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“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.
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, those with their noses to the wind could smell it drifting over from the Soviet occupied zones of Berlin.
But the rhetoric even among British conservatives tended to be far more cautious. A day before Animal Farm‘s publication, Churchill, now the leader of the opposition, had 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.” Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech was still a year away and though its themes were already present in his parliamentary remarks, 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. 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, and 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.
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”, but its proponents insist that the slogan applies to actual legal equality while its inequality will actually make everyone more equal. 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. 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.
Orwell is widely read and rarely heeded. His death at a relatively early age and the slow dissolution of the liberal anti-Communist movements that were launched by, among others, his publisher Warburg, in the early days of the Cold War, also made it all too easy to hijack his legacy, but the stark satirical novels he wrote toward the end of his life remain sharp rebukes.
80 years later, Animal Farm mocks not only the Soviet Union, but the idea that liberation movements concentrating and clinging to power would ever amount to more than totalitarian farces. It offers a warning to contemporary American and European liberals who, like their counterparts in Orwell’s day, allowed themselves to be hijacked by Communism, of how it all ends, not in Obama’s ‘Right Side of History’ but in terror, tyranny and mass death.
Ideology, Orwell warned his ideological cohort, is endlessly mutable when it consists of mere words. “Two Legs Bad” can become “Two Legs Better” when people learn to repeat slogans, rather than live them. Equality is either a real state of being or just another slogan all too easily warped into meaning whatever those in power want it to mean. Above all else, Orwell taught us to be suspicious of the slogans and rationales deployed by those in power to justify their rule.
We live in a world where some animals are more equal than others. What will change that world is not another revolution of radicals, but reducing the power of the radical pigs who rule over us.