‘Orwells List’ is rightfully controversial. Im not gonna try and fully defend him siding with the British Goverment against anyone

But I do think to judge him fairly you gotta understand a couple things

• it was written in 1949

• it called out people who he thought were too closely tied to Stalin’s Russia

• the British Establishment at the time were nominally friendly with the Stalin government

• Orwell was unhappy with Soviet Communists due to their liberal collaboration and repression of anarchist Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War

• Orwell was always explicitly anti-stalinist

So I don’t think he’s immune from historical judgement, but I do think that modern conclusions of Orwell as a kind of ‘counter-revolutionary’ miss a lot of valuable context

He definitely wasn’t just informing on people whom he thought were ‘too socialist’, even if from a 2026 perspective he had more in common with the communists he was listing

And it’s worth noting that this was years before American McCarthyism and the associated witchhunt

Can I ask, what’s the (ill-advised) use case for this?

I don’t know anything about electronics but I readily believe this is a dangerous cable

But what I don’t get is what people want it for. I’ve never been in a situation that calls for this