Orwellian Birthday
It’s the birthday of the man who wrote Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-four (1949), George Orwell, born Eric Blair in a small village in Bengal, India (1903). He went to an English boarding school and then worked as a policeman in Burma before becoming a journalist.
…it wasn’t Fascism or Communism that was evil, but simply idealism taken to any extreme…
He wrote about the Spanish Civil War, and fought on the side of the loyalists, fighting against Franco. But he also witnessed the Stalinist faction of the communist party that began to suppress the other leftist groups, arresting them and censoring newspapers and organizing armed militias. Orwell himself had to go into hiding in order to avoid arrest or even execution by the Stalinists.
He eventually had to flee the country. The experience of the war changed his life. He came to believe that it wasn’t Fascism or Communism that was evil, but simply idealism taken to any extreme. At a time when most intellectuals still supported Communism in Russia, Orwell became one of the first leftist writers to speak out against Stalin. He began to work on a political allegory about the Communist revolution that became Animal Farm, about a group of farm animals that overthrow their farmer, Mr. Jones. Because England and Russia were still allies at the end of World War II, he had trouble publishing the book, but when Animal Farm finally came out after the war, it made Orwell famous.
Orwell spent the last years of his life writing Nineteen Eighty-four, about a future in which England has become a totalitarian state run by an anonymous presence known only as Big Brother. He died a few months after it was first published, but it has since been translated into sixty-two languages and has sold more than ten million copies.
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