Let’s make the grass greener

Real-life lesson: Malaysia can learn a lot from Slovenia, which transitioned peacefully from dictatorship to democracy after the Iron Curtain fell.

GEORGE Orwell had a lot to teach us. His two monumental works are Animal Farm and 1984, the former a depiction of a glorious revolution gone wrong, the latter an all too realistic extrapolation of what life under a futuristic totalitarian regime would be like.

But it’s actually passages from the autobiographical account of Orwell’s time serving in the Spanish Civil War that seem most relevant to me now. Homage to Catalonia describes Orwell’s romantic dash to Spain to fight on behalf of the left-wing elected government against Franco’s Fascists.