The funny thing is just how profoundly self unaware that dude was. He was a lifelong socialist, and he claimed that Animal Farm was a critique solely of Stalinism. His whole life he never realized that his writing is a critique of all leftist ideology, not just the ones that didn't turn out how he'd hoped.
The man was a living embodiment of "it wasn't real socialism."
Read some of his non literature writing. He was legitimately that unaware of it all. He actually thought that there was any meaningful difference between what he advocated and what Stalin brought about.
He absolutely was one of them, he just didn't know it himself.
His issue was that he has a desperate desire to help the poor, but couldn't concieve any other way to uplift them than Socialism, which he also knew from experience, didn't work.
So it created a dissonance inside him where almost all of his professional work was his honest, intellectual side bitterly attacking Socialism in practice, while still believing emotionally and naively that some manifestation could work.
I honestly think if Orwell could see the state if the poor in the West today, he'd be a Capitalist. The days of 60-hour weeks in a mineshaft just to barely get by are long gone.
The funny thing is just how profoundly self unaware that dude was. He was a lifelong socialist, and he claimed that Animal Farm was a critique solely of Stalinism. His whole life he never realized that his writing is a critique of all leftist ideology, not just the ones that didn't turn out how he'd hoped.
The man was a living embodiment of "it wasn't real socialism."
Nah, his books were in plain sight truths of what they had in store for us. He was one of them, too.
Read some of his non literature writing. He was legitimately that unaware of it all. He actually thought that there was any meaningful difference between what he advocated and what Stalin brought about.
He absolutely was one of them, he just didn't know it himself.
His issue was that he has a desperate desire to help the poor, but couldn't concieve any other way to uplift them than Socialism, which he also knew from experience, didn't work.
So it created a dissonance inside him where almost all of his professional work was his honest, intellectual side bitterly attacking Socialism in practice, while still believing emotionally and naively that some manifestation could work.
I honestly think if Orwell could see the state if the poor in the West today, he'd be a Capitalist. The days of 60-hour weeks in a mineshaft just to barely get by are long gone.