“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
The 80th anniversary of the publication of Animal Farm passed almost without notice on college campuses where Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto is the most assigned political work and in a culture where ‘Equity’ took the book’s sardonic corruption of equality from satire to reality.
Orwell, a fierce opponent of the Soviet Union, had his journalism relentlessly censored by British Communists and their fellow travelers, forcing him to resort to fiction, first Animal Farm and then 1984. The direct inspiration for Animal Farm had come from ‘The Adventures of the Little Pig’ a pre-war children’s book published by the ‘Left Book Club’ to indoctrinate children into anti-capitalism as the little pig grapples with various threats embodying rapacious capitalism.
The Left Book Club had been created “to provide machinery by which books of urgent political importance could be issued at a very low price” and while ‘The Adventures of the Little Pig’ was successful at the time, its political indoctrination is so mild by the standards of contemporary children’s literature, in which Antiracist Baby and the Little Engine That Could Pays a Visit to the Pride Parade are normative, that it’s borderline undetectable, and is mostly forgotten today.
But 8 years later, Orwell used a story about some pigs and other barnyard animals to distill a capsule history of the Bolshevik revolution through its various phases from the promise of liberation to the descent into an even bleaker tyranny than anything that had come before.
Despite the animal fable, Orwell found it nearly impossible to find a publisher. Unlike The Adventures of the Little Pig there was nothing childish about Animal Farm and the book was clearly not meant for children. Anyone familiar with the history of the USSR knew exactly what Orwell was on about which meant that British Communists rushed to suppress it, warning that it was a threat to national security, the war effort and would ruin relations with Moscow.
Orwell’s old enemy, the Ministry of Information, infested with Communists and leftists, did everything possible to make certain Animal Farm would never see the light of day. Orwell would make the ‘Ministry’ the focus of 1984 where it would be known as the Ministry of Truth and in the business of lies, doublespeak and industrial level societal brainwashing. Even Soviet spies took an interest in Animal Farm and worked to suppress the biting critique of the USSR.
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Author: Ruth King
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