"he was anti-authoritarian man! no he wasn't just some anticommunist he was the most principled anti-authoritarian! both the US and the USSR banned him! he's a based libsoc!"

so, for the billionth time:

this guy was a former colonial cop who actively reported anyone he deemed too subversive to the British government, including people he referred to as "anti white agitators".

his work was briefly banned in like a couple of counties in the US before seeing mass adoption as anticommunist propaganda by the US government and especially the CIA.

ok so i need to address this because i keep seeing it. authoritarianism/totalitarianism are not coherent frameworks for understanding the actions of a state. their definitions essentially are "when a political entity exercises authority" which is what every single one of them necessarily does if it has any power or "when a political entity is doing oriental despotism" which in itself is meaningless, but also racist.

both of these terms were also popularised in the cold war in order to draw a false equivalence between communists and fascists in order to prop up liberal bourgeois democracy as the only correct or moral form of government (despite the fact that every fascist state arose from a liberal state and that most fascist states have at least at some point been supported by liberal states (and the modern ones are supported and set up by foreign liberal states)).

George Orwell's work exists to criticise the USSR and socialism, despite him never really studying it or ever having been to the USSR, and makes his contempt for the proletariat very clear. 1984 is him imagining "what if the evil socialist state oppressed petit bourgeois intellectuals like me in favour of the masses". Animal Farm is even more blatant in his contempt for the proletariat. in Animal Farm, the proletariat is represented by farm animals (not very subtle) who overthrow the farmer, who represents the bourgeoisie. they then devolve into a non-functional imaginary caricature of what a socialist state must be like in Orwell's imagination. there is no value to be gained from his work except as anticommunist propaganda.

if there were actual insightful critiques of what, for example, the US government is doing to be found in those books, they wouldn't be mandatory reading in school. the only purpose their mass adoption had was quite the opposite: pro bourgeoisie propaganda.