Ignoble Ig-nazi-o?(response to essays about double-dealing of Ignazio Silone, Italian Communist Party member.)

Nation, The, June, 2000 by Hitchens, Christopher

When I read the various essays and disclosures about the treachery and double-dealing of Ignazio Silone, who acted as an informer for Mussolini's police while occupying a leadership position in the Italian Communist Party, I confess that I had to entertain a vulgar journalistic question, which pushed itself to the front of the psychological and political and literary ones.

The question was this: How will Alexander Cockburn contrive to add this to his bill of indictment against George Orwell? Nor had I long to wait. In a Nation column demagogically titled "Even Worse Than ...