In 1948, the Information Research Department (IRD) was formed by the British Foreign Office, which was/is covertly controlled by MI-6. The Cold War propaganda campaign embraced Animal Farm, which rapidly became a best-seller. ‘Animal Farm’ was published in the same month of the German surrender, May 1945, which was the perfect, convenient moment to launch a concerted attack on Soviet policies. Ironically, Orwell had unknowingly fallen into the clutches of the very propagandists and distorters of truth he vilified and satirised because his British publisher, Fredric Warburg, was a secret CIA asset who would later become notorious for publishing and distributing a CIA propaganda magazine ‘Encounter,’ for one of the CIA’s countless ‘front’ organisations, the ironically named Congress for Cultural Freedom. Orwell was opposed to totalitarianism in all its forms, whether Stalinist/Marxist/Communist, fascist or pseudo-democratic. This and his satirical, political novel, ‘Animal Farm,’ described succinctly the mechanisms of oppression and distortion of the truth by the state and the realities of political power. George Orwell (real name Eric Blair) wrote ‘1984,’ a grim novel of future totalitarianism in 1948.
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