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About George Orwell
George Orwell was born near the turn of the century in Bengal, India. Not being an Indian native however, he went to school in England. For a large portion of his life, he served as a British policeman for 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 developed a unique world-view, which would later serve him as a writer and political essayist and critic. Here he criticized 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 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 hate 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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