304. Orwell: Animal Farm, 1984 & Totalitarian Dystopia (Part 3)
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Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnand. And me, William Durrenpool. Now, of course, you don't need me to tell you, but we are in the middle of our Little Orwell mini series, and in the last episode we were talking about Orwell's time in Spain during the Spanish Civil War, how he got dramatically shot in the throat, how his wife leapt in and saved his life and got them both out, and it's during this time that he writes Homage to Catalonia in 1938, and and in that book, I mean it's so much a signature of his thinking and developing and writing, he abhors the violence, this time of sectarism on the left during the Civil War.
This period of, I think, all was life, it's fair to say, is like watching a Polaroid develop and and stabilize, because this is the period when his political views really harden. He adopts a new and very characteristic view of the world and he sees the problem as being the power and totalitarianism, which he contrasts with libertarianism. Everyone else in his generation is thinking left or right. He sees extreme left and extreme right as totalitarian and against that he is for democratic libertarianism.
And as we said in the last episode, this philosophy is brought out and developed and deployed in his two most famous works, Animal Farm and 1984. And this era of his writing is what we're going to be doing today. We are going to talk about Animal Farm in 1984 in great depth, a book that I know many of you listening to this podcast will have read at school, and it was an absolute joy to sort of reread them again for this. It works still, doesn't it? I mean, it's amazing.
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