Anti-Sovietism

And Animal Farm had a very, very hard time indeed getting a publisher because of the efforts of someone we now know to have been a KGB agent in the British Ministry of Information, a man named Peter Smolka, who tirelessly worked to put around the idea among wartime publishers that Orwell, in criticizing the great Soviet ally, was undermining the war effort against him.

A line which actually, and here is, if you like, a literary, historical, cultural irony, which also seems to have persuaded T.S. Eliot, who, though he was a friend of Orwell's and had been invited by Orwell to appear on his BBC show, given every opportunity by him, that he was a well-known reactionary, to air his views, declined to publish Arnold Farmer on the grounds that he was anti-Soviet.

So that Orwell is in the position of being accused of selling himself out to the other side in order to get sales and publicity, and is then denied these things by the same people.

Is it really...

Almost all of them were immediately arrested and executed, but we thought that would be the way to set off a war against, uh, against Russia.

Uh, now, the f- big challenge the United States had when trying to create a network of anti-Soviet or anti-Moscow Ukrainians was that we didn't know any of them.

During the war, of course, we had been an ally of the Soviet Union, so we didn't spy on them.

We didn't know any anti-Soviet partisans or underground organizers.

They were on the other side.

So we made a wonderfully, uh, coherent deal with General Reinhard Gehlen.

He turned up, uh, at an American, uh, base s- a few days after the war ended, turned himself in, and the deal was very simple.

The Americans agreed instead, that instead of hanging Gehlen, they would hire him and pay him handsomely.

They've got massive problems with the trains, so presumably reliant on rail replacement buses.

And there are signs of growing anti-Soviet feeling because the Red Army is still stationed in Hungary and people have had enough of it.

Gera is due to go for a meeting actually with Tito on the Adriatic.

So he misses some sort of warning signs in the next few days.

However, of course, from the other side's point of view, in this case, particularly the Russians' point of view, all of this is a spear pointed right at their throat.

What was the anti-Soviet NATO military alliance is now the anti-Russian one because they clearly are not allowed to join it.

And so they clearly are still the object of it.

And the Americans who implemented this policy this whole time, they said, like, for example, Bill Clinton, the most guilty of all, or tied with Bush and Obama and Biden, for most guilty of all here, he goes, hey, we don't want to recreate dividing lines in Europe.

I just like maybe didn't have the supernatural fortitude that somebody would require in order to accomplish this task that was thrust upon him.

And that's how we get at this, like this, like sort of subversively anti-communist, anti-Soviet, like read of mine.

Right.

Which is this idea that like we're recasting this folktale where this guy like didn't have what it took and, And we're sort of being like, was it really that surprising or that bad that he didn't have what it took to like to accomplish this great task? You know, like I'm not necessarily saying it's a one for one with sort of like accomplishing communism.

Uh, Mötley Crüe was on there in the ear- early '80s.

They mentioned, uh, uh, Kiss as being somehow, uh, uh, uh, anti-Soviet fanatics, which I don't know where that came from.

Um, they just saw, uh, but really what they saw was, um, Americans being happy with these groups, with these bands, and being able to do this, and of course, the Soviets couldn't do it.

Um, and they just continued to pull away, and especially as far as the youth was concerned, um, and the idea of the Soviet, you know, Stalin, Stalin was gone.

Um, Donna Summer, eroticism.

Tina Turner, sex, meaning promoting a sexual revolution.

Van Halen, anti-Soviet propaganda.

I don't know where they're with any sort of anti-Soviet propaganda.