Originally Posted by
Partridge
I sincerely doubt Orwell was a fascist when he died. He spent the best part of his time since 1936 in one way or another fighting fascism, physically in the Spanish Revolution, and ideologically as an Allied-propagandist for the BBC in Asia during the WWII years. After that he wrote regularly for both Tribune and The Observer. It's true he did shamefully provide a list of names of people he suspected to be Communists (ie Stalinists) to the Foreign Office - and that I can never forgive him for - but this was probably more out of a hatred Stalinism (who's effects he had directly experienced in the Spanish Revolution, being basically run out of the country on pain of death by the sell-out Stalinist forces) than any love of capitalist 'democracy', never mind fascism.
There is revisionism in regard to Orwell, both the Cold War revisionism of the right which use books like 1984 and Animal Farm to show that a) Orwell hated socialism (not true - in fact his critiques of the USSR were based largely upon the Trotskyist and Anarchist views of that state) and that b) Socialism necessarily leads to 1984 style Totalitarianism - presumably because 'Orwell said so' (which, of course, he never did).
And then is the new-revisionism which would have it that Orwell secretly wanted a 1984 style society, and as you put it to "mold the people slowly". I find this laughable - anyone who reads 1984 can surely see this was railing against the society in which Winston Smith found himself - which was basically what he believed the future would be like under Stalinism. Doublethink is the prime example of this - remember this book was written when Stalin was still in power, and the various Communist Parties all over the world followed the Russian line without criticism. And example would be the fantastic anti-fascist propagandism doen by the CPs, then as soon as the Molotov-Von Ribbentrop non-agression pact was signed, the CPs began agitating for non-interventionism in Euorpe (and ironically, selling out their CP comrades on the mainland). Of course, such 'doublethink' is not the sole property of the Stalinist left, one can easily see it among pro-war right in the US for example (Saddam Hussien had WMDs/We never said he had WMDs - Saddam was helping Al Qaeda/We never said that! etc).
So basically, no, I think your teacher is talking out of his arse. To the best of my knowledge, Orwell remained what he termed a 'democratic socialist' until his death in 1950 - he was probably closer to anarchism than any other ideology in his last years.