Animal farm

George Orwell

Animal Farm was written by George Orwell between 1944 and 1945 and was published in 1945, during this type of the world was going through the end of the horrid World War II, but Russia, in particular, had two other events simultaneous with the two world wars. During the first, the Bolsheviks deposed and killed the last Russian tsar, and the second world War gave enormous power and prestige to Stalin who created the USSR, communism and spread this influence across much of Eastern Europe.

The events take place on a small farm in England, named Manor farm, to which the farmer: Mr Jones is often ignorant because of his heavy drinking. But things are about to change as a near-death boar, Old Major summons a meeting with the other farm animals. His views are passed on to the other animals in his speech, inciting rebellion, sustained by the idea that all animals are equal and their sole problem is caused by the leadership of men. He gives them, even an anthem called: “Beasts of England”.

After his death, two pigs Napoleon and Snowball take it upon themselves as their duty to continue their newly acquired “awakening” in the philosophy of Animalism. They discuss it with the horses: Boxer and Clover, while some of the other animals find it a bit difficult to comprehend the entire philosophy because of their lack of intelligence, some of them can’t even read.

Upon the fact that Mr Jones misses feeding the animals for 24 hours in a row, three months after Old Major’s speech, the pigs see their opportunity, rebel against the farmer and chase Mr Jones from the farm in an easy to obtain successful campaign.

The objects through which Mr Jones imposed his power like whips or knives are quickly burned and after the celebration, the pigs do reveal they self-taught themselves to read, and Snowball demonstrates this newly acquired skill by painting the farm name as “Animal Farm” and the seven rules of Animalism. One of which guaranteed equality among animals. All the other rules ensured that they will not act like humans: creatures walking on four legs are friends, while those walking on two are enemies, animals will not wear clothes or will not sleep in a bed, animals shall not drink alcohol, and animals will not kill other animals. All this human behaviour was seen as the source of their initial problems.

The animals begin to feed themselves from their production, their harvest. The pigs acquire the skill to milk the cows, however, the milk does not appear to enter the stocks. Boxer the strong horse is excited by these events and adopts the motto: “I will work harder!” which he does hold up too. Everyone works hard, there is just one exception, a horse named Mollie, who is very much into her looks.

There are regular meetings where dogs, the goat Muriel and the donkey Benjamin become fully literate, while the sheep do not have the capacity to reach that level and can only learn one letter. As such the rules are read to them and synthesised in a single expression: “Four legs good, two legs bad.” In the meantime, while Snowball is more concerned with the masses of animals, Napoleon is more concerned to train some new puppies, nine of them. Both pigs sent out pigeons, to neighbouring farms, to see if they would find collaborators.

Mr Jones manages to gather from the local pub some man and attempt to reclaim Animal Farm, by attacking them with guns in an attack that will be called “The battle of cowshed”. Though harder, the animals manage to come victorious once more and decide on a tradition: to fire Mr Jones gun twice a year in the honour of the battle, and a military distinction is given to Snowball.

The competition between the two pigs escalates. And by winter Mollie flees the farm to serve a human in town.

The final tipping point comes upon the debate of building a windmill that would provide electricity and eventually reduce the harder work for the animals, however in this debate: Snowball and Napoleon come clashing, and the latter calls upon the now grown-up puppies and the dogs to chase away Snowball. Upon his departure, Napoleon expresses to the others of Snowball secret intentions to eliminate the animals right to vote, and he nominates himself as sole leader.

After three weeks he turns his speech, saying that it was his idea all along to construct a windmill. All the animals need to sacrifice more of their production time on the windmill construction, therefore is less food to which all animals are affected, except the pigs and the dogs.

Because of the necessity for other external materials, to construct the windmill, the pigs initiate trading with other farms. This coincides with the pigs moving into Mr Jones old farmhouse and beginning to sleep in bed, soon followed by a change in the commandment of: “no animal will sleep in a bed” with the addition: “with sheets”.

