I live in Concord, Massachusetts, once renowned as the Cradle of Liberty, but today a center of anti-Trump, No Kings, Our Turn to Resist Tyranny, pro-DIE affluent liberal leftism.
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My neighborhood book group, interestingly, has just decided to revisit George Orwell’s Animal Farm, perhaps because of the new (and apparently dumbed down and revisionist) animated film about to appear in theaters.
I am sure they want to turn it into an anti-Trump hate-fest. After all, if Trump is Hitler, why not also Napoleon or Stalin the Pig?
But to paraphrase a saying: I do not think that this story means what you think it means. This is a story about how a self-anointed elite (AKA a mafia gang) of parasites who produce nothing, but are totally driven by a Will to Power, like most of the leftist denizens of D.C., can, if not countered, hijack the best of liberal intentions.
Beyond that, I have some problems with the story itself.
First and foremost, although Orwell roughly follows Soviet history, he in fact brushes over and distorts it by focusing narrowly on the Stalin-Trotsky rivalry and the alleged betrayal by the pigs, and especially by Stalin-Napoleon, of Old Major (Marx and Lenin)’s seemingly lovely socialist ideals.
In particular, Orwell gives communism/socialism a vastly better image than it deserves. The reality of the revolution’s aftermath was about 180 degrees opposite of Orwell’s portrait in Chapter 3. Orwell portrays the immediate aftermath of the revolution (takeover of Manor Farm) as some edenic worker-management paradise of abundance, only later corrupted by the powerful self-appointed, self-anointed elite pig Vanguard of the Proletariat. He also ignores Lenin’s role as founder of terror as a mode of governance and the Cheka as its instrument (well before the arrival of Stalin-Napoleon’s NKVD hounds).
Not only was there no abundance after the revolution, but agricultural production collapsed, and a famine ensued, starving millions. Industrial production (contrary to Soviet myth, there was a lot of it prior to the revolution) plummeted to a fifth (only 20 percent!) of pre-WWI days by 1920 — specifically because Lenin and the Cheka liquidated (exterminated) the largely ethnic German managerial and engineering class who had done the basic running of things for the tsarist empire. (Fun fact. Tchaikovsky’s patroness, Nadezhda Von Mack, was the wife of one of the original German-Russian railway barons.)
The Soviet economy began to recover only with the partial restoration of markets and capitalism with the New Economic Policy of 1921. And the real road to re-industrialization was not any Trotsky-Snowball blueprint, but rather a massive infusion of American (!) technology and management know-how, financed by expropriations, exactions, and confiscations well before Stalin took over.
It is interesting that the American contribution to the rise of the USSR is so little known, or perhaps deliberately suppressed.
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Here is a bit of that history, by someone who was one of America’s pre-eminent historians of technology and innovation (see his book American Genesis).
And then there was the (again airbrushed from history) staggering contribution America made via Lend-Lease to keep the Soviets from defeat in WWII.
American technology and management have done a lot for others out in the world, including for those who became our adversaries. It would be nice to get out of all the doom and gloom and celebrate those contributions for our 250th birthday.
A final thought: Animal Farm is and remains a valuable cautionary tale of how determined, self-anointed “elites” and utterly ruthless individuals can hijack noble-sounding ideals and turn alleged utopias into tyranny, especially if those around them allow themselves to be propagandized into becoming unthinking sheep.
For me, however, it ends as it begins on a historically and factually false note. The moral of the story — yes, Orwell was right to subtitle it “a fairy tale” — is clearly that the communist pigs have become evil because they are now indistinguishable from the human capitalist oppressors against whom they originally rebelled.
While dramatically satisfying as closure for a story, there is, to me, something repellant in the implied moral equivalence. The two systems are not morally equivalent. Free market capitalism has brought billions of people out of poverty; communism has shot, starved, and murdered at least 100 million and enslaved many more hundreds of millions. It is, after all, a system that denies private property and confiscates income, thus denying people — other than the governing elite — most or all of the fruits of their labor. In other words, slavery.
All animals are, of course, not equal, as Orwell well shows in his fairy tale, nor are humans. We have different talents, abilities, and ambitions or lack thereof. Forcing “equality” is by definition done by force, and force is always applied by those who deem themselves more equal than others, which is real tyranny.
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Image: kallerna via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 (cropped).