In this blog post, we’ll explore how George Orwell’s life and experiences—including the Spanish Civil War—led to ‘1984’, a cautionary tale about totalitarianism, and why its message remains relevant today.

The Author’s Life

George Orwell, who created the most famous dystopian imagery in literary history with ‘1984’, led a life that was ironic in many ways. Although he came from a family with aristocratic ties, he lived as a poor socialist; although he worked as a police officer for the empire, he opposed imperialism; and although he suffered constantly from illness, he remained an active activist. While he criticized those who supported communism, he identified as a socialist until the end of his life; ironically, he also became widely known through anti-communist interpretations of his work. Although he was not an author who created an original world solely through imagination, Orwell grew as a writer by drawing on his own experiences. In his case, this reliance on personal experience was a crucial path to capturing the turbulent historical landscape of the early 20th century.
Eric Arthur Blair, known by his pen name George Orwell, was born in 1903 in a small town in India, then a British colony. Although his family had a history of attaining social status—including marriages into the nobility—and his ancestors had amassed wealth through business ventures in the colonies, the household in which he grew up was not well-off; his father was merely a low-ranking civil servant of the Empire. He returned to England and followed the educational path typical of upper-middle-class youths at the time, studying at the prestigious private schools St. Cyprian’s and Eton, where he was able to attend on a scholarship.
It is said that his school days, particularly his experience at St. Cyprian’s, were dreadful. The oppressive educational system, violence among students, and the sense of deprivation and hurt he felt among his wealthy classmates left deep scars on Orwell’s psyche. These experiences served as the starting point for his recurring interest in poverty, class issues, institutionalized violence, and the resulting sense of guilt, themes that appear throughout his later works.
After graduating from Eton, unlike his peers who went on to Cambridge or Oxford, Orwell chose to join the Imperial Police and head to the colony of Burma rather than attend university. Although this decision stemmed from his inability to secure a scholarship due to poor grades, the five years he spent in Burma had a profound impact on his life. Upon his return to England, he resigned from the police force and resolved to become a writer, making his debut with the autobiographical novel ‘Burmese Days’ (1934), based on his experiences there.
Orwell was a diligent writer. During his approximately 20-year career as an author, he consistently produced six novels, several books of reportage and essay collections, and various newspaper and magazine serials. From the very beginning, he took a keen interest in the lower classes; to this end, he lived in working-class neighborhoods in London and Paris, experiencing menial labor—such as washing dishes—and life at the very bottom of society. The experiences he gained while moving between various jobs—including living on the streets, seasonal labor, and working as a private tutor and bookstore clerk—were seamlessly woven into his writing, lending a sense of realism to the protagonists of his early works, who were at odds with the world yet unable to escape its constraints.
The turning point that solidified Orwell’s calling as a writer was his experience fighting in the Spanish Civil War in 1936. He entered the Spanish Republic as a reporter but ended up fighting against Franco’s fascism, experiencing the clash between ideals and reality firsthand. He enlisted in the volunteer forces dreaming of international solidarity, but witnessed power struggles within the Communist Party and the brutal purges that followed; he was wounded by gunfire and had to escape by the skin of his teeth. Observing how communists backed by Stalin’s Soviet regime oppressed and eliminated their former comrades—socialists and anarchists—he realized that Stalinism and fascism were fundamentally no different. This experience solidified his conviction that his literary calling was to warn against totalitarianism. In his 1946 essay “Why I Write,” he clearly stated that his serious works since 1936 were intended, whether directly or indirectly, to oppose totalitarianism and support democratic socialism. The work in which this sense of mission is most clearly manifested is ‘1984’, his masterpiece and final novel.

Work Commentary

‘1984’ was published in 1949, as World War II was ending and the Cold War was in full swing. When he published his previous work, ‘Animal Farm’ (1944), the atmosphere surrounding open criticism of the Soviet Union was still delicate, making it difficult to find a publisher; however, as anti-communist sentiment and fear grew due to shifts in the international political landscape, ‘Animal Farm’ became Orwell’s first bestseller. Thanks to the success of his previous work and the perfect timing of its release, ‘1984’ was immediately recognized as an iconic text of the Cold War era, denouncing the inhumanity of Stalinism and communism. Terms coined by Orwell—such as “Big Brother,” “Thought Police,” and “Telescreen”—quickly established themselves as symbols evoking the repressive nature of communist regimes, and in some countries, support was even provided for the translation and distribution of these works.
When read within the context of the Cold War, ‘1984’, like ‘Animal Farm’, is easily interpreted as political satire denouncing the Soviet Union under Stalin. It is clear that the characters and devices in the novel evoke Soviet leaders and events. Symbols such as Big Brother and Goldstein bring to mind Stalin and Trotsky, while the descriptions of the Thought Police’s surveillance, arrests, torture, and purges evoked the behavior of the Soviet secret police. Many readers and critics, regardless of Orwell’s intentions, accepted the novel as an anti-communist work.
Orwell regretted that his work was read solely as conveying an anti-socialist message, and even while gravely ill, he attempted on several occasions to clarify his intentions. He made it clear that the purpose of ‘1984’ was not to make an accurate prophecy about the future or to launch a simple attack on a specific political force, but rather to issue a warning if reality were drifting toward totalitarianism. His insight—that criticizing the totalitarianism of the Stalinist regime and supporting democratic socialism are compatible—remained consistent. The conclusion is simple: we must not stand idly by and allow such a totalitarian situation to arise, and the responsibility for this lies with us.

The Nightmare of Oceania

Oceania is a dystopia where the nightmare of totalitarianism is realized to its fullest extent. The meticulous surveillance system via telescreens installed everywhere, thought control, the thorough suppression of desire, hate rituals that stir up primal rage, and fanatical leader worship were not figments of the imagination but the very essence of how real-world totalitarianism operates.

The Shift in the Tradition and Beliefs of Utopia

Surprisingly, it was not that long ago that a powerful centralized control system became a suspicious entity that naturally warranted caution. Since Thomas More’s ‘Utopia’ (1516), most fictional utopias have been societies where everything is planned centrally, and this basic structure remained largely unchanged until the late 19th century.
The Industrial Revolution seemed to provide the wings needed to turn such dreams of paradise into reality. When we recall that the optimistic fantasy—proposed by Edward Bellamy—of state control combined with science and technology resolving class conflict and labor issues gained widespread public support and even developed into a social movement, we can see just how abrupt today’s shift in perception has been.
Underlying the possibility of these utopias was a belief in human reason. Based on this premise, the state was viewed as a tool for promoting human happiness, and happiness was considered a concept on which universal consensus could be reached.

The Inverted Utopia: The Instrumentalization of Power

Orwell’s Oceania is an inverted utopia of an era that had lost faith in human rationality following the experiences of World War I and fascism. This society seeks to eradicate or redefine human happiness and pleasure, and to build a new civilization upon fear, hatred, and cruelty.
The Party’s three slogans—“War is Peace,” “Freedom is Slavery,” and “Ignorance is Strength”—blatantly reveal the contradictory principles that absolutize the logic of power. Oceania’s rulers promote happiness, but unlike their predecessors, they do not go to unnecessary lengths to make it appear genuine. An unsatisfactory reality must be covered up with doublethink; it cannot be the subject of criticism.
Through the words of O’Brien, an Inner Party member, Orwell strips away all the pretense of power to reveal the chilling truth that its true goals are nothing but power itself and oppression. O’Brien’s confession goes as follows:
“The Party seeks power entirely for the Party’s sake. We have no interest in the welfare of others. We are interested only in power. We care nothing for wealth, luxury, longevity, or happiness. Only power—pure power. You will soon understand what pure power means. We differ from all those past oligarchies in that we know what we are doing. Whether they were similar to us or not, they were all cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists were very similar to us in their methods, but they lacked the courage to acknowledge their motives. They seized power—unwillingly, but for a limited time—and pretended to believe, or perhaps actually believed, that humanity would soon find a paradise of freedom and equality. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means but an end. No one establishes a dictatorship as a safeguard for a revolution. Revolutions are launched to establish dictatorships. The purpose of persecution is persecution. The purpose of torture is torture. The purpose of power is power.”

A Critique of the Genealogy of Dystopia and Technological Progress

On the surface, Oceania bears a closer resemblance to Yevgeny Zamyatin’s ‘We’, which is based on surveillance and oppression, than to Aldous Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’, which depicts a strategy of dumbing down the masses through unrestrained pleasure. However, Orwell’s future society points to a fundamentally different direction from the dystopias of the past.
The artificial and glamorous vision of the future presented by London in the year 632 Ford or by the One State—a 19th-century belief in infinite technological progress—becomes a subject of ridicule in Orwell’s world. O’Brien declares that the pursuit of power is an end in itself, and that technological progress may well come to a halt in the process. He dismisses technological progress as nothing more than a daydream.

