Where did Orwell ask whether British democracy would end through a Fascist takeover or by a Socialist revolution?

Question

The Wikipedia article about Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighthy-Four contains the following statement:

During World War II, Orwell believed that British democracy as it existed before 1939 would not survive the war. The question being "Would it end via Fascist coup d'état from above or via Socialist revolution from below?"^{[citation needed]}

When looking up whether the sentence in quotation marks was something Orwell wrote literally, I cannot find a source. One source on Google Books simply quotes Wikipedia. Another source, a juvenile edition of 1984 published in 2016 looks like it also uses Wikipedia, but without proper acknowledgement: the quoted passage was added to Wikipedia before the publication of the book. See for example the version of the article from January 2016:

During World War II (1939–1945) Orwell believed that British democracy as it existed before 1939 would not survive the war, the question being "Would it end via Fascist coup d'état from above or via Socialist revolution from below"?

The statement has been part of the Wikipedia article for a very long time, but not always with quotes. For example, here is the version from the 22 February 2006 version of the article:

In articles written during the Second World War, Orwell repeatedly expressed the idea that British democracy as it existed before 1939 would not survive the war, the only question being whether its end would come through a Fascist takeover from above or by a Socialist revolution from below.

This suggests that the statement may actually be a paraphrase of something Orwell wrote and that the quotation marks, which were added later, only make it look like a quote. Since Wikipedia claims Orwell expressed the idea in that passage repeatedly, what was the first article in which he expressed it? How close does it come to the wording used in Wikipedia? And did he ever use the exact wording used on Wikipedia?

Answer 1

In The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell, he expresses this view many times. (After the war, he reflected on how he tended to overestimate forces pushing toward socialism and underestimate on those pushing away.)

The problem with identifying exactly when he said the concept first is that you have to decide exactly how close the idea comes before it qualifies as the first. For instance, up to the outbreak of WWII (the writings in the first volume An Age Like This), he holds the opinion that there are only the fascists and the socialists, and Great Britain and the other democracies are already fascists. He even discusses making plans on how to work against the war effort if war broke out.

When it did, he had a horrible night and realized that England had his support for the war. (The essay "My Country Right Or Left.") He expresses views much closer to phrasing in the next volume.