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> In this scintillating book, Nadine Akkerman demonstrates that women were unlikely to be suspected as intelligencers and, if unmasked, were usually treated mor
by Hokusai 6y ago
> In this scintillating book, Nadine Akkerman demonstrates that women were unlikely to be suspected as intelligencers and, if unmasked, were usually treated more leniently than men.
This reminds me a passage from "Homage to Catalonia" from George Orwell:
"My wife was lying in bed all the while; obviously there might have been half a dozen sub-machine-guns under the mattress, not to mention a library of Trotskyist documents under the pillow. Yet the detectives made no move to touch the bed, never even looked underneath it. I cannot believe that this is a regular feature of the Ogpu routine. One must remember that the police were almost entirely under Communist control, and these men were probably Communist Party members themselves. But they were also Spaniards, and to turn a woman out of bed was a little too much for them. This part of the job was silently dropped, making the whole search meaningless."
- inetsee 6y agoI love your paintings ;).
- lostlogin 6y agoThat book has an account going over the top in trench warfare and also describes bayoneting someone. It’s bad enough reading it, let alone being there. An independent account of what Blair was like post war would be interesting.
- pjc50 6y agoPTSD? Hard to tell; it would have been endemic at that time between and after the two great wars. You can detect traces of it in his later work; more directly, having encountered actual Stalinists in Catalonia he became a committed anti-Communist while remaining a socialist, an important political distinction which it is hard for some modern readers to understand. Orwell would have seen trauma before Catalonia, during his time as a colonial policeman in Burma. "Shooting an Elephant" https://www.orwell.ru/library/articles/elephant/english/e_eleph https://www.orwell.ru/library/articles/elephant/english/e_el... gives a taste of that. (obvious content warning applies)