Madridman,
What newstories from the right?

"In accordance with the principles of double-think it does not matter if the war is not real. For when it is, victory is not possible. The
war is not meant to be won, but it is meant to be continuous."

he [Orwell] went to Spain at the end of 1936, with the idea of writing newspaper articles on the Civil War, which had broken out there. The conflict in Spain was between the communist, socialist Republic, and General Franco's Fascist military rebellion. When Orwell arrived in Barcelona he was astonished by the atmosphere he found there: what had seemed impossible in England seemed a fact of daily life in Spain. Class distinctions seemed to have vanished. There was a shortage of everything, but there was equality. Orwell joined in the struggle by enlisting in the militia of the POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificación de Marxista), which was associated with the British Labour Party For the first time in his life socialism seemed a reality, something for which it was worth fighting for. Orwell received a basic military training and was sent to the front in Aragon, near Zaragoza. He spent a couple of dull months there, and he was wounded in the throat. Three and a half months later, when he returned to Barcelona, he found it a changed city. No longer a place where the socialist word “comrade” was really felt to mean something, it was a city returning to "normal". Even worse, he was to find that the group he was with, the POUM, was now accused of being a Fascist militia, secretly helping Franco. Orwell had to sleep in the open to avoid showing his papers, and eventually managed to escape into France with his wife. His account of his time in Spain was published in Homage to Catalonia (1938). His experiences in Spain left two impressions on Orwell's mind: firstly, they showed him that socialism in action was a human possibility, if only a temporary one. He never forgot the exhilaration of those first days in Barcelona, when a new society seemed possible, where "comradeship", instead of being just a socialist abuse of language, was reality. But secondly he saw the experience of the city returning to normal as a gloomy confirmation of the fact that there will always be different classes, that there is something in the human nature that seeks violence, conflict, power over others. It is clear that these two impressions, of hope on the one hand, and despair on the other are entirely contradictory. Nevertheless, despite the despair and confusion of his return to Barcelona (there were street fights between different groups of socialists), Orwell left Spain with a hopeful impression.

In 1938, Orwell became ill with tuberculosis and spent the winter in Morocco. While being there, he wrote his next book, a novel entitled Coming up for Air, published in 1939, the year the long-threatened war between England and Germany broke out. Orwell wanted to fight, as he has done in Spain, against the fascist enemy, but he was declared physically unfit. In 1941 he joined the British Broadcasting Corporation as talks producer in the Indian section of the eastern service. He served in the Home Guard, a wartime civilian body for local defence. In 1943 he left the BBC to become literary editor of the Tribune and began writing Animal Farm. In 1944 the Orwells adopted a son, but in 1945 his wife died during an operation. Towards the end of the war, Orwell went to Europe as a reporter. Late in 1945 he went to the island of Jura off the Scottish coast, and settled there in 1946. He wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four there. The island's climate was unsuitable for someone suffering from tuberculosis and Nineteen Eighty-Four reflects the bleakness of human suffering, the indignity of pain. Indeed, he said that the book wouldn't have been so gloomy had he not been so ill. Later that year he married Sonia Brownell. He died in January 1950.