A weather event destroys most of the windmill construction, but Napoleon blames it on Snowball, accusing him of external sabotage. However, an internal rebellion appears among the birds, as the hens are told their eggs will be traded for grain, while the hens wanted to hatch their eggs. But after the revolt, their food ratio is cut down, some of them die, and they forcibly agree to the pigs’ conditions. However, Napoleon puts the chickens’ death on another sneaky intervention of Snowball, while the animals are confused.

A few days later the dogs attack some pigs who, under threat, admit they have been conspiring with Snowball, and the pigs are killed by the dogs. This fate is followed by other animals who come to confess to their conspiration with Snowball against Animal farm.

Boxer accepts the situation easily while Clover the horse thinks that this is not exactly what she would have hoped for at the start of the rebellion, but the situation might have been worse under Mr Jones. And to reinforce the initial rebellion thoughts the animals want to sing once more “Beasts of England”. This time, Squealer, a pig with great oratorical talent, and a right hand of Napoleon explains the banning of this song, as the revolution and its ideals have already been achieved and there is no more the necessity of the song, and another pig composes a new song.

After this Clover asks once more for a read of the commandments, not managing to understand the latest killing of animals, but this rule had now a completion as well: “Animals should not kill other animals” with the addition of: “without cause”.

As such the animal focuses then on their common goal, the windmill, pushing their back into it more than ever, while Squealer constantly gives them false positive news regarding the farm does. He gives reports of production increasing enormously, doubling and even going five times to what it used to be, although the animals’ food ratio is cut constantly.

Napoleon stays more and more secluded in Mr Jones farmhouse protected by his dogs, while starting to trade and negotiate with the two surrounding farms of Mr Pilkington of Foxwood farm and Mr Frederick of Pinchfield farm, considering the two farms are enemies and in competition one with the other. He changes alliances several times, but Mr Frederick and his gunned man invade Animal Farm and blow up the recently completed windmill.

Despite more losses, the animals do manage to come victorious once more, and Squealer depicts this as a tremendous victory for them. This time the pigs discover a whiskey case in Mr Joneses’ house, and taking a liking to alcohol, command that some of the fields will now hold barley. To this, the rule of drinking has addition as well: “Animals should not drink alcohol” plus “in excess”.

The windmill construction is restarted, food restrictions are becoming more severe and the workaholic Boxer has the powers reduced, as he is getting older and weaker. In the meanwhile, the pig population grows, some of which are Napoleon’s offspring, and he is voted unanimously as president, upon the farm becoming a republic.

When Boxer falls down because of overworking in old age, Napoleon informs the animal that he has been taken to be seen by a veterinarian, while Benjamin speaks of a different story, Boxer was taken to the glue factory.

Time goes by, and there are fewer and fewer animals who remember the old major, the revolution goals, and the old times. The first windmill eventually gets completed, a second one is started, but neither electrifies the farm. The pigs begin to walk on two legs, carry whips.

The sheep who have always known the brief expression of the commandments now learned the newer version from the pigs: “Four legs good, two legs better.” In the meanwhile, the commandment board was replaced by just one statement: “All animals are equal. But some animals are more equal than others”.

As dissension starts during a card game, the other animals realize that they can’t distinguish among the rioters’ pigs from men.

The main theme of the novel is very easy to distinguish, and that is totalitarian systems, regardless of their orientation: extreme left, extreme right. The tale starts with a slow abolition of rights, disguised in democratic actions, in fighting a common enemy and achieving a common good goal. Nobody would choose evil if they would recognise it as evil, it is when it is disguised as good that it starts when it reaches certain levels of power, the totalitarian system is too hard to stop.

The story shows clearly that Napoleon manages to increase his power through the other animals’ lack of knowledge, through their not being able to have the sufficient intellect to decide for themselves, to analyse and distinguish values or tricks, and like sheep they will accept and repeat anything that they would be told. By the time some of them raise questions about the loss of the original principles, there are already sufficient reinforcers of the current power, the dogs, that they cannot raise questions. But it is through the fact the majority of animals accept the conditions without questions due to their lack of knowledge that the real totalitarian system is achieved.

