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JaneT's avatar

He worked at the BBC during the war. Maybe it was a picture of England in 1948.

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Kent Clizbe's avatar

Orwell fought on the "Republican" side (actually Anarchist/Communist) in the Spanish Civil War--1936-37. He was there with pretty much all the English-speaking communists who later rose to prominence.

Orwell fell in with a non-Stalinist Spanish group, and saw what communism was all about.

That experience was the source of 1984. Written in 1948, he told the story of Stalin's communist totalitarian dictatorship--as he had lived it, and knew it.

"The revolution Orwell encountered in Barcelona was unique in European history. It had been initiated, in response to the fascist putsch, by the large Spanish anarchist movement (the C.N.T. (Confederación Nacional de Trabajadores) / F.A.I. (Federación Anarquista Ibérica — C.N.T./F.A.I. posters), with the support of an independent and anti-Stalinist Marxist party, the P.O.U.M. (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista — P.O.U.M. recruiting poster), in whose militia both Orwell and Milton had enlisted. It was a revolution organized from the bottom up, with worker and peasant collectives taking direct control of the Catalonian economy. It was also a process independent of the Spanish Communist Party, occurring without direction or support from Moscow. A revolution in marked contrast to the Soviet model, it incurred the deep enmity of Stalin, who moreover at that time was pursuing foreign policy aims that had no place for such an event.

"In Spain, therefore, Orwell and Milton found themselves in the heat of both battle and a sharp political struggle on the left. Behind the Republican lines, a kind of civil war within the Civil War was taking place, one which pitted anarchist and Marxist revolutionaries against Stalinist elements-including agents of the Comintern and Soviet security forces-who sought to stifle precisely those forces of the Spanish left that were not controlled by Moscow. Stalin was determined to curb the power of the anarchists and to destroy the P.O.U.M., which was branded as ‘Trotskyist’. In this, he had an ally in the Spanish republican government, whose own powers had been challenged by the revolutionary movement unleashed in July 1936."

https://www.orwell.ru/a_life/Spanish_War/english/e_harry

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