George Orwell
George Orwell was the pen name for Eric Arthur Blair (1903–1950), a leading English socialism writer and journalist who exposed the evils of totalitarianism in two novels published near the end of his life: Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.
The formative experience of Orwell's creative life was volunteering to fight the Spanish Fascist forces to keep them from overturning the democratically elected socialist government of Spain in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). He enlisted in the POUM (In English, Workers Party for Marxist Unity) Militia, and saw action on the Aragon front, where he fought side by side with Anarchists and Communists, as well as Republican regulars.
He became disillusioned with the Spanish government's policy of witholding arms from the POUM and the Anarchists, which he saw as an attempt by the Communists to water down the revolutionary nature of the Anti-Fascist resistance, and centralize power in the hands of the Moscow-backed Communist Party. Taking a bullet through his neck but surviving, Orwell was invalided to Barcelona, where he witnessed the Stalinist repression of Trotskyist and Anarchist parties. Orwell and his wife were forced to escape from Spain as fugitives, after the POUM was banned by the increasingly repressive regime.
Despite his persecution, Orwell continued to support the Republic upon his return to England, viewing a Communist dominated Spain as better than a Fascist Spain.Template:Fact-political He recounted his experiences in Spain in the book Homage to Catalonia. [1]
Orwell had only ten years left in his life when he returned. During that period he and his wife adopted a baby boy, but Orwell's wife died shortly thereafter.
In those ten years Orwell wrote his famous anti-communist classics described above, first spending three years on the short story Animal Farm (1944), and then perhaps five years on the longer novel 1984 (1949). Orwell continued championing Socialism right up to his death, writing a regular column in the left-labor Tribune paper, but strongly criticized the USSR, unusually for a left-winger of the period. He died of tuberculosis in 1950.
Quotes
"It cannot be said too often - at any rate, it is not being said nearly often enough - that collectivism is not inherently democratic, but, on the contrary, gives to a tyrannical minority such powers as the Spanish Inquisitors never dreamt of."
"War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it."
"The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them."
"Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I know it."
"I have no particular love for the idealised 'worker' as he appears in the bourgeois Communist's mind, but when I see an actual flesh-and-blood worker in conflict with his natural enemy, the policeman, I do not have to ask myself which side I am on."
"If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear."