Orwell’s Warning
As we approach the 80th anniversary of the publication of Animal Farm, a novelized attack upon Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union in particular and totalitarianism in general, the lessons of that “fairy tale” are more relevant today than they were in the aftermath of the Second World War.
Animal Farm was one of two classics written by Englishman Eric Blair, who took on the pen name George Orwell — the other being 1984, a dystopian novel that used human characters, not farm animals — in an effort to warn of totalitarianism in the noncommunist world.
Orwell was educated at England’s most acclaimed prep school, Eton, and desired to make a living writing novels. He was hardly a staunch right-winger. At the time he published Animal Farm, he was an avowed democratic socialist. Like many socialists of his day, he had a conviction that socialism had not been implemented correctly, believing that the horrors of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) were an aberration. By the time he wrote 1984, Orwell’s fictional villains were proponents of English Socialism — IngSoc, as he called it. One might wonder what Orwell would think of “democratic” socialism today, and how his two classics are now used seemingly as instruction manuals, rather than warnings of what to avoid.
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