George Orwell is one of the 20th century’s most trenchant critics of totalitarian regimes.
His most famous works, 1984 (1949) and Animal Farm (1945), presage a kind of thinking about totalitarianism that links writers as disparate as Christopher Hitchens (God Is Not Great; 2007), Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale; 1985), Suzanne Collins (The Hunger Games; 2008) and even JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series (1997-2007).
A Cliff Notes version: Totalitarian regimes make up their own rules that are absurd, violent, deadly.
5. He was certainly astute. “The petty Indian capitalist exploits the town worker with the utmost ruthlessness, the peasant lives from birth to death in the grip of the money-lender. But all this is an indirect result of British rule, which aims half-consciously at keeping India as backward as possible. The classes most loyal to Britain are the princes, the landowners and the business community – in general, the reactionary classes who are doing fairly well out of the status quo,” he wrote in the essay The English Revolution.
6. Orwell let no one off the hook, not even the English Labour Party that formed the government after World War 2. “However horrible this system [fascism] may seem to us, it works. It works because it is a planned system geared to a definite purpose, world-conquest, and not allowing any private interest, either capitalist or worker, to stand in its way. British capitalism does not work, because it is a competitive system in which private profit is and must be the main objective,” he wrote, in Shopkeepers At War, another essay in the collection The Lion and the Unicorn.
7. Orwell captured the zeitgeist of the times, a changing world order divided between the rich and powerful classes and the working poor, especially in the years preceding World War 2. He preached a form of socialism that valued not utopia or bloodshed, but brotherhood. “At normal times a capitalist economy can never consume all that it produces, so that there is always a wasted surplus (wheat burned in furnaces, herrings dumped back into the sea etc. etc.) and always unemployment. In time of war, on the other hand, it has difficulty in producing all that it needs, because nothing is produced unless someone sees his way to making a profit out of it,” he wrote, in Shopkeepers At War.
8. For Orwell, who studied neither Marxism nor philosophy formally, life experiences drove his polemic. He lived between Paris and London, mostly poor and hard-pressed, working various jobs — as a private-school teacher, a dishwasher at a hotel, a book seller — and writing prolifically. His first book, Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), describes some of this time.
9. He spent time in industrial Northern England in the winter of 1936, on the advice of his publisher, the socialist Victor Gollancz. The working and living conditions he observed here formed the basis of The Road to Wigan Pier (1937).
10. His alias was a combination of the names of the reigning monarch of England at the time, George V, and a river in Suffolk. He adopted it shortly before the publication of Down and Out… in 1933.
11. In 1936, he married Eileen O’Shaughnessy, a poet and Oxford graduate who was once a pupil of JRR Tolkien. A year before she met Orwell, in 1934, O’Shaughnessy wrote a poem titled End of the Century, 1984. In it, she predicted a dystopian future in which forms of culture and literature were destroyed, and thought control was rife. O’Shaughnessy’s concerns likely drew on the growing influence of Adolf Hitler’s party in Germany. Orwell’s 1984, published a year before his death, presents a similar dystopian world, but makes no mention of what inspired it.
12. Soon after his wedding, Orwell and O’Shaughnessy moved to Spain, where both played a role in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), in which Republicans rose against General Franco’s army, determined to establish a socialist democratic government. Orwell worked on the side of the Left-leaning Spanish Republicans, serving as a volunteer soldier for the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (POUM) militia. O’Shaughnessy worked in the radio and print propaganda unit of that party.
13. The Spanish Civil War was a defining moment for intellectuals, journalists, writers and artists of the time, one in which they could live out their democratic and socialist ideals. Orwell shone a vital light on the Left’s failings and the Right’s. He retained his focus on humanist values of equality and dignity, and was committed to the idea of a flourishing humanity, which, he said, could only be achieved by an intellectually moral Left.
14. Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia (1938) details his time on the Front. He was in distinguished company there. The writer Ernest Hemingway, poets Pablo Neruda and Federico Garcia Lorca (who was assassinated by General Franco’s troops), journalists Martha Gellhorn, John Dos Passos and Arthur Koestler, Tristan Tzara (founder of the influential Dadaist art movement) and Andre Malraux (art critic, and later minister of culture for France) were among the public intellectuals who were either war correspondents or volunteer soldiers against General Franco’s army. The Republicans would eventually lose, and the world would unravel into a period of fascism, Nazism and war.
