Page "George Orwell" Paragraph 133

Orwell was opposed to rearmament against Nazi Germany — but he changed his view after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the outbreak of the war.

He left the ILP because of its opposition to the war and adopted a political position of " revolutionary patriotism ".

In December 1940 he wrote in Tribune ( the Labour left's weekly ): " We are in a strange period of history in which a revolutionary has to be a patriot and a patriot has to be a revolutionary.

" During the war, Orwell was highly critical of the popular idea that an Anglo-Soviet alliance would be the basis of a post-war world of peace and prosperity.

In 1942, commenting on journalist E. H. Carr's pro-Soviet views, Orwell stated: " all the appeasers, e. g. Professor E. H. Carr, have switched their allegiance from Hitler to Stalin.