George Orwell, born Eric Blair, formed his
political sensibilities fairly late in life, a fact that's perhaps surprising given his
reputation. In an essay called 'Why I Write,' Orwell describes himself as reluctantly political,
and speculates that had he been born in a peaceful time he might not have been political
at all. Orwell's catalyst came in 1936 and 1937 when he traveled to Spain to work as a journalist
during the Spanish Civil War. On arrival, he decided to enlist in the fight against Francisco Franco.
Orwell speculated that had he been asked why, he would have said 'to fight against Fascism.' If
he had been asked what for, he would have only said 'common decency.' Some elements of his political
thinking were already in place. He instinctively felt sympathy towards the working class and
distrust towards authority. When he arrived in Barcelona, a city that had converted in wartime
to a worker-owned classless structure, he said 'there was much in it i did not understand, in some
ways i did not even like it, but i recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting
for.' Orwell was assigned to a Marxist militia group associated with Leon Trotsky which was allied with
a Communist militia group associated with Stalin and the Soviet Union. After months of fighting
and making friends in his militia, Orwell was shot in the throat by a sniper, an experience he
described as 'very interesting.' Like being at the center of an explosion, followed by a painless
shock that made him feel like he shriveled up to nothing. Orwell survived and the injury
meant that he effectively sat on the sidelines during a major political shift: the Communist
faction with allegiance to the Soviet Union had gained influence in the Spanish government
and moved to eliminate their political competition - Orwell's Trotskyist group. This was a betrayal
since they'd been fighting on the same side of the war. Before long, virtually everyone Orwell
knew was either killed or thrown in jail. They were charged with conspiracy, among other
false claims, which was picked up and spread around the world by press on the Left. After making
some efforts to help his friends, Orwell felt his own arrest was imminent. He fled the country and
returned to England. The experience changed him. Orwell believed what happened in Spain was linked
to the Soviet Union, where political purges were also being conducted, with lies and propaganda to
justify them. He also believed that people in the West were falling for it and wrote 'it was of
utmost importance to me that people in Western Europe should see the Soviet regime for what
it really was.' He published Animal Farm, which was a thinly guised critique of the Soviet Union,
effectively saying it wasn't the happy free and equal place that it claimed to be. In reality it
was a highly unequal place, where a dictatorial minority used propaganda and political terror to
manipulate the masses against their own interests. Orwell summarized the absurdity and the injustice
of the situation in a proclamation made by the ruling pigs on the farm: 'all animals are equal
but some animals are more equal than others.' He warned of the danger of political ignorance
in such a society in the character of Boxer, who for years loyally works himself to exhaustion. His
usefulness gone, Boxer isn't granted the retirement that was promised, but instead is slaughtered for
meat and glue. His concerns with the Soviet Union were part of a broader concern on the nature of
truth and the way truth is manipulated in politics. He brought attention to people's tendency to
distort reality according to their political convictions. Reflecting on the Spanish
Civil War, Orwell wrote: 'what impressed me then, and has impressed me ever since is that
atrocities are believed in or disbelieved in solely on grounds of political predilection.
Everyone believes in the atrocities of the enemy and disbelieves in those of his own side,
without ever bothering to examine the evidence.' Orwell believed intellectuals and the media - the
people who live in the world of ideas - were prone to being especially out of touch with reality.
This quote is often falsely attributed to him but it does capture his general position and he
did say something similar. Reviewing the media coverage of the Civil War, Orwell said: 'in Spain for
the first time I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the
relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. I saw great battles reported where there had been
no fighting and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed. I saw troops who had
fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot fired
hailed as the heroes of imaginary victories; and I saw newspapers in London retailing these
lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that had never
happened. I saw in fact history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought
to have happened according to various "party lines."' He thought propaganda on the Fascist's side was
even worse and concluded: 'this kind of thing is frightening to me because it often gives me the
feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Concerned with the
effect this would have on history he said: 'I am willing to believe that history is for the most
part inaccurate and biased but what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that
history could be truthfully written. In the past people deliberately lied, or they unconsciously
colored what they wrote, or they struggled after the truth well knowing that they must make many
mistakes; but in each case they believed that "the facts" existed and were more or less discoverable.
