George Orwell was born near the turn of the century in Bengal, India . Not being an Indian native himself, he went to school in England
. For a significant portion of his life, he served as a British policeman of sorts (like his father and grandfather) with the Indian Imperial Police in Burma. After 6 years, however, he became discouraged and decided to return to England and take up writing for a living. Having spent a significant portion of his life watching and even participating in the oppressive influence of the declining British Empire, he began to develop a unique world-view which would later serve him well as a writer and political essayist and critic. Here he criticized virtually all forms of government. Having fought for the Trotskyist government in Spain
, he knew how oppressive Stalin's regime had become. Now he was seeing acceptance of communism
even as far as his homeland England.
Animal Farm was written at a very inopportune time, for everywhere, even in the United States , respect for the communist government was growing, after their valiant defeat of Nazi Germany. Later, however, Orwell's Animal Farm was caught up in a " cold war
" of anti- communist sentiment and soon even encouraged this outrage, although this was not Orwell's intent. For Orwell was not a party-hardliner, nor a capitalist at heart. Really he despised all systems of government
that he considered hypocritical. At Eton in England, he attained such a distaste for money that he soon became an opponent of capitalism all together.
Surprisingly, Orwell was a socialist. The reason he hated communism so much is because it was not pure socialism -- he distrusted the leaders who lived in mansions while the common folk slaved in the fields. communism
, he thought, was just another way for the elite to control the majority of peasants.
Orwell died at the young age of 46 from lung disease .
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