This is my message to you, comrades: Rebellion!

Moses, Animal Farm

The book has been chosen as a feature of the Book of the Month Club. It’s September 1946, and the critic is baffled by the announcement.

How is it possible, he asks, that such a book is heralded as something worthwhile to read? The “unusual talent” of the writer is rare. Rarer, still, is the “recognition” he’ll receive as well as “a great tangible reward.”

But for this book?

“There are times when a reviewer is happy to report that a book is bad because it fulfills his hope that the writer will expose himself in a way that permits a long deserved castigation,” writes the New Republic critic, George Soule. But this isn’t the case with George Orwell.

Animal Farm “puzzled and saddened me.”

What a “dull” book!

It’s obviously an allegory, a satire, yet nothing more than “a creaking machine for saying in a clumsy way things that have been said better directly.” As much as he admires Orwell, he can’t recommend that anyone read a book that seems to miss the boat.

The writer’s display of knowledge about the behavior of farm animals is dwarfed by the way the animals move about as if “circus animals performing mechanically to the crack of the story-teller’s whip.”

Horrid!

Maybe it’s too soon after those recent historical events in Russia that Orwell struggles to represent in Animal Farm. There’s Major, the pig, who prophesies the revolution to come. “All men are enemies. All animals are comrades.” Yes, we get it!

The reader, too, is to recognize in Napoleon, also a pig, Lenin. Snowball, another pig, is Trotsky. The building of the windmill is “an obvious symbol for electrification and industrialization.” That is, a Lenin project.

Okay.

But how can the reader be expected to enjoy such a story when forced to keep up with “who is who”? Without the details about what happened on the ground during the Russian Revolution, how would a reader know? Millions and millions died. Millions survived, enduring the Flu of 1918, the Holocaust, the fireballs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Spanish Civil War… and yes, World War I and II which ended the year Orwell’s Animal Farm is published.

“What aspect of reality is being satirized”? The reader of Animal Farm is “prevented either from enjoying the story as a story or from valuing it as a comment.” Anyway, the world has seen better writers at this game of satirizing history. Swift! Anatole France! Better storytellers, too.

(Maybe readers in 1946 or today should go back and read them?).

But I digress—

In Animal Farm, for Soule, it’s not clear what Orwell means even. Who is to be on top, Snowball? Should there have been “a common primitive communism without leaders”?

Maybe Orwell should stick to events he personally experienced. For the Russian Revolution isn’t one of Orwell’s experiences! “He should try again, and this time on something nearer home.”

Something nearer home!

**

I hadn’t read Animal Farm in ages. It’s COVID-19 and a good time to read something that might speak to the suffering and dying in the world around us, even if not directly. Orwell, unlike Swift and France, addresses the crisis of existence in his time. But maybe there’s something in Animal Farm that resonates with for us in 2020, facing the Pandemic and enduring tyrannical leadership, a few states away in the Big House.

Familiar with Orwell’s work, I suspect Animal Farm is more than a satire on what was for him recent events. It’s a book that situates Orwell’s disgust with humanity’s response to tyrannical rule, a response that falls short of remaining vigilant of catastrophic destruction and death. It’s a population of humanity, in this case, that just so happens to reside in Russia, who happen to call themselves Bolsheviks, revolutionaries, but who neglect the principles pf human decency, compassion, social justice, and freedom.

Who are these humans who desire to live in a democratic society, but who allow for the co-opting of ideas about democracy, the work and the creatively to bring it into existence, by the tyrants among them who seize on an opportunity to eliminate civil liberties, even the memory of civil liberties, until nothing resembling life remains on the landscape. All resemble the faces of the tyrants preceding them. All indistinguishable siblings of the Colonist, the Slaveholder, the Fuhrer—right down to the absurdity of playing cards while the world around them burns and people suffer and die.

Orwell was writing about an event nearer to home. He didn’t need the Russian Revolution to do so.

For me, there are few white writers worth reading again and again. Shakespeare, for one. Camus. Faulkner. Baldwin’s essays. And Orwell. I have no interest in imitating a passive reader, following the words washing over me without so much as an obstinate or an agreeable thought from me. I have no interest in being a “bystander,” an “Other,” a “minority” representative in the so-called “universal” narrative.

It’s a question of writing close to home. A question, as the late German writer W. G. Sebald once posed it, of representing the truth in its entirely unpretentious objectivity,” that is, “producing literature in the face of total destruction.”

That destruction of what Orwell witnessed and what he didn’t, nonetheless, concerned him as a human being.

“When power translates itself into tyranny, it means that the principles on which that power depended, and which were its justification, are bankrupt,” writes James Baldwin. Tyranny is the face of destruction for Orwell. Orwell is prompted to write, not of “circus” animals, but of humans thinking and behaving as circus animals, responding to the whip of tyranny as if nothing else in life is ever to be expected.

This is what interests me as reader and human being. In plain language, what the hell is wrong with people, the people, the masses, the working class, and the marginalized—the walking dead?

Orwell, having thrown his lot in with the people, the enslaved, the colonized, the fodder, the floor mat for the tyrants to use and abuse, to tramp over, disappear, and eliminate, is committed to presenting a narrative that stirs this population out of it’s weary state of submissiveness into action—on behalf of their own interests.

Most people know what’s happening to them, but what to do when the gaslighting begins, when the Squealer comes with a narrative that is contrary to reality, contrary to the crisis of a for-profit medical system and a pandemic—contrary to the crisis of an environment that responds to human indifference with yet another reveal about the inhumanity of world leadership, not to mention that Napoleon in the Big House.

