Sunday 17 August 2014

Aug 17 1946 - George Orwell Publishes Animal Farm

A post taking real life incidents from this day in history and my view of them as if they were happening today and what my honest view would have been then on that day ignoring hindsight or knowledge of how it ended.

Of all the political ideologies bandied around, it's Socialism that sounds the most attractive. Everyone equal and 'from each according to his ability, to each according to his need' as Karl Marx put it. 
The problem is with any ideology, it can become corrupted by having a power crazy megalomaniac at the top and George Orwell has come up with an amazing book that warns how even the best ideology can become corrupted and he has surprisingly used the setting of a farm.
Based on the Russian revolution and following through to the modern day Stalin era, he cleverly uses the farm animals and the farm itself as the staging for the uprising against Farmer Jones and the pigs' rise to pre-eminence which mirrors the rise of Stalin.
If you know the story of the Bolsheviks and the overthrow of the monarchy, the idea that 'all animals are equal' which slowly becomes corrupted into 'all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others' parallelling the perverting of the Marxist theory which the revolution was based upon.
Powerful writing and undoubtedly it will not see light of day in the Soviet Union but Orwell beautifully weaves real life events into a fantasy setting and warns in large letters that any ideology, even one as appealing as Socialism where everyone is supposedly equal, can be twisted and corrupted in the wrong hands.  

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Of all the political ideologies bandied around, it's Socialism that sounds the most attractive.
*High Five*

Liber - Latin for "The Free One" said...
This comment has been removed by the author.