This was another important aspect of his theme of the totalitarian nature of Stalinism: its constant suppression of facts and truth in favor of the current Party line, from which no deviation was tolerated.Īnimal Farm is an allegory of the Soviet Union from the era of the Russian Revolution through the rise of Joseph Stalin and the German invasion in the Second World War. He had also seen how the Communists distorted and covered up all these events in their propaganda, which made him wonder whether the concept of objective truth had disappeared from the world Orwell, Homage to Catalonia, 223). Their destruction opened his eyes to the true nature of Stalinism, which he wrote about in Homage to Catalonia. He had regarded their militias, cooperatives and collectives as 'a sort of microcosm of a classless society' and an early stage of socialism (Orwell, Homage to Catalonia, 105). Orwell witnessed the events in Barcelona in which all the socialists and anarchists not under Stalin's control were rounded up and massacred by the Communist military and secret police. In Spain, however, he was fighting with a non-Communist militia, the POUM, the party of Marxist Unification, which was suppressed on Stalin's orders.

He regarded this 'immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for,' and the war as part of a common struggle against fascism by all the liberal and leftist parties in the Popular Front (Orwell, Homage to Catalonia, 5).

Barcelona in 1936 was the 'first time I had ever seen the working class in the saddle,' and he approved of it (Orwell, Homage to Catalonia, 4). Orwell had witnessed this firsthand during the Spanish Civil War, when he fought on the Republican side against Francisco Franco and the Nationalists. Instead of liberating the masses from the oppression of capitalism, they created a new kind of totalitarian tyranny that was more brutal than the old order it replaced, one that enslaved the common people to a new set of masters. George Orwell's most powerful and important works were Animal Farm and 1984, which described the corruption of the socialist ideal in the 20th Century at the hands of Lenin and Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union.

George orwell a hanging theme