George Orwell and Totalitarianism

George Orwell and his novel 1984 have had a prolific impact on dystopian and political literature. The reason for this is simple: Orwell managed to encapsulate the great political fears being experienced during his lifetime. The rise of totalitarian governments in Spain, the former Soviet Union, and Nazi Germany gave way to the Spanish Civil War and eventually to World War II. These events, among others, led Orwell to form his own beliefs and political opinions on socialism and totalitarianism, which would one day, become his literary works.

Orwell was born to an English family in Motihari, India in 1903. After going to boarding school, preparatory school, and then, finally secondary school at the prestigious Eton, he decided to join the Indian Imperial Police. He received his training in Burma in 1922, but once he arrived and settled in he came to a startling awakening. The Burmese were treated, by the British, as objects instead of people; something which Orwell had only read about in fictional works, but had yet to come across in reality. The Burmese were being beaten, ridiculed, and humiliated by the Imperial Police. This impacted Orwell tremendously by showing him exactly how the English had been treating their colonies and the ruthlessness of imperialism, but it was not until 1927, while home on leave, that he finally decided to put forth his resignation. In his book, titled The Road to Wigan Pier, Orwell states that after his service in Burma he felt “an immense weight of guilt that” he “had got to expiate” (246). It was after those formative years, in the Imperial Police, that he began forming a more formal opinion of socialism and totalitarianism, as well as giving him a basis for the oppression that is incurred in 198...

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...y witnessing the betrayal to the citizens of England his disdain for the Soviet Union and communist regimes increased. Five years after the publication of Animal Farm, 1984 was published and has since been viewed as a parallel to Stalin’s Soviet Union.

Orwell unfortunately passed away in 1950, two years after 1984 was published and therefore he never had the pleasure to see how much of an impact his novel created. If anything, his works serve as a “cautionary tale against totalitarianism” (Aubrey) and a warning for all future generations. Orwell’s political beliefs and ideologies formed from all of his experiences, from the Indian Imperial Police, to the Spanish Civil War, to World War II, his novels and journals will continue on, to represent a time in history when political system all over the world were in a state of turmoil, never experienced before or since.