What is even more interesting is that directed knowledge, learning the sheep just a glimpse of reading (just the letter A), learning the other animals just segments, teaching them just the rules and not what is behind them, that shows even more danger. When some animals believe they have sufficient knowledge, know how to read parts of sentences, that is when Napoleon’s real power is achieved and expanded to exterminate all competition and to install an even more tyrannic system than Mr Jones ever was.

Subjective opinion:

Studying history and literary history was a continuous question to find out how the population lived at the beginning of the 20th century accepted to adopt an extremist (left and right) policy. The literacy level was even higher than in the previous centuries. People started to have more and more access to free school education, to books, and yet the population seemed to have turned away from that and choose extremist views.

It is, of course, now analysed, that the economic crises might have had an impact, as in periods of extreme turmoil masses of people will lean towards populist leaders, which are usually a trait that the extremist leaders will have. After the instauration of communism in Russia, Nazism in Germany, or Fascism in Italy, it was no wonder on the path humanity will face World War II was inevitable, and with it, and especially after the end. Stalin was renowned for its policy of killing any member of the bourgeois, of its noble intellectual elite, of its doctors, engineers and anyone who would have had the intellectual capacity to contradict them from all powers, stripping them of any type of rights. So, the fact that some Eastern European countries now have a difficult time regenerating that properly educated and knowledgeable population is of no wonder. In a different form, but after World War II, West European countries did find their elite going down from power and replaced with other people, more mondain, more popular. It is weird how a lot of Western countries blame themselves for their history and will tend to mend everything by offering privileges based on past oppression and not necessary on merit. But that is a different story.

What is more interesting is those people at the beginning of the 20th century that chose a very wrong path, an extremist path and they were well educated. Or were they? If we look a bit closer, we do realize that there was a huge rise in the middle class at the beginning of the 20th century, we might then assume, just in theory, that people started to have access to knowledge, but it was not yet that well understood, and in the speed of it all, the population thought it might have a tremendously good knowledge of everything and yet it did not. That can be dangerous.

What would be more dangerous is a historical quote: “A population that does not know its history is like a child that does not know its parents.”

Therefore, in today’s day, access to knowledge is so easy to be achieved, and yet… Pornhub has a lot more visitors than Wikipedia, reaching a daily user base of 2.8 billion users.

We have the software technology to develop so many useful algorithms for hospitals, for education platforms, and yet we use it to develop the so-called social media applications. Applications for internet dating that allow any user to pretend they are whoever they want to be and create so many personas that there will be multiple persons tricked in a fake relationship which usually end up with scammers robbing people of huge amounts of money.

We create social media software that affects so much human self-image, that teenagers have to put on filters over their pictures to feel accepted, in some cases leading to suicide.

We develop applications that create a crypto currency (which by the way in Greek means hidden) that will actually affect the environment more, is easier to be used as ransom money by hackers and is much harder to be tracked for laundering money, when the problem is not our current currency is how it is distributed.

It is the fact that a lot of people would more easily spend money on alcohol, drugs, pornographic websites that objectify people than on books, literature, art galleries, classic music concerts.

Meanwhile, it is cheaper than ever to print and sell books, yet people prefer a vlog, a video that would give you the sense you have more knowledge on a subject than someone who has a degree.

It is not the lack of knowledge that is so dangerous, is when the illusion of knowledge is created without a solid foundation, it is only then that people can be tricked into following pre-chosen paths.

The cure is very simple. Read. Learn. Hear 10 opinions before you decide upon one. What is harder to achieve in terms of knowledge is usually better. It is much harder for someone to write and publish a book as it involves much more people, it is far easier to express an opinion on the topic in a free to upload video. Yet in a book, it might be, much more research, real study and because it is harder to achieve, it might be more truthful and accurate.

Just an opinion. Just a thought. Just Steven J. Scott.