the New York Daily News had printed an editorial saying that Nineteen Eighty-Four was an attack on the British Labour Government, Orwell was asked by Francis Henson to make a statement and wrote: My recent novel is not intended as an attack on socialism or on the British Labour Party (of which I am a supporter) but as a show-up of the perversions to which a centralized economy is liable and which have already been partly realized in Communism and fascism . . . The scene of the book is laid in Britain in order to emphasize that the English-speaking races are not innately better than anyone else
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