Animal Farm: a review
Title: Animal Farm
Author: George Orwell
Publisher: Penguin English Library
Pages: 109
My rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Who will like it? The language is digestible, the allegory perspicuous, so really, anyone can read it and feel astounded.
I read 1984 and the ending horrified me. I flipped through the last few pages holding my breath until the story snapped to a close, “That’s it?!”. Animal Farm is a thought bubble extension. Both books share the congent word choice and coherent themes: how language can corrupt thought, how power can reveal the worst side of humanity, and how the most ordinary person is tortured as if the most ruthless enemy under a totalitarian regime.
Animal Farm was published in a difficult time when Stalin was still in power, and in his proposed preface, Orwell explains the rejection of publishers in the U.K. although there is no official state-wide censorship. Orwell’s own life involved fleeing the Communists in Spain with his wife, and upon seeing the gullibility and confusion of people in England, he thought that the only possible way of reviving the Socialist movement was through the destruction of the Soviet myth (p. 107). Some people forget this — and it’s easy to see opinions as pitch black or ultra-pure white, instead of layers and shades of grey, especially in an increasingly polarized world full of echo chambers. But Orwell was a democratic socialist, according to The Wire, “a clear-eyed, committed socialist”, and he wrote against totalitarianism and dictatorships instead of the principles of socialism.
There’s so much I can comment on about Animal Farm. It parallels the mighty and poignant history after the Bolshevik Revolution in such an intriguing way. When the hens step out and confess as “ringleaders [who] attempted rebellion”, or when the “sheep confessed to having urinated in the drinking pool” (p. 53), and then the dogs slew them without pause at Napoleon’s command, publicly, boiling anger and frustration and confusion is unleashed upon Stalin’s Great Purge. Napoleon infiltrated the minds of all of the animals through Squealer’s cries until the first squeak of a sucking-pig should be “Comrade Napoleon!” His titles, “Father of All Animals,” “Terror of Mankind,” “Protector of the Sheep-Fold,” and “Ducklings’ Friend”, are spitting reflections of the cult of personality with Joseph Stalin bolstered with unquestioning flattery and praise and an unending canvas of propaganda weaved by lies. Towards the end, when Napoleon betrays even the most hardworking Boxer, whose only maxims are “I must work harder” and “Napoleon is always right”. Resentment. Outrage. Hatred.
I always knew Stalin was a ruthless dictator. But reading more, I was again stunned by how Stalin’s iron fist was so inhumane and incited such unmeasurable suffering. His huge swallowing aspirations of collectivizing agriculture and technology in the U.S.S.R. (building the windmill in Animal Farm) and his forceful, almost breaking grip on the NKVD (the dogs Napoleon raised) is difficult to visualize. And Orwell broke the placidity in England by writing this novella. We cannot passively participate in hurting those who are like us, because of our lack of knowledge or our blind ignorance. Just as how the horses draw the cart holding Boxer to their own brother’s death, “too ignorant to realize what was happening” (p. 78) is a warning sign, a counterexample.
Next up, maybe Darkness at Noon, The Great Terror, or My Life: An Attempt at an Autobiography, by Leon Trotsky? We’ll see.
(p.s. if you like George Orwell’s writing, I highly recommend his essay “Politics and the English Language”, which is insane and captures the essence of writing and using words to deliver ideas.)
