Insult to Orwell
MacDiarmid was attracted to fascism in the 1930s, and in 1941 he wrote that the Axis powers were “less dangerous than our own government in the long run and indistinguishable in purpose”.
Having been rejected by the Communist Party for being a Scottish Nationalist (and vice versa), he joined it in 1956 in support of the Soviet Union’s rape of Hungary, compounding that in 1968 with his praise of its repeat action in Czechoslovakia and, to my knowledge, never renounced such views.
Conversely, Orwell was generally consistent in his democratic socialist beliefs and justifiably earned his “secular saint” description.
John Birkett
Horseleys Park
St Andrews, Fife