Wednesday, March 19, 2008

The Two Winstons

I was surprised at the parallels between Churchill and Orwell's lives, especially in their early years. Both of their boarding school days seem to have had a profound affect on their lives and future actions. Although both had clearly different views on this experience. The movie demonstrated that Churchill became fascinated with history in school, while Orwell was the opposite, he despised the pointlessness of memorizing dates. After school their parallel lives continued with their first failed attempts in the military or police, and then they both dropped out of society in a way. Orwell literally, and Churchill forced out due to his military miscues. I expected this intersection to be the last in their lives, as Churchill eventually becomes one of the greatest figure heads of a nation, and Orwell an author appalled by big brother government. From what little of knew of these two men's histories and their writings, I expected them to have an ideological clash at the very least. Needless to say I was very surprised when they were able to come together in a way, through their mutual fear/hatred for communism and socialism, ideologies taking over and destroying continental Europe at the time.

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