303. Orwell: Fighting Fascism In The Spanish Civil War (Part 2)

Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnand. And me, William DeRumpel. And this is the second episode in our mini-series on George Orwell. If you missed the first, let me tell you what you missed. You missed a lot.

Where were you? Uh First of all, wasn't born George Orwell, was born Eric Flair, wasn't born in Great Britain, was born in Bihar, moved to the UK as a toddler, went to Eton, hated Eton, uh, went to uh runaway to Burma to join the Imperial Police Force, became a police officer, hated being a police officer, came back to Great Britain, and this is the bit that we're going to be looking at. So he's he's sort of come back to Great Britain, but he's not going to tarry for that long because the next chapter of his life is going to revolve around the Spanish Civil War.

And it will take you on a journey from Orwell's hatred of fascism and hatred of imperialism to a gradual disillusionment with what he thought might be the answer once upon a time, which was communism, and then he ends up sort of hating Stalinist totalitarianism. So that's what we're going to be talking about today. Because what we did leave you with is he'd come back and he'd published Burmese Days. And it's after publishing Burmese Days that his life changes forever. And it changes because of a woman and a really extraordinary woman at that, a woman called Eileen O'Shaughnessy.

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