Book Review:

The Betrayal of Dissent
by Scott Lucas

reviewed by Tom Mellen

To the surprise of many on the left, George Orwell worked for the 
top-secret Information Research Department, an organisation set 
up by the Attlee Labour Government in 1948 to generate anti-
communist, anti-Soviet propaganda for the consumption of the 
British people.

In 1949, he handed over a notebook of 135 names of friends and 
acquaintances whom he suspected of being sympathetic to 
communism. It contained a disparate bunch of progressives, 
including Charlie Chaplin, Harold Laski, EH Carr, Stephen Spender 
and Randall Swingler.

This, in itself, is not exactly a revelation — documents held by 
the Public Record Office proving that Orwell worked as an 
informer were released in 1996.

The Betrayal of Dissent is more than the beginning of a — 
long overdue reassessment of Orwell, "the wintry conscience of a 
generation which in the '30s had heard the call to the rasher 
assumptions of political faith", as VS Pritchett put it.

Scott Lucas's central argument is that what he terms "the 
canonisation of St George", far from strengthening the hand of 
the common man against "Big Brother", has served to stifle 
dissent.

Lucas uses this observation to expose the self-proclaimed 
contrarians, the "belligerati" of our own day — Christopher 
Hitchens, David Aaronovitch, Nick Cohen, Johann Hari and other 
intellectuals on the "left" who have not only been cheerleaders 
for the war against Iraq but have attacked the anti-war movement 
and provided the warmongers with a sophisticated "humanitarian", 
"left-wing" defence not only of the invasion and occupation of 
Afghanistan and Iraq but also of any future wars waged against 
"totalitarianism".

Lucas draws parallels between Christopher Hitchens' rounding on 
many of his former allies in the left-wing intelligentsia, and 
Orwell's list of communist subversives.

Like Orwell, Hitchens has set himself up as the policeman of the 
left, attacking "appeasers" of Serbo-fascism during the blitzing 
of Yugoslavia and defenders of "Islamo-fascism" — or appeasers 
who dare to oppose a war that is serving to liberate the Iraqi 
people.

Tariq Ali, Harold Pinter, John Pilger and Noam Chomsky all faced 
the vitriolic zeal of this convert to humanitarian militarism. 
Anyone who marched against the war, according to Hitchens, has 
the blood of the innocent Iraqis who were slaughtered by Saddam, 
on their hands.

"I have no hesitation in describing this mentality, carefully and 
without heat, as soft on crime and soft on fascism", Hitchens 
declares. "No political coalition is possible with such people."

Of course, at a time when all the excuses for the invasion and 
occupation of Iraq are being exploded (Where are the WMD? Where 
is the evidence linking Saddam Hussein with al-Qaida?) the pro-
war "left" is performing a vital service for British imperialism.

Their assertion that the anti-war movement are "moral 
relativists" who are appeasers of the Socialist Party of Serbia, 
the Ba'ath Party of Iraq and the Workers' Party of Korea serves 
to provide the illegal, predatory series of wars waged by British 
and US imperialism with a moral veneer.

Far from being a neo-colonial adventure, these wars by the 
richest countries in the world against the poorest are portrayed 
as "liberal interventions", even manifestations of 
"internationalism", as Blair likes to put it.

Scott Lucas has done a commendable job of knocking Orwell off his 
seemingly unassailable pedestal. At the same time, his expose of 
the role of the belligerati in providing the "moral" and 
"humanitarian" rationale for imperialist war is detailed, well- 
researched, and, above all, timely.

The Betrayal of Dissent is in major bookstores

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Morning Star, British socialist newspaper