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George Orwell (real name Eric Arthur Blair) was many things: a rapist, a bitter anti-Communist, a colonial cop, a racist, a Hitler apologist, a plagiarist, a snitch, and a CIA puppet.

Rapist

…in 1921, Eric had tried to rape Jacintha. Previously the young couple had kissed, but now, during a late summer walk, he had wanted more. At only five feet to his six feet and four inches, Jacintha had shouted, screamed and kicked before running home with a torn skirt and bruised hip. It was “this” rather than any gradual parting of the ways that explains why Jacintha broke off all contact with her childhood friend, never to learn that he had transformed himself into George Orwell.

— Kathryn Hughes. (2007). Such were the joys

Bitter anti-Communist

[F]ighting with the loyalists in Spain in the 1930s… he found himself caught up in the sectarian struggles between the various left-wing factions, and since he believed in a gentlemanly English form of socialism, he was inevitably on the losing side.

The communists, who were the best organised, won out and Orwell had to leave Spain… From then on, to the end of his life, he carried on a private literary war with the communists, determined to win in words the battle he had lost in action…

Orwell imagines no new vices, for instance. His characters are all gin hounds and tobacco addicts, and part of the horror of his picture of 1984 is his eloquent description of the low quality of the gin and tobacco.

He foresees no new drugs, no marijuana, no synthetic hallucinogens. No one expects an s.f. writer to be precise and exact in his forecasts, but surely one would expect him to invent some differences. …if 1984 must be considered science fiction, then it is very bad science fiction. …

To summarise, then: George Orwell in 1984 was, in my opinion, engaging in a private feud with Stalinism, rather that attempting to forecast the future. He did not have the science fictional knack of foreseeing a plausible future and, in actual fact, in almost all cases, the world of 1984 bears no relation to the real world of the 1980s.

— Isaac Asimov. Review of 1984

Ironically, the world of 1984 is mostly projection, based on Orwell’s own job at the British Ministry of Information during WWII. (Orwell: The Lost Writings)

• He translated news broadcasts into Basic English, with a 1000 word vocabulary (“Newspeak”), for broadcast to the colonies, including India.
• His description of the low quality of the gin and tobacco came from the Ministry’s own canteen, described by other ex-employees as “dismal”.
• Room 101 was an actual meeting room at the BBC.
• “Big Brother” seems to have been a senior staffer at the Ministry of Information, who was actually called that (but not to his face) by staff.

After all, by his own admission, his only knowledge of the USSR was secondhand:

I have never visited Russia and my knowledge of it consists only of what can be learned by reading books and newspapers.

— George Orwell. (1947). Orwell’s Preface to the Ukrainian Edition of Animal Farm

1984 is supposedly a cautionary tale about what would happen if the Communists won, and yet it was based on his own, actual, Capitalist country and his job serving it.

Colonial Cop

I was sub-divisional police officer of the town, and in an aimless, petty kind of way anti-European feeling was very bitter. … As a police officer I was an obvious target and was baited whenever it seemed safe to do so. When a nimble Burman tripped me up on the football field and the referee (another Burman) looked the other way, the crowd yelled with hideous laughter. This happened more than once. In the end the sneering yellow faces of young men that met me everywhere, the insults hooted after me when I was at a safe distance, got badly on my nerves. The young Buddhist priests were the worst of all. There were several thousands of them in the town and none of them seemed to have anything to do except stand on street corners and jeer at Europeans.

All this was perplexing and upsetting.

— George Orwell. (1936). Shooting an Elephant

Hitler Apologist

I should like to put it on record that I have never been able to dislike Hitler. Ever since he came to power—till then, like nearly everyone, I had been deceived into thinking that he did not matter—I have reflected that I would certainly kill him if I could get within reach of him, but that I could feel no personal animosity. The fact is that there is something deeply appealing about him.

