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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. I was impressed on how our own reality is pictured so very well in this book. I come from a country oppressed by a disguised form of socialism. It is instead communism, the old one.
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. 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. 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 popularity (and addition to the school curriculum) could perhaps be attributed to the "Red scare". 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 an allegory depicting the Bolshevik revolution using pigs, dogs, horses and other farm animals. 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.
In truth they belittle them to unrecognizability. At first it is the turn of the unadopted, but in the end all others are in for it, even the rascals. 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. This can be seen in our times in Islam how it is lived by the Islamists where the individual is nothing, although promised paradise. Not quite.
Orwell is taking one step more here than in "1984". 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. This makes them assessable. He hopes that man is wise enough to do it. 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. Is this what Orwell wants to tell us. 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.
Ideologies promise always to bring people to their true greatness. They leave a desert behind. 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. It is a pious hope.Freedom is always endangered if one or a group of people, a party, a majority etc. But then it might be an imperceptible process which is all the more successful in case of a skilled use of language.
And freedom is getting lost, if it becomes a political will, transformed and applied by the power holders. 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. has the presumption to connote oneself as only owner of "truth". 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. Enough examples in the younger history.
The individuals should get accustomed to the wrong and adopt it. The freed ones installed a much worse rule. He is about showing us that this is only inevitable when the conscience for freedom values is undermined.
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. Is the worldview of ANIMAL FARM realistic.The impact of this book was seen as huge and potentially destabilizing when published in 1946. 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. So much for calling Stalin a pig. 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. 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. This book today is seen by many as a children's story as some publishers saw it when Orwell first approached them.
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 US Army in Bavaria restricted distribution to then Soviet occupied zones for fears that it would provoke the ire of the Russians. 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. A student of history and readers who like animal stories will find this book enduring. Was Orwell guilty of aloofness from realpolitik or did he have excessive idealism. 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 farm, with the politics machinations of the pigs, was defended from a far worse human tyranny. The pigs on the farm become the ruling class in this "classless" society.
A revolution that could have created a weak Spain occupied by the Nazi war machine. 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. Enough said about the plot. The secession of Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin can easily be seen in the story as can the the tyranny of the ruling Politburo.
I have passed this book on to relatives so that they may understand also. This is one of the easiest books I've ever 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.
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