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

[Melody]

First, Przemyslaw Plaskowicki.  Thank you for the link.  It was a nice
quick overview to all those bits I did not know.  When the book
introduction does not illude to it and you do not read the book in a
class with a professor to tell you what the author meant, you are left
to your own knowledge.  And unfortunately, my knowledge and love of
history has focused on Britian and America all my life, so I have
missed that chunk.  


Haggridd wrote:
> Melody, "Eventually" can be a long time for those stuck in the 
> horrors of such a system.  

Yes.  I am sorry if I spoke lightly of it.  It was not my intent. 
Often when you are glazing through history and looking at it from
above, you can forget that people suffer day by day in it and the life
they lived was not humane.  If you look over the whole of history, you
really cannot find a single bit of it where all humans were treated
well and had hope.  So to me, every system had horrors for someone. 
It just seems totalitarianism manages to lump more in that misery
category than say fuedalism.  


Haggridd:
> 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.

Is that really true?  From the beginning, the whole goal of those
seeking Russian power or in this book "the pigs" was in full knowledge
that it will drive the quality of life down for those they stood on? 
They purposefully engaged in practices to see how far they can drive
the people down?  I thought all they wanted was power and the
appearance of glory, so they did all they could to keep those two
myths alive to those in and outside their reign.  

I never knew if Communism started in Russia with idealism truely in
mind, or if those seeking its coming saw the evil innate in the system
and exploited it.  

I just thought, and remember I was in elementary school when the USSR
fell, that Russia became corrupt not because it started that way, but
because it did not account for the greed in people.  


> The Communists lasted seventy years, less than your century, but a 
> full biblical "three score and ten".  

Well, I said century because I do know the Czar was overthrown around
the turn of the century.  But if I had thought harder I would have
remembered the princesses in 1910's clothing and that USSR came down
in the 80's.  


> 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.  

And did the world do anything?  Did the UN?  I never knew it was that
bad.  It is sad that public and even college courses get to the last
century of world history in the last weeks of class, and thus skim
over them.  What we should know best is our recent history.  It is so
important and so tender still.

 
> Perhaps instead of taking comfort that totalitarianism hasn't lasted 
> over 100 years, 

Everyone tries to take comfort in evil not lasting.  That is the
essence of fairy tales and even Harry Potter.  Evil will happen. 
People will suffer.  I try to find comfort in the fact that it will
not last forever.  I guess that the pendulum will swing the other way.
 Maybe that is because that is the only comfort I can find, because I
*know* evil things will happen.  Maybe because I have never lived
under a regime, I don't understand, and cannot understand, what it is
I am trying to comprehend.


> ...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.

And why does the world do nothing?  Why hasn't the UN done anything? 
Because China says they are shifting into an "UN approved" government,
or because they are so big and their army can crush anyone that tries?


Melody
who has always asked too many questions and been overly curious