ORWELL, George, & John Strachey.

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The Betrayal of the Left. First edition, first impression, of this vigorous attack on the British Communist Party for their support of the Nazi-Soviet pact and their adherence to Stalin's orders to adopt a neutral attitude towards Nazi Germany. It contains two essays by Orwell, "Fascism and Democracy" and "Patriots and Revolutionaries".The left-wing publisher Victor Gollancz (who published Orwell's works) was relentlessly harried by the British Communist Party for his and his writers' opposition to Stalin and Stalin's alliance with Hitler. The Party's hostility had led to membership in Gollancz's Left Book Club falling from 57,000 to 15,000 between 1939 and 1942. This volume was put together in response, collecting articles that had appeared in the Left News and providing a detailed critique of Communist Party policy between October 1939 and January 1941. It was published in March 1941; with the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in June, the Communist Party fully re-orientated to a fervent opposition to Germany. Gollancz meanwhile moved to closer support of the Soviet Union, and decided not to publish Animal Farm due to its implicit criticism of Stalin - this was the final Gollancz book with Orwell's work in it.Orwell's two contributions argue, respectively, that the materialism of the left led them to underestimate the emotional appeal of fascism, and that the revolutionary moment possible after Dunkirk was missed and the ruling class had re-asserted themselves.The total pri

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