15. Orwell was wounded in the Civil War, by a bullet passing within millimetres of his carotid artery. He was also present in Barcelona when Soviet-sponsored hit squads attempted to suppress the Trotskyists (a subset of Marxists who believe in the vital necessity of permanent revolution), whom he and O’Shaughnessy were accused of spying for.
16. The duo famously survived a two-hour raid by Stalin’s men in Spain. As the soldiers swept their room, searching for anti-Russia propaganda, O’Shaughnessy remained seated on their hotel bed, passports and chequebook under the mattress.
17. As the Spanish Civil War imploded, amid infighting and the non-interventionist approach of Western countries despite Nazi Germany and Italy’s support for the Spanish Nationalists, Orwell and O’Shaughnessy fled to France in 1937.
18. By 1938, his health had deteriorated. He spent time in Morocco and then England, recovering from a lung haemorrhage. As the world powers lurched towards a war, Orwell wrote his fourth novel, Coming Up for Air (about an insurance salesman who seeks to recreate cherished memories after he wins a large sum in a bet), and Inside the Whale and Other Essays, while O’Shaughnessy nursed him back to health.
19. Was George Orwell disappointed in socialism, as so many of his contemporaries were? His nuanced position distinguished between socialism and communism. Fascism — which many others saw as a direct outcome of communist states — was, in Orwell’s analysis, a symbol of capitalism. “Fascism, at any rate the German version, is a form of capitalism that borrows from Socialism just such features as will make it efficient for war purposes,” he wrote in Shopkeepers At War, in 1941.
20. Orwell’s critique of Nazism aimed to reveal the hypocrisy at the core of its ideology. It didn’t take much to see that the German state was a puppet of the rich, more invested in ensuring their survival than the common citizen’s. “Socialism aims, ultimately, at a world-state of free and equal human beings. It takes the equality of human rights for granted. Nazism assumes just the opposite. The driving force behind the Nazi movement is the belief in human inequality, the superiority of Germans to all other races, and the right of Germany to rule the world,” he wrote in the same essay.
21. Certainly, his time in Northern England led him to understand why socialism was desperately needed in a capitalist political economy, but it was only when he fought against the Nationalist far right regime of General Franco that he became cognisant of the totalitarian nature of communist regimes too.
22. Orwell wanted to fight in World War 2, but he wasn’t drafted because of his poor health. Instead, he was asked to work for the British Broadcasting Company (BBC), delivering radio content aimed at drumming up support for Britain and the Allied Powers, among the people of the Indian subcontinent. O’Shaughnessy worked at BBC too. Orwell did not think much of his time there. Critics say his depiction of the Ministry of Truth in 1984 took inspiration from this time.
23. In 1944, the couple adopted a boy, named Richard Blair. O’Shaughnessy died the following year, following complications from a surgery. Orwell moved to Jura, an island in Scotland, to live with his sister Avril Blair Dunn. He contracted tuberculosis and died a few years later, in 1950, aged 46. Shortly before his death, he married Sonia Brownell, an editorial assistant on the literary magazine Horizon. She took on the name Orwell, went on to be one of his literary executors, and co-edited a four-volume collection of his works that was published in 1968.
24. Orwell’s position on anti-Semitism has been described as a mixture of “ignorance and insight”. He reported from Germany in 1945, spoke of the horrors of the Holocaust, and supported the influx of Jewish refugees into Britain. At the same time, his works contain references to stereotypes of Jewish appearance.
25. Orwell’s 1984 was a culmination of the many issues he wrote about through his years, and has rightly been called his masterpiece. But it is in his essays, poems and journalistic writings (including a column in the Left-leaning Tribune) that he advocates most strongly for an equal world order. “Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 [when he fought in the Spanish Civil War],” he wrote in his oft-quoted post-war essay Why I Write (1946), “has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism, as I understand it.” He always used the capital S when he wrote the word Socialism.
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