1. George Orwell & The Spanish Civil War: How did this influence 1984?
Gaurav, Zainab, and Blessing

2. Starter: What significance do you think these have?

3. Background
In 1922, Orwell joined the Indian Imperial Police in Burma, where he remained for 5 years as he saw countless acts of terror committed by those around him, his superiors, and occasionally himself, towards prisoners and subordinates. Having stood by as all this oppression went on around him, he felt massively guilty, and this changed his word view entirely:
For five years I had been part of an oppressive system, and it had left me with a bad conscience.
Innumerable remembered faces of prisoners in the dock, of men waiting in the condemned cells, of subordinates I had bullied and aged peasants I had snubbed, of servants and coolies I had hit with my fist in moments of rage (nearly everyone does these things in the East, at any rate occasionally: Orientals can be very provoking)--haunted me intolerably.
I was conscious of an immense weight of guilt that I had got to expiate. I suppose that sounds exaggerated; but if you do for five years a job that you thoroughly disapprove of, you will probably feel the same.
I felt I had got to escape not merely from imperialism but from every form of man's dominion over man. I wanted to submerge myself, to get right down among the oppressed, to be one of them and on their side against their tyrants.

4. Involvement in the Spanish Civil War
Orwell’s experiences as an officer of the Indian Imperial Police instilled in him a resentment for tyrants and more generally, authority. He wished to be on the side of those being oppressed so he could contribute to defending them.
Based on this belief, Orwell went to Barcelona in 1937, where he joined the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification (POUM), who were a left-wing, but non-Stalinist movement fighting against Franco’s Insurgents, who aimed to establish a regime built upon fascism, the one thing Orwell wanted to fight.
However, he found himself faced with a worse form of totalitarianism, when Stalinist forces turned on the POUM and branded them Trotskyists.
Forced to come back home, his opposition to totalitarianism was now set in stone. He had made many friends in Spain, like the novelist Arthur Koestler. His novel, about an innocent Bolshevik who is eventually murdered by the Soviet authorities, had a great influence on Orwell.
It was influences such as these which shaped Orwell’s opinion of totalitarian states, which in turn would lead him to publish his terrifying vision of what the world would look like under one.

5. Link to 1984
The way Stalinist forces turned on the POUM, as well as the experience of fighting Francoism and the terror in British India, shaped Orwell’s vision for his final and most famous novel, where a totalitarian socialist state has almost completely subjugated its people and implements mass terror without any resistance.
Orwell wanted people to see that they should never unilaterally let themselves be put down by authority, as it yields horrifying results.
More than anything, 1984 is a dystopian amplifying of Orwell’s experiences up until the end of the Spanish Civil War, of what the world would be like if the things he witnessed in those years were still taking place.
“It depicted a man of about forty-five, with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome features”.

6. Relevance Today
The reasons for which Orwell chose to write this novel have not since diminished, as it constantly reminds society that they should never stand by while totalitarian figures take charge. Since publication in 1948 it has been a consistent reminder of this.