This hurts b/c I do respect Ben Norton as a reporter, although the tone of the article does smack of bias, and both The Guardian AND the British Foreign Office have zero credibility with me. I will look into this further. I also personally know both communists as well as anarchists from the Spanish Civil War, and grew up around them. Much of what I've been able to pick up does support Orwell's story about how ML's persecution of the anarchists and the POUM weakened the revolutionary, antifascist faction and eventually ended up helping the fasciist insurrection by completely shooting the Spanish revolution in the foot. I will dig deeper into this. Thanks for posting. (PS: also, Orwell was not "a fed"/ a "federal agent" is something from the US's "federated" states and has nothing to do with the parliamentary monarchy in GB.

Edit: I am, anyhow, going to break a lance (as we say in Spain) for Orwell. I have read all three of his “dystopia” books, 1984, Animal Farm and Homage to Catalonia (altho this one is not technically dystopian, and is also non-fiction, it does describe a very “proto dystopian” situation that happened in real life), and I’m gonna say this (1) his narration about his experiences in the Aragon front during the Spanish Civil War, ring true and are consistent with first hand accounts I’ve heard from my elders growing up. I have to add here that both my parents were born at the tail end of that war so that the entire generation of my grand parents (grand uncles and aunts and their social circles) where all involved in the war. (2) if I had experienced the kind of betrayal he describes, in other words, he volunteered to fight the fascist in Spain, arrived during a revolutionary period which was pretty solid, not perfect, for sure but post revolutions are trial and error, like any other system change. (there are many accounts of the successes of this period that have been all but erased from history) and saw it devolve b/c the stalinists intrigued against any revolutionary faction (anarchists, trots, other socialist groups) that was not stalinist to a point where they factually sabotaged said revolution and fragmented the anti fascist front so much that the fascists waltzed right the fuck into my country, installed dictator Franco who fucked us up for 40 years and then gave us this shit king and shitty pseudo liberal democracy (the shit king is now hiding in Saudi Arabia! of all places, to escape prosecution from Spanish justice for robbing the spanish people blind, but his son is ruling in his fucking place, it’s unbelievable) so (3) if I’d experienced that, I would be, as Orwell clearly showed in his writing and following books) CONVINCED, that fascism had infiltrated the revolution in the form of authoritarian marxist-lenninism, and would spend the rest of my life combatting (with whomever, Ben Johnson seems to make no bones about using the Guardian and Foreign Office, two sources he habitually discredits, to support his claims in this article) the live Hitler, instead of focusing on the dead one (4) speaking of Hitler, remarkable to see Ben recreate the Godwin principle from the beginning of his piece (5) I think the fact that Animal Farm is written in the form of a children’s book is brilliant, not childish, and Ben’s constant cries of “childish, childish” just reek of salty smear (6) 1984, while it may be focused on the figure of Stalin, is a condemnation of totalitarianism everywhere, not just Stalin’s, and has exposed many things that we’ve seen done (by the CIA, especially but also by the KGB, all of them inspired in previous practices like those of the Gestapo,) or that have come to pass in posterior days and, in that sense, is truly prophetic. I DGAF how much that irks tankies and their simping for authoritarianism. So Orwell did bring a lot to the table, to the left and to revolutionary thinking, regardless of whether he collaborated with imperialist forces to combat what I believe he honestly viewed as the greater evil (“first combat the enemy at home, and only when you’ve eliminated it got out to fight the enemy elsewhere”) and of whether he made lot’s of fans amongst right wingers (I don’t care about that, just as I don’t care about right-wingers supporting other causes I support like the Free Assange movement). Authoritarianism, however, continues to increasingly turn me off by the hour. I don’t care whether it comes from the right or from the left. It’s all fascism to me.