What was it that, as part of our heritage of rebellion, we have lost?

**

I don’t want to linger on the likes of Napoleon. We should know him long before he is given our trust and power. We should recognize the way he sets out with determination to re-write the narrative of animal bondage to his advantage. For in removing the tyranny of human rule, under Mr. Jones, from Manor Farm, Napoleon doesn’t so much as misguide the animals on the farm as recognizes himself as different, superior, and, as such, entitled to the benefits of the farm’s production. He is Napoleon! He’s entitled to remove rivals such as Snowball and dampen the spirits of Boxer, a potential threat to his authority over the narrative.

When he rids Manor Farm of the peoples’ leader, Napoleon demands the loyalty of all the others, and, by force, he insist on their dedication to work. Not the collective co-op kind, not the creative kind—work that is tantamount to colonial plantation slavery in Africa, Europe, and the New World.

And then he, Napoleon, retreats.

To the luxury of Mr. Jones’ house and all of Mr. Jones’ former possessions, Napoleon becomes acquainted. All the stuff that legitimizes his superior position as the dear leader belongs to him just as the fruit of the animals’ labor will belong to him and the pigs on the farm. The do-nothing managerial rule of the pigs took up residents, too, in the Big House.

Napoleon surrounds himself with guards, vicious dogs. Raising the pigs to a ladder on the rung just below him but above all others, he issues edicts through his faithful, no-thinking spinner of lies and deception, Squealer. And, Squealer is good at what he does. And, that's important. So what does it matter if the pigs are incompetent and never work or think about anything but consuming as much as can be produced on the farm. What does it matter if initially they steal milk. Demand more eggs from the hens. As Squealer explains it, the poor pigs do work. They work on “files” and “reports.” It’s strenuous work. (Spying). Squealer is good at explaining everything so it sounds sane and reasonable. Fair is not an issue here.

The pigs’ isolation from the others, in turn, resembles the former occupants, who didn’t have the pecking order of life right in the first place. In fact, no pecking order should have been evident then or now. But who’s thinking of what could be possible for all?

So from the Big House, Napoleon issues his edicts is the Big House to Squealer. The seat of governance isn’t the seat of “the animals.” The edicts aren’t pronouncements about democracy; they are not even democratic in and of themselves.

Don’t you agree? “It’s for your sake.”

The animals nod. You know, maybe it’s for the best, they think—and they think without so much as requesting evidence or demanding an open debate. So when Boxer has time to think, he thinks: “If Comrade Napoleon says it, it must be right.” That’s critical thinking on the plantation, prison, farm.

Squealer’s words is absorbed in their DNA, and back to work they go. Not even happily but miserably—more hungry and overworked than before the “revolution.” But they had to make what Squealer termed “‘readjustments.’” So, you know, readjustments.

What is so sad about what happens on the Manor Farm (for when was it ever really “animal” farm?), is that the needless destruction and death, all the years of suffering, could have been prevented by the same “animals” who became its victims. The rise of the tyrannical could have been avoided, or, at best, snuffed out by that same determination and bravery present in the animals at the first battle.

Did we, as readers, ever witness Napoleon fully endorsing Major’s rules?

Animal Farm becomes Manor Farm, a prison before and a prison after. For what prisoner is free to pursue what makes one human?

There’s “death” before death.

There’s nothing to be admired in the Big House or in the field where the animals toil without benefit of the fruits of their labor. In the CEO board rooms or at the workplace—order is chaos. Boxer’s, “I will work harder,” as a response to the theft of civil liberties and justice, is not only inadequate but absurd. The sheep and their “Four legs good, two legs bad,” changed for efficacy into “Four legs good, two legs better!,” is homage to tyranny. And that’s absurd and shouldn’t be matched by those who want to see a better world—without the systemic orders that are antithetical to democracy.

And that’s what’s lost here. The demoralization of the spirit has replaced the legacy of rebellion. Life is extinguished. It’s not the “leadership” in the Big House but the victims of this ruthless order that disturbs Orwell and should disturb any reader who comes to the text with a sense of social responsibility to life on this planet.

What good could have ever come of this so-called revolution on Manor Farm when the vision of their collective spirit, in tangent with Major’s willingness to organize the collectives’ thoughts, was forgotten by those who desired freedom from tyranny? When the end arrives, in all caps, it can be heard as an echo of lost opportunities. (And those opportunities were lost at the beginning, when the “revolution” ended, mind you).

With successive generations on Manor Farm, the rule that “no animal must ever tyrannise over his own kind,” is no longer part of the worker’s collective memory because no longer an inheritance. “A time came when there was no one who remembered the old days before the Rebellion, except Clover, Benjamin, Moses the raven, and a number of pigs.” And then time passed, and that generation died. Boxer’s death makes for the survivors a “more morose and taciturn” environment.

And Boxer and others missed it: “It was a pig walking on his hind legs.”

Napoleon, too, along with the whole pig rule, walking “majestically upright” with throwing “haunting” glances this way and that way! He carries a whip! Napoleon carries a whip!

Progress!!

The winning progress just keeps coming: Those 7 Commandments, originally modeled after Major’s rules—they are whittled down to one, supreme edict since it arrives in all caps:

ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL

BUT SOME ANIMALS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS.

I leave Napoleon, Alexander the Great, Constantine, Hitler, Pinochet, even Trump to the historians…

The revolution is constant, said Rosa Luxemburg to Lenin. And then to the people.

If the people’s leader is taken out, duly note the sacrifice but resume the struggle. Turn the pages, historian John Henrik Clarke, would say, and struggle on.

That’s why I re-read Orwell. He reminds successive generations to never forget!