— George Orwell. (1940). Review of Adolph Hitler’s “Mein Kampf”

Orwell not only admired Hitler, he actually blamed the Left in England for WWII:

If the English people suffered for several years a real weakening of morale, so that the Fascist nations judged that they were ‘decadent’ and that it was safe to plunge into war, the intellectual sabotage from the Left was partly responsible. …and made it harder than it had been before to get intelligent young men to enter the armed forces. Given the stagnation of the Empire, the military middle class must have decayed in any case, but the spread of a shallow Leftism hastened the process.

— George Orwell. (1941). England Your England

Plagiarist

1984

It is a book in which one man, living in a totalitarian society a number of years in the future, gradually finds himself rebelling against the dehumanising forces of an omnipotent, omniscient dictator. Encouraged by a woman who seems to represent the political and sexual freedom of the pre-revolutionary era (and with whom he sleeps in an ancient house that is one of the few manifestations of a former world), he writes down his thoughts of rebellion – perhaps rather imprudently – as a 24-hour clock ticks in his grim, lonely flat. In the end, the system discovers both the man and the woman, and after a period of physical and mental trauma the protagonist discovers he loves the state that has oppressed him throughout, and betrays his fellow rebels. The story is intended as a warning against and a prediction of the natural conclusions of totalitarianism.

This is a description of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, which was first published 60 years ago on Monday. But it is also the plot of Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, a Russian novel originally published in English in 1924.

— Paul Owen. (2009). 1984 thoughtcrime? Does it matter that George Orwell pinched the plot?

Animal Farm

Having worked for a time at The Ministry of Information, [Gertrude Elias] was well acquainted with one Eric Blair (George Orwell), who was an editor there. In 1941, Gertrude showed him some of her drawings, which were intended as a kind of story board for an entirely original satirical cartoon film, with the Nazis portrayed as pig characters ruling a farm in a kind of dysfunctional fairy story. Her idea was that a writer might be able to provide a text.

Having claimed to her that there was not much call for her idea… Orwell later changed the pig-nazis to Communists and made the Soviet Union a target for his hostility, turning Gertrude’s notion on its head. (Incidentally, a running theme in all every single piece of Orwell’s work was to steal ideas from Communists and invert them so as to distort the message.)

— Graham Stevenson. Elias, Gertrude (1913-1988)

Snitch

“Orwell’s List” is a term that should be known by anyone who claims to be a person of the left. It was a blacklist Orwell compiled for the British government’s Information Research Department, an anti-communist propaganda unit set up for the Cold War.

The list includes dozens of suspected communists, “crypto-communists,” socialists, “fellow travelers,” and even LGBT people and Jews — their names scribbled alongside the sacrosanct 1984 author’s disparaging comments about the personal predilections of those blacklisted.

— Ben Norton. (2016). George Orwell was a reactionary snitch who made a blacklist of leftists for the British government

CIA Puppet

George Orwell’s novella remains a set book on school curriculums … the movie was funded by America’s Central Intelligence Agency.

The truth about the CIA’s involvement was kept hidden for 20 years until, in 1974, Everette Howard Hunt revealed the story in his book Undercover: Memoirs of an American Secret Agent.

— Martin Chilton. (2016). How the CIA brought Animal Farm to the screen

Many historians have noted how Orwell’s literary reputation can largely be credited to joint propaganda operations between the IRD and CIA who translated and promoted Animal Farm to promote anti-Communist sentiment.^[1] The IRD heavily marketed Animal Farm for audiences in the middle-east in an attempt to sway Arab nationalism and independence activists from seeking Soviet aid, as it was believed by IRD agents that a story featuring pigs as the villains would appeal highly towards Muslim audiences.^[2]

Additional Resources

• George Orwell was a terrible human being | Hakim (2023)
• A Critical Read of Animal Farm | Jones Manoel (2022)

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1. Jeffreys-Jones, Rhodri (2013). In Spies we Trust: The story of Western Intelligence ↩︎

2. Mitter, Rana; Major, Patrick, eds. (2005). Across the Blocs: Cold War Cultural and Social History ↩︎