Comment by Intermernet
Comment by Intermernet 9 hours ago
Just nitpicking here, but 1984 is a critique of totalitarianism. The only references to systems of government in the book refer to "The German Nazis and the Russian Communists".
Orwell was a democratic socialist. He was opposed to totalitarian politics, not communism per se.
It's true that it's about totalitarianism to some extent. But we have Orwell's actual words here that it's chiefly about communism
> [Nineteen Eighty-Four] was based chiefly on communism, because that is the dominant form of totalitarianism, but I was trying chiefly to imagine what communism would be like if it were firmly rooted in the English speaking countries, and was no longer a mere extension of the Russian Foreign Office.
And of course Animal Farm is only about communism (as opposed to communism + fascism). And the lesser known Homage to Catalonia depicts the communist suppression of other socialist groups.
By all this I just mean to say when you're reading Nineteen Eighty-Four what he's describing is barely a fictionalization of what was already going on in the Soviet Union. There's just not a lot in the book that is specifically Nazi or Fascist.
I don't have any opinion on whether he thought there were non-totalitarian forms of communism.