Animal Farm (spoilers to those who have not read it)

Haggridd jkusalavagemd at yahoo.com
Tue Sep 28 17:03:45 UTC 2004


--- In HPFGU-OTChatter at yahoogroups.com, "Melody" <Malady579 at h...> 
wrote:
Pessimistic.
> 
> I can see how things can get so bad that they turn out the way they
> did in the book and can be manipulated into being that way, but I
> can't help think in the end when the pigs are like humans, that the
> farm animals can just as easily rebel against the pigs.  Granted the
> point of the story seems to be the circle of a hard life is constant
> no matter how you perceive it, hence the line from the donkey
> Benjamin.  I don't know if I am just eternally optimistic or I just 
am
> stubbornly determined to see the good in man to rise above.  Now I 
am
> getting into the "Lord of the Flies" argument.
> 
> I guess I just don't see how the animals are stuck "forever" in
> misery.  I mean England and America got out of the slums of
> Industrialization and cleaned up their faults.  Is the story more
> about distracting reality by believing you are free?  Is the story
> saying you are controlled by your fears?  Or is the story about how
> the smartest can always find ways to arrange things to his favor?
> 
> What I do wonder is what happens after the pig Napoleon dies.  That 
is
> what saves many a tyrant's rule.  His inheritor is not as "smart" or
> as "clever" as him to spread so much misery.  The question of who
> would reign after Hitler died.  Would the whole thing fall because 
he
> or she could not carry the weight of it?  Has totalitarianism ever
> lasted over 100 years?  There is so little I know about it and world
> events.  I know fear can create a situation for a moment, but
> eventually the people revolt.  

> Ok, I will stop.  I just had to wonder.  Damn books I read.  :)
> 
> 
> Melody

Melody, "Eventually" can be a long time for those stuck in the 
horrors of such a system.  Orville's thesis is that the Communists 
had set out to achieve brutal power consciously, with malice 
aforethought, and planned each step of the way.  To paraphrase from 
his negative utopia "1984": the only way you know-- really know-- 
that you have power is your ability to make others suffer.

The Communists lasted seventy years, less than your century, but a 
full biblical "three score and ten".  During that time they caused 
the death of perhaps fifty million people.  Not enemies, not the 
Nazis in World War II, but their own people:  men, women, children, 
dead by an "arranged" famine; dead by working them to death in the 
frozen north, building canals that didn't work, or hydroelectric 
plants so inefficient that a new wave of oppression was started to 
hide the embarassment over this failure; dead by visits in the middle 
of the night to kidnap unsuspecting citizens; engineers, officers, 
other parties which had been allies, dead.  

Perhaps instead of taking comfort that totalitarianism hasn't lasted 
over 100 years, (Not true; in so-called "water supply" economies, the 
controlling powers can last for generations, unless destroyed from 
outside.)the question should be why it took seventy years of this 
horrror and misery for the people to do whatever was necessary to 
throw off this yoke.  And coountries such as the People's Republic of 
China are far better at this than the Soviets ever were.  Of course, 
they've only been in power fifty-five years.  We have fifteen years 
yet.

Haggridd





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