Orwell believed breaking our agreement that there is such a thing as a shared objective reality
is a necessary condition for totalitarianism. Totalitarianism became a major focus of Orwell's
career and combined his criticism of Fascism, Soviet Communism, and the general willingness of
people to bend reality for political purposes at society's expense. He described totalitarianism
as the suppression of individuality for the sake of political orthodoxy. He wrote that 'it not only
forbids you to express, even to think certain thoughts, but it dictates what you shall think, it
creates an ideology for you, it tries to govern your emotional life as well as setting up a code
of conduct.' In the totalitarian society of 1984 Winston Smith's individuality is so tightly
controlled that he's not even allowed to think a thought that breaks the orthodoxy of his political
party. People who do commit thoughtcrime are either killed or re-educated through torture until
their minds are realigned with party orthodoxy. Orwell was responding to totalitarianism spreading
at the time in countries like Germany, Italy and the Soviet Union, but he also thought it was
spreading in more subtle forms back at home in England through socially enforced unofficial
political orthodoxy. Many people participating would do so voluntarily. Voluntarily censoring
themselves when it came to certain subjects and voluntarily conforming their beliefs to
whatever their political party tells them. Orwell said those types of people
effectively have gramophone minds. Minds that play whatever record someone places on
them. In 198, Winston Smith's wife is a portrait of that person, willingly surrendering her
body and mind to the party of Big Brother, a process that Orwell believed dehumanizes people
as they willingly surrender their identity and in effect become a machine. But he knew not everyone
would voluntarily believe what they're told and argued that in order for totalitarian regimes
to control the broader public they'd need to break down belief in objective truth, giving
them a schizophrenic relationship with truth that allows them to believe the changing nature of
reality as is presented to them by party politics. Orwell wrote 'the peculiarity of the totalitarian
state is that though it controls thought, it doesn't fix it. It sets up unquestionable
dogmas and it alters them from day to day. It needs the dogmas because it needs absolute
obedience from its subjects, but it can't avoid the changes which are dictated by the needs of power
politics. It declares itself infallible and at the same time it attacks the very concept of objective
truth.' He believed there were totalitarian trends in language since language could be used to
dull the truth, hide reality, and even numb the minds of people listening. This is captured in
Newspeak in 1984: a language that narrows every year, trying to narrow the range of thought and
eventually make unorthodox thought impossible. Orwell was concerned that totalitarianism was
spreading worldwide and argued that there were two safeguards against it: one is that truth
exists despite people trying to claim otherwise, and the other safeguard is the liberal tradition
of freedom and equality, which guarantees the right to argue for truth against political pressures
that might make truth unpopular. He defined liberty saying 'if liberty means anything at all it means
the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.' He was absolute in his defense of liberty
saying 'any attack on intellectual liberty, and on the concept of objective truth, threatens
in the long run every department of thought.' He tied his ideas together in a journal entry
written by Winston Smith in 1984 which says: 'Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two
make four. If that is granted all else follows.' Although he defended individual liberty, George
Orwell was not a liberal in the traditional sense of the word. He was anti-capitalist,
believing that capitalism is exploitative and that money had distorting effects on truth. For
example, writers might follow profit incentives and say what they think people want to hear,
rather than saying what they think is true. He also believed class inequality led
to inequalities in political influence, making capitalist societies
inherently flawed democracies. The social model that best upheld the principles
of freedom and equality, he argued, was democratic Socialism. Democratic Socialism to Orwell
didn't mean a welfarist version of capitalism. It meant using democracy to vote in a new, mostly
classless society, with centralized means of production and income levels controlled to the
point of being approximately - but not exactly - equal. Orwell's support for democratic Socialism
motivated more of his work than many realize. As he explained in a preface for Animal Farm, the
book wasn't condemning Socialism. It was trying to separate it from Soviet Communism and allow
for a revival of Socialism. His most extensive argument for democratic Socialism is in 'The Lion And The Unicorn written in England in 1941, while German bombers flew overhead. Although
Hitler's regime was morally wrong, Orwell argued that the English could learn something practical
from it. He said of the english ruling class: 'to understand Fascism they would have to study
the theory of Socialism, which would have forced them to realize that the economic system by which
they lived was unjust, inefficient and out of date.' Orwell believed Hitler's military success
while appropriating aspects of Socialism physically debunked capitalism, and once and for
all proved that a planned economy is stronger than a planless one. He described Fascism as a
form of capitalism that borrows from socialism features that make it efficient for war purposes,
and he distinguishes the two saying Socialism aims for a world state of free and equal human beings. It takes equality of human rights for granted, and Fascism does the opposite. Fascism is the
belief in human inequality, and in the case of Germany, German superiority. Orwell argued
that for England to win the war, they should turn it into a revolutionary war, waging war
against both Germany and class inequality. At the end of the war, Orwell openly reflected
on those claims and said in some aspects he was wrong, but he still believed in the Socialist
cause. Summarizing his own career in 1946, he said: 'the Spanish war and other events in 1936 and 37
turned the scale and thereafter i knew where I stood. Every line of serious work that I have
written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for
democratic Socialism. Orwell lived long enough to see an influential critique published that
said Socialism itself leads to totalitarianism, and he responded, effectively agreeing that it
was a threat, but arguing that the injustice of capitalism made it a risk worth taking. In one
of the final essays of his career he wrote: 'a Socialist United States of Europe seems to me
the only worthwhile political objective today,' which would be founded on the principles
of liberty, equality and internationalism, which he believed was being held back by the
'apathy and conservatism of people everywhere.' The end of World War II freed Orwell to write more
outside of politics, often playfully. He praises the beauty of the common toad a subject he chose
because toads never get much of a boost from poets. And he wrote at length about his favorite bar, the Moon Under Water, and the ten qualities that made it the perfect pub, only to say there is no such place
as the Moon Under Water. He did say there was a bar with eight of those ten qualities. The two things
it missed were draft stout and china mugs. In more serious writing he explored the
nature of hedonism, and said that modern inventions like film and the radio weaken
our consciousness and dull our curiosity, and instead we should try to preserve
patches of simplicity in our lives and apply a litmus test to new products from
science and industry: 'does this make me more human or less human?' But in Orwell's own assessment,
politics brought out the best in him, writing: 'looking back through my work I see it is
invariably where I lacked a political purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed
into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally.' There
are no surviving film or audio records of George Orwell but it's likely through his political
writing that he'll go on being remembered.
Orwell was a rapist