Animal Farm Turns 80: The Book the Communists Wanted to Kill Is Now More Relevant Than Ever

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.

This from frontpagemag.com.

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. Ironically, the direct inspiration for Animal Farm came 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.

Eight years after the publication of Little Pig, Orwell created his own story about pigs and other barnyard animals:

[T]o 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 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 meant and British Communists rushed to suppress it.

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:

[A]nd 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.

The liberal Jewish anti-Communist publisher Fredric Warburg, who had published Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, and its description of Communist depredations, took a chance on Animal Farm. The book emerged in the late summer days of 1945 in that awkward stage between the fall of Germany and Japan, and while the Cold War had not yet officially arrived.

A day before Animal Farm‘s publication, Churchill, then the leader of the opposition, delivered a speech warning about totalitarianism under Soviet occupation all the while hedging diplomatically that “nor does it mean that Soviet Russia seeks to reduce all those independent States to provinces of the Soviet Union. Mr. Stalin is a very wise man.”

NOTE: Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech was still a year away.

Animal Farm delivered one of the clearest popular early blows to the pro-Soviet consensus in the UK:

Animal Farm’s Soviet Union is a grim mockery, a totalitarian system that undoes equality in the name of equality, that terrorizes and exploits the working class it claims to save, whose pigs are not liberators, but enslavers, and who, most damningly, invert language to mean its opposite.

Further:

This is a theme that Orwell would revisit powerfully in 1984 and make ‘Orwellian’ into a verb.

Today, Animal Farm’s breakdown of Soviet history is indecipherable to all but its most educated readers:

– its metaphors for the different elements of the classes on the farm are irrelevant, and

– the Communists who once tried to stamp it out for those reasons no longer care about it so much so that the book the CIA once covertly airdropped into Soviet territories can be found for sale in China because the perception is that no one knows what it’s talking about anymore.

But in the age of ‘Equity’—of Black Lives Matter—Animal Farm is also more relevant than ever.

Orwell, a close student of political language, incisively deconstructed the rationales by which leftist movements make totalitarianism seem like liberation and turn inequality into equality.

All animals are equal, but some animals

are more equal than others…

…remains a scathing retort for the hypocritical systems that insist that their version of inequality is a better version of equality.

No conservative critic of the Left could summon the sense of outraged betrayal that Orwell, a socialist, brought to his attacks on the Communist perversion of his ideals and in the process, he created witty biting anti-slogans such as “Four Legs Good, Two Legs Better”, “War is Peace” and “Freedom is Slavery”.

All of those satirical anti-slogans remain more relevant than ever even long after the passing of the USSR because the reality in front of our eyes is constantly in conflict with the ideological mass propaganda being presented to us by our version of the party.

The simple truth of that ‘fairy’ animal fable, as Animal Farm was once known, is that power is at odds with equality:

[A]nd any system that insists on centralizing power in the name of equality, as the Left invariably does, is a paradox that can only be resolved through Doublespeak inversions.

In closing, please note the following observations:

– Leftist totalitarianism has become slyer than ever at hiding behind victimhood,

– Equity is a classic example of “all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others”,

– Leftist tyrants always hide behind the oppressed, behind some group of victims in whose name they oppress, but they can’t help oppressing the oppressed,

– The caretaker regimes, the pigs of Animal Farm, can never cede power to the people or animals whom they claim to advocate for, and eventually the shell game dissolves into open tyranny, and

– While 1984 is the clearest paradigm of tyranny, Animal Farm is in some ways even more important because it shows the process by which the revolution devolves into tyranny.

We live in a world where some animals seek to be more equal than others. What will change that world is not another revolution of radicals, rather by reducing the power of the radical pigs who rule over us.