ideas - it's a fact about his personal situation, but you could be the most useless thinker in the world and still have been shot in such a way. It just doesn't prove or justify anything when it comes to his political/critical thought."
Question: "What happened to the great poets of WWII?" Answer: "They died in Spain!"
Some argue that the Spanish civil war was the turning point for twentieth century history. I don't know if it's true, but something of this urgency must have been felt by men around the world who volunteered to come and fight in Spain. Orwell was one of them: he put his life on the line, he survived, and he wrote one of the best non-fiction books I've ever read: "Homage to Catalonia." In it he captures the day to day realities of the revolution, the ever-eternal conflict between the logic of ideas (ideology) and lived reality, and the complicated project of socialist revolution.
You're right. A man might have lousy political ideas and his eating a bullet won't make them good. Speaking specifically of Orwell though, his volunteering to fight in this conflict, his truth-telling after (which won him friends neither on the right nor on the left), are of a piece with his character and his politics -- and the two, were never very far apart in his life. That was most of the point of his life and writings...no matter how shamefully they are used/abused in high school english classes.
Joanna