LiveWire

“…How had it come about that the targets in Nineteen Eighty-Four were English socialists and their nightmare totalitarian state? …he was fighting Franco's insurgents in Spain as a member of a left-wing, but non-Stalinist militia, the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification (POUM)…but found himself face-to-face with another form of totalitarianism. The pro-Stalin communist forces in Spain turned on the POUM, branding them Trotskyist traitors. Back home no one wanted to know about his experiences…In his view of things, totalitarianism was not merely a theoretical threat from a fictional future. The urgency of Nineteen Eighty-Four, and of much of Orwell's wartime and post-war writing, springs clearly from his sense that totalitarianism was already proving dangerously attractive to many on the left, not least intellectuals….”