Animal Farm
I recently read Animal Farm again. Actually I listened to it as an audio book, which I am really beginning to like. I am so done with paper books now. I lose my page, people borrow them and make dog ears in them or worse still don’t return them. Once I am done with them they sit around and collect dust and since I am a secret pack rat at heart I never throw or give them away and now I have tons of them. Also I am growing old now and sitting in the same position for hours on end nowadays leaves me sore. My ass goes to sleep and my feet get the tingles. (Man, I sound antediluvian)
But, as usual, I’m going off on a tangent here. So. Lets turn this car around (Which is a brilliant Tom Petty song from his 2006 album ‘Highway Companion’)
Animal Farm. The more I read this book the more parallels I find between it and Orwell’s Magnum Opus, 1984.
You can read it as a simple story, a fairy tale about animals that overthrow their human overlords and run a farm themselves or, if you are paying attention, as a scathing criticism of every aspect of communism.
Orwell creates parallels in his make-believe animal farm to every aspect of this political theory and he rips apart every facet of it. From the idealistic beginnings to the dreams of equality and division of labour. Animal Farm has propaganda and brain washing (squealer, the pig), the mindless proles (the sheep), the leader’s junta (Napoleon’s dogs) and even the church and a Moses figure in the form of the raven promising everyone an after life in Sugar Candy Mountain.
The animals’ dreams of equality are quickly dashed when power gets concentrated with the pigs who soon make a pact with the recently overthrown humans to reign over the rest of the animals.
The book also has one of the most memorable last lines which stuck in my mind since I first read it. ”The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
It reminds me of Abraham Lincoln’s famous quote. ”Nearly all men can stand the test of adversity, but if you really want to test a man’s character, give him power.”