#stalin

Let's be precise about what @queercodedangel got wrong.

What the IRD list actually was:

A private notebook, handed to one person at the IRD, listing individuals Orwell thought were unsuitable to write anti-stalinist propaganda - not people he wanted arrested, surveilled, fired, or harmed - and none of them were.

Orwell believed these specific people were Stalinist sympathizers who would undermine the work of countering Stalinism. You can legitimately think that was a bad call - it was certainly a morally complicated one for Orwell. It was not, however, the act of an imperialist snitch. It was the act of someone who hated authoritarian Stalinism enough to do something uncomfortable about it, while continuing to publicly criticize the British state.

The tension between those two things evaporates the moment you understand Orwell's position: Stalinism wasn't socialism. It was fascism with better branding, and it was destroying the socialist project from within.

History proved Orwell right.

Orwell:

Got shot through the throat while fighting fascists in Spain

Spent decades producing some of the most devastating critiques of British imperialism ever written, including Burmese Days, and Shooting an Elephant.

Called himself a Democratic Socialist his entire adult life and meant it.

Wrote that "every line of serious work I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism."

@queercodedangel is taking one late-life episode, stripping it of all context, and canceling one of the sharpest anti-totalitarian, anti-imperialist pens of the twentieth century - because he wouldn't excuse Stalin's crimes. That's apparently the price of admission to the 2026 left - being ignorant enough to deny that Stalin was a monster.

Calling that "snitching" tells you nothing about Orwell. It tells you that for some people, anti-Stalinism is a greater sin than imperialism ever was - and you can only take that position if you know nothing about what Stalinism was.

That sucking vacuum of ignorance where actual knowledge should be doesn't inspire a single second of hesitation before they confidently preach provable falsehoods. The less @queercodedangel knows about Orwell, the IRD list, or Stalin's crimes, the more confident the verdict. This is what happens when a generation decides memes and reels are sufficient substitutes for actually reading anything.

Orwell spent his life fighting this kind of epistemic laziness - the willingness to flatten complex realities into politically useful, emotionally resonant, self-affirming fictions.

This is why Gen Z desperately needs to read the Orwell and Huxley they've been told to avoid.

In fact, it is precisely the one who today is considered responsible for the Holodomor who most decisively promoted “affirmative action” on behalf of the Ukrainian people. In 1921, he rejected the thesis of those who claimed that “the Ukrainian Republic and the Ukrainian nation were inventions of the Germans. It is obvious, however, that there is a Ukrainian nation, and it is the duty of the Communists to develop its culture.” Starting from these assumptions, the “Ukrainization” of culture, schools, the press, publishing, party cadres and the state apparatus was developed. The implementation of this policy was given particular impetus by Lazar Kaganovich, who was a trusted collaborator of Stalin’s and who in March 1925 became party secretary in Ukraine. The results were not long in coming. In 1931, the publication of books in Ukrainian “reached its peak with 6,218 titles out of 8,086, almost 77%,” while “the percentage of Russians in the party, equal to 72% in 1922, had fallen to 52%.” It must also be borne in mind the development of the Ukrainian industrial infrastructure, on whose necessity Stalin once again insisted.

One can try to minimize this by referring to the persistent monopoly of power exercised in Moscow by the CPSU. And, yet, this policy of “Ukrainization” had such a strong impact that it faced resistance from Russians: The latter were, however, disappointed by the solution given to the national question in the USSR. They resented Russia’s equalizing with the other federal republics, they resented the rights granted to minorities within the Russian Republic, they resented the regime’s anti-Russian rhetoric […] and they resented the fact that the Russians, were the only nationality in the federation that had neither their own party nor their own academy of sciences.

If this is not enough proof for Stalin not being a Russian chauvinist(even though he was Georgian) because Losurdo is a marxist scholar let me further quote anti-communist Reaganite scholar Robert Conquest he says and I quote:

A policy of ‘Ukrainianization’ was formalized in April 1923, at the XIIth Congress of the Russian Communist Party. For the first time since the 18th century, a government firmly established in the Ukraine had as one of its professed aims the protection and development of the Ukrainian language and culture […]. Ukrainian cultural figures who returned to the country came in the genuine hope that even a Soviet Ukraine might be the scene of a national revival. And, to a high degree, they were right—for a few years. Poetry and fiction, linguistic and historical writing, established themselves on a scale and with an intensity extremely exciting to all classes, while the older literature was reprinted on a massive scale.

So what kind of vibe would you get from being there?

Hunger, prison, deportations

Easy access to food? clothes you like? travel?

Sex education? LGBTQ+? Safety?

Remember that you have nothing of your own. Do you even deserve it?