Same here, this is a great discussion.
If you mean “apologist” in the sense of “offering a reason for, explaining,” then sure: but the word carries such a weight of “mitigating, explaining away, rationalizing” that I felt the need to dispute it. You certainly weren’t spitting it at me.
It would be good to know more about the IRD: propaganda is manipulation, sure, but there’s a huge difference between Churchill’s speeches and the color-coded Homeland Security Terror Popsicle. So I guess I’d be a lot more comfortable with his actions were the IRD more of the former kind.
I think his actions are far darker from our perspective: after being bombed in WWII and fighting, after foodlines and privation, seeing the Soviets on the rise–it’s easier for me to credit his actions as at least wanting to be virtuous. There’s also his involved relationship with Kirwan: this isn’t a case of a private citizen “dropping a dime” on somebody.
The question for me is: if the man who envisioned 1984 saw a similar horror in the Soviet Union, did he think that the IRD, and his actions re: the list, were like or unlike the horror he was engaged in fighting? Did he miss the irony, or did he accept it as being part of a politics that was for all its failings pragmatically better than its foe’s?