A Familiar and Contemporary Future: The Landscape of Wartime London

The future world of ‘1984’ is all the more chilling because it takes on the familiar features of the past and present. In Oceania, there are almost no “futuristic” landscapes of the kind one might expect from H. G. Wells or Jules Verne. Despite being a war-based state, no new weapons of any kind appear.
Instead, the future presented is a naturalistically depicted, desolate, and impoverished landscape of wartime London. Shattered buildings, dilapidated apartments, scarce daily necessities, and rationed food—which tasted terrible but was always in short supply—are memories familiar to postwar Britons. Historic sites such as Trafalgar Square, the National Gallery, and Nelson’s Column—stripped of their past memories and transformed into public spaces glorifying war and Big Brother—erase the distinction between the present and the future, thereby completing the dystopian landscape.

Manipulation of Records and the Malleability of the Past

The gap between the grim, hungry reality and the happiness propagated by the Ministry of Truth is bridged through the manipulation of records. In Oceania, false propaganda—such as the claim that daily necessities are always overproduced, living standards are constantly improving, and wars are always won—is a constant feature of daily life. Actual reality is irrelevant; what matters is the recorded reality.
An agency called the Ministry of Truth is responsible for this manipulation. Controlling records is the path to controlling history and truth—and, by extension, a means of controlling human consciousness. By continuously manipulating the past in accordance with current changes, the Party denies history as objective fact and reimagines the present as an eternal utopia.
The Party’s doctrine is the mutability of the past. The Party asserts that past events do not objectively exist but survive only in records and memories. The past consists of whatever records and memories agree upon, and because the Party controls all records and completely controls even the minds of its members, the past is shaped exactly as the Party chooses.

Winston’s Resistance and Destruction

In such a system, believing that nostalgia for or memories of the past serve as indicators of truth is a subversive and dangerous act. In that world, the protagonist, Winston Smith, defies the Minister to preserve memories of the past and hopes to communicate with the future.
He writes a diary, risks his life to buy a glass paperweight, struggles to elicit memories of the past from a drunken old man, and, harboring hope for the future, joins the Brotherhood to toast “For the Past.” He dreams of the restoration of history and the possibility of change—something possible only through the connection between the past, present, and future.
However, Winston’s hope is thoroughly crushed. His rebellion, which began with keeping a diary, seemed to lead to his meeting with Julia, the secret hideout in the antique shop, and his induction into the Brotherhood through O’Brien—but the regime was already one step ahead. O’Brien, whom he believed to be a comrade, had been wearing a mask all along, and the antique shop was a trap set by the Thought Police.
Any attempt to escape the Oceania regime only leads deeper into its heart, and ultimately, Winston betrays Julia and is utterly destroyed. In the final scene, he sits in a café, a mere shadow of his former self, shedding tears of joy as he hears news of Oceania’s victory. This symbolizes Big Brother’s complete triumph.

The Novel as a Warning and the Clues Left Behind

‘1984’ is a powerful warning about the might and terror of totalitarianism in the early 20th century. Orwell did not rely on notions such as the inevitability of history; he was an active intellectual who emphasized the importance of an alert consciousness and action. Through his novel, he sought to awaken people to the dangers facing the modern world.
However, Orwell does not leave even the fictional world to complete despair. The clue lies in the appendix. The appendix, “The Principles of Newspeak,” may at first glance appear to be an academic report on Newspeak, but it reveals Orwell’s ongoing interest in exploring the interrelationship between language, truth, and politics.
The Principles of Newspeak aim to disrupt common sense and grammar, thereby making it impossible to think in ways that differ from the Party’s worldview. Its absurd examples are reminiscent of Swift’s satire. At the same time, as novelist Thomas Pynchon has pointed out, the appendix’s consistent use of the past tense subtly implies that Newspeak has already become a thing of the past. This can be read as a signal that the day of freedom has arrived—a day when Newspeak and the political system it represents can be discussed objectively.
Orwell believed that totalitarianism—which seeks to restrict the human mind with crude language and freeze history—must not be allowed to triumph. Like Winston, he trusted in the integrity of the people to the very end and sought to understand socialism as a system capable of upholding justice and human dignity.
It is also noteworthy that the original title was “The Last Man in Europe” and that it was changed to “1984.” Rather than declaring the end of history through the apocalyptic defeat of an individual, the decision to change the title to a narrative set at a specific point in time seems to imply Orwell’s intention that Winston’s personal defeat does not necessarily signify Big Brother’s ultimate victory or the end of history.