.
From Daniel Brandt
Re: US biological warfare in Korea and the activities of the Ford Foundation
I noticed your comments on ‘two Canadian scholars’ in Lobster 44 (p. 27) and the update in Lobster 45 (p. 47). Are you aware that these two published a book on the topic? I recently indexed it in NameBase. I wasn’t even aware of the book until I spotted it in a used book-store in San Antonio. (Not too weird the U.S. Air Force spooks have a huge presence in San Antonio, Texas, as there are several Air Force bases here.) This has to be the worst-distributed book in recent Western history. Here’s my Name-Base blurb on it. I certainly found it convincing and very well put together. Tons of documentation.
Endicott, Stephen and Hagerman, Edward, The United States and Biological Warfare: Secrets from the Early Cold War and Korea. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999. 275 pages.
This book presents a massive amount of evidence that the U.S. used biological warfare during the Korean War. What’s stunning about this is that so many Western scholars have dismissed such accusations for the last fifty years, following the lead of the U.S., which has consistently lied to Congress and the public on this issue. Despite an International Scientific Commission that interviewed hundreds of witnesses, and concluded in 1952 that the charges were credible beyond a reasonable doubt, Western scholars have always insisted that this Commission was a front for Red propaganda.
With newly declassified documents from the U.S., Canada, and Britain, and after interviewing key people in China who were on the scene in North Korea in 1950-1951, and with the co-operation of the Chinese Central Archives, the authors make a very persuasive case. They show that the U.S. program in germ warfare began when Japan’s records of experimentation on prisoners were appropriated after World War II. By the time Korea started, the U.S. had an offensive capability. The effort in Korea was more experimental than strategic, but it was definitely offensive rather than defensive, and was part of an ongoing development program within the bowels of the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence establishments.
Re: the comments in Lobster 45 p. 24, subhead ‘Monkey business?’, the Ford, Rockefeller, and Carnegie Foundations poured millions into women’s studies, black studies, and Mexican-American studies programs beginning in the early 1970s. From the Wall Street Journal, 27 January 1995:
‘Mariam Chamberlain, a former program officer of the Ford Foundation, estimates that Ford has donated $24 million to women’s studies projects from 1972 to 1992.’
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