What can I say for Animal Farm that hasn't already been said. Amazing, terrifying, prescient, and perfect... Mr. Orwell's surgical assault on authoritarianism and all its tricks sends chills down the spines of all those familiar with tyranny.
Animal Farm is pure satire comprised of intelligent and self-aware animals who labor on an Englishman's farm. Notwithstanding their abnormal powers to speak and reason, the animals are stereotypes of their species: the plodding but devoted workhorse, the clever and lazy pig, the happy and compliant sheep. Fed up with their unfair working conditions, the animals lead a successful revolt against their human owners, driving them from the farm. Though the human neighbors believe the animals will soon ruin the farm, the revolutionaries make it a going concern, occupying it, defending it, and then turning it into a profitable, cooperative venture where all the needs of every animal are met. They codify the laws of their utopia, writing them on the wall of the barn so that everyone can see them, learn them, comprehend them and follow them. But as time passes, divisions within their unified ranks begin to appear, divisions which, while slight at first, eventually grow in scale and severity until the animal utopia is little more than a remembered dream.
If Mr. Orwell's tale was nothing more than an intellectual exercise, it would be clever and inventive, but that it so perfectly captures the inevitabilities of authoritarian rule transforms a simple short story into a tale of heartbreaking truth about human failing which is this. In order to justify bleeding and dying for a cause, humans have to believe in that cause. No one would volunteer for martyrdom if they did not believe. But while belief in a cause grants humanity an almost supernatural strength, it also removes any capacity they have to view the cause impartially. They must believe. To do else is to allow in doubt. And doubt puts at risk the stability, the purpose, that faith has given them. The leaders of causes understand this weakness well enough to use it to rewrite histories, to reshape the cause's goals, slowly, insidiously, over time. And the believers accept these changes, revising their own memories to do so. And they must do this, they must comply, for to do anything else would be to doubt the leaders,which would mean doubting the cause, which would mean doubting the sacrifices made for the cause, a dissonance they cannot tolerate. It's a perfect encapsulation of how the human failing of the need to believe in something can be harnessed, forged, and then wielded as a mighty weapon by the clever hypocrites who know just how to exploit the exploitable. An absolute must read. And being that it is a scant 110 pages, it won't take long at all to have your mind appropriately blown. (5/5 Stars)
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