The impression one gets from reading Orwell’s work during this period is of a man urgently trying to clarify the relationship between fascism, communism and capitalism. He clearly preferred a fourth option—democratic socialism—but that didn’t seem to be on the table. Just before he went to Spain, he had scorned “the vulgar lie, now so popular, that ‘Communism and Fascism are the same thing.’ ” But when he read Assignment in Utopia, he felt that Stalinism, as described by Lyons, “does not seem to be so very different from Fascism.”
