Orwell went to Spain in December 1936 to report and joined the POUM militia instead. Homage to Catalonia is what he came back with, and it is the book where every component of Nineteen Eighty-Four first appears as reportage. The Party line changing overnight and yesterday's ally becoming an unperson; newspapers reporting battles that did not happen and omitting ones he had been present at; the police apparatus of a nominally revolutionary government hunting its own side. He wrote that in Spain he saw "history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened", which is the sentence the Ministry of Truth is built out of. Orwell named the experience himself as the turning point: "Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism."