Sir, - Your readers (February 13th) may have been confused to read in Alexander Cockburn's otherwise informative article on Sidney Blumenthal, completely gratuitous references to George Orwell.
Your readers should know that the underlying reason for these gratuitous swipes may well be because Orwell, in his book Homage to Catalonia, exposed the horrible, Stalinist lies of Cockburn's father, Claud Cockburn, who was the Daily Worker's correspondent in Spain during the Spanish Civil War. The elder Cockburn wrote under the pseudonym of Frank Pitcairn and peddled the lies of the Spanish Communist Party, one of which was that other leftwing militias were working for Franco and the Fascists. It was this type of garbage which contributed to the arrest and almost certain murder (and probably torture) in prison of Andreu Nin, the leftist leader, by Stalin's Spanish thugs.
George Orwell was probably the greatest political writer of this century and was, with Thomas Jefferson and Oliver Wendell Holmes, one of the greatest political writers of all time in the English language.
Did Orwell "snitch", or did he correctly read the mindset of the Communist leaders, ready to tell any lie, no matter how big, if it advanced the aims of the Soviet Union? Evidently, Orwell "snitched" on Alexander's father when he told the truth about events he had witnessed in Barcelona in 1937. - Yours, etc., Frank MacGabhann,
Charles Street West, Dublin 7.