All ism's (Animalism here) eventually encounter the same issues

books:

	• Animal Farm George Orwell 1st World Library - Literary Society, 2004 - 113 pages average customer review:based on 1213 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

All ism's (Animalism here) eventually encounter the same issues

Animal farm was not part of my high school curriculum, so I happened to read this "A Fairy Story" at a later stage in my life. It's an allegory depicting the Bolshevik revolution using pigs, dogs, horses and other farm animals. The much expected revolution had animals in the beginning saying "Four legs good, two legs bad" and towards the end of the satire the sheep's were bleating "Four legs good, two legs better" and the pigs (the ruling class) were walking on their hind legs. It's the story of a revolution gone bad, the wicked and the scheming taking over and the lot of the ordinary working class staying as is or perhaps even worse. The characters Napoleon and Snowball represent Stalin and Trotsky while Squealer and Minimus represents Stalin's sycophants. It's fairly good; however, I'm not sure why this book is a literary masterpiece though. It's a fairly simple mapping of the main characters of the Russian revolution to farm animals with a decent dose of humor sprinkled here and there. It's popularity (and addition to the school curriculum) could perhaps be attributed to the "Red scare"?

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Easy read

I read this book within one day. If you want to understand what is going on with our Country today, just pick up this book and it will help you understand what is going on in the simplest way possible. This is one of the easiest books I've ever read. I have passed this book on to relatives so that they may understand also.

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Great for those living in communist type of socialism

I come from a country oppressed by a disguised form of socialism. It is instead communism, the old one. I was impressed on how our own reality is pictured so very well in this book. I couldn't finish it, I read it in two afternoons.
A classic to give as a gift to someone that doesn't actually grasp the sad reality they live in.

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Politburo Parody

Years after its publication ANIMAL FARM continues to bridge the gap between great parody and a good animal story. The setting is a farm taken over in an animal revolution from the human owner. The pigs on the farm become the ruling class in this "classless" society. The farm endures an abortive invasion by the humans and gradually devolves into a society similar to the old one that was overthrown with the humans allying with the pig elite. Enough said about the plot. This book today is seen by many as a children's story as some publishers saw it when Orwell first approached them. As the memory of the Soviet Union fades into history this book will lose its edge as parody.

The story of ANIMAL FARM is actually the history of the Soviet state between 1917 and the death of Stalin. The secession of Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin can easily be seen in the story as can the the tyranny of the ruling Politburo. ANIMAL FARM was probably influenced by Orwell's experience in the Spanish Civil War remembered in HOMAGE TO CATALONIA- a bitter story of Communist double dealings against the Left. The chapters in HOMAGE TO CATALONIA that deal with the labyrinthine left politics of the Spanish Republic are echoed in ANIMAL FARM.

ANIMAL FARM raises the same disturbing questions that HOMAGE raised with me when I read it. The tyrant pigs who run the farm are, paradoxically, the ones who save it from the humans and the ones who organize and exploit it. The Soviet Union with its meagre help bought time for the Spanish Republic, advanced the Soviet state's interest in maintaining its military alliance with France, and at the same time prevented a real revolution in Spain. A revolution that could have created a weak Spain occupied by the Nazi war machine. A war machine that would have dominated the western flank of British Egypt and Malta.

The West benefited from the tyranny of Stalin with a destructive second front against Hitler. The farm, with the politics machinations of the pigs, was defended from a far worse human tyranny. Was Orwell guilty of aloofness from realpolitik or did he have excessive idealism? Is the worldview of ANIMAL FARM realistic?

The impact of this book was seen as huge and potentially destabilizing when published in 1946. The US Army in Bavaria restricted distribution to then Soviet occupied zones for fears that it would provoke the ire of the Russians. So much for calling Stalin a pig. A student of history and readers who like animal stories will find this book enduring.

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Like people without truth

Orwell is taking one step more here than in "1984". He describes the rebellion of the animals of a farm against the brutal, steadily drunken farmer who exploits and oppresses them violently. The usurpation against this rule of violence is successful. But to fight the evil it does not mean to attain the emergence of the good.
When in 1917 the Bolschewiki and Menschewiki overthrew Czarist Russia they removed a system that had brought for most of the people only hardly bearable conditions. In their place they set a regimen with an ideology that promised a wonderful future but created more terrible conditions than had ever existed before. The same goes with the animals on the farm. The freed ones installed a much worse rule. This happens not at once, it is a creeping and scaringly not avoidable process!
Is this the fate of any free order, that it deteriorates into dictatorship? Is this what Orwell wants to tell us? Not quite! He is about showing us that this is only inevitable when the conscience for freedom values is undermined. But then it might be an imperceptible process which is all the more successful in case of a skilled use of language. The individuals should get accustomed to the wrong and adopt it. This makes them assessable. In the end they have no more own voice and bleat "mee" and "moo" in lockstep until they can be lead to the butcher unresistantly. At first it is the turn of the unadopted, but in the end all others are in for it, even the rascals. They leave a desert behind. Enough examples in the younger history! Especially the 20th century has excelled in the realization of much promising but less promise keeping ideologies, whose devastating effects will last long.
Orwell`s book is an appeal to all to understand and treasure the freedom rights of man as superior sanctity of human possession and to restore them as the most precious good that people have. He hopes that man is wise enough to do it. It is a pious hope.
Freedom is always endangered if one or a group of people, a party, a majority etc. has the presumption to connote oneself as only owner of "truth". And freedom is getting lost, if it becomes a political will, transformed and applied by the power holders. Ideologies promise always to bring people to their true greatness. In truth they belittle them to unrecognizability. This can be seen in our times in Islam how it is lived by the Islamists where the individual is nothing, although promised paradise. Already Friedrich Hölderlin had said: "It were always those who made the world a hell who promised to make it paradise."
"Animal farm" is thrilling though you know in the beginning how it ends.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

Purchase one of 1st World Library's Classic Books and help support our free internet library of downloadable eBooks. Visit us online at www.1stWorldLibrary.ORG - - Mr. Jones, of the Manor Farm, had locked the henhouses for the night, but was too drunk to remember to shut the pop-holes. With the ring of light from his lantern dancing from side to side, he lurched across the yard, kicked off his boots at the back door, drew himself a last glass of beer from the barrel in the scullery, and made his way up to bed, where Mrs. Jones was already snoring. As soon as the light in the bedroom went out there was a stirring and a fluttering all through the farm buildings. Word had gone round during the day that old Major, the prize Middle White boar, had had a strange dream on the previous night and wished to communicate it to the other animals. It had been agreed that they should all meet in the big barn as soon as Mr. Jones was safely out of the way. Old Major (so he was always called, though the name under which he had been exhibited was Willingdon Beauty) was so highly regarded on the farm that everyone was quite ready to lose an hour's sleep in order to hear what he had to say.

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