George Orwell, Animal Farm, and The Fat Pig Sharon.

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Animal Farm 

George Orwell is best known for predicting the future in his book 1984. Many Right Wing people speak of Orwellianism, the current state of the World in which good is called evil, evil is called good, peace is called war, and war is called peace. Although Orwell was a Socialist, these people interpret his book to fit their own Worldview. Right Wingers say the “peace process” between Israel and the Arabs is an example of war called peace. Left Wingers may use the same argument for George Bush’s war in Iraq where “war of oppression” is called “a war for Iraqi freedom”. 

George Orwell became critical of Soviet Communism in spite of his Socialist beliefs. Animal Farm is a satirical work to mock how a ”people’s revolution” will end up leading to a brutal dictatorship controlled by a select “elite”. The animals in the story are given human-like qualities which they use to overthrow the human owner of Manor Farm. The human represents the Russian Czar who was overthrown in the Russian Revolution. Like the Russian Revolution, the animal revolution ended up with a dictatorship. The Russian Revolution ended up in a Bolshevik dictatorship. The animal revolution ended up in a pig dictatorship. The pigs saw themselves as superior to the other animals. They were the only legal government. The other animals were only given a choice to vote on what the pigs decided.

One day, the pig Napoleon, who can be compared to Soviet Bolshevik dictator Joseph Stalin, expelled the pig Snowball, who can be compared to Leon Trotsky.  Napoleon became a totalitarian dictator. The whole reason he claimed to expel Snowball was that he “opposed” Snowball’s plan to build a windmill to provide electricity to the farm. After Snowball’s expulsion, Napoleon declared that there would be no windmill but only weeks later, he himself adapted Snowball’s policy.

The animals adapted “The Seven Commandments” as their supreme law system which they broke down as simply “four legs good, two legs bad”, meaning that all animals were good and that animals shouldn’t fight or kill each other, and all human beings were bad. But this didn’t stop Napoleon from turning against not only his fellow animal, but also his  fellow pig. “The Seven Commandments” are meant to mock the Ten Commandments and the Bible, because the animals in the book are fashioned after atheist Communists who rejected G-d and religion. They wanted to create a “worker’s paradise” and rejected the belief of animals having an afterlife. But without believing in a Higher Being, the leaders thought they were responsible to know no one but their selves so therefore felt no problem with abusing their subjects.

Such a novel is very relevant in today’s contemporary society. A case in point is Israel. The critics of the Israeli Government use the term Orwellian to refer to the political situation in Israel today. The pigs in the story are comparable to the ruling “elite” in the Israeli Establishment. Just as Napoleon had seized power pretending to oppose the policies of Snowball, so too did Prime Minister Ariel Sharon when he was re-elected over Labor Party Chairman Amram Mitzna on the platform of opposing Mitzna’s plan of “unilaterally ‘disengaging’” from the Gaza District  and forcibly expelling Jews from the region solely on the basis of their religion and national origin. In Israel, the ruling “elite” controls the country and oppresses any form of democratic opposition to the dictatorial policies. The Israeli Labor Party can be compared to Snowball while Ariel Sharon and his new Kadimah Party can be compared to the pig Napoleon. The Kadimah Party is now in power undemocratically under the rule of Acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert who seized power when Sharon entered a vegetative state even though Sharon was elected Prime Minister as head of the largest party in the Knesset, Likud, not Kadimah, the third largest party in the Knesset, which did not exist in the last elections. If Israel were a democracy, the new Prime Minister would have come from the Likud Party. Aided by the Israeli judicial system which acts like the council of pigs in Animal Farm, the Israeli electorate is only given a choice between corrupt dictator number and corrupt dictator number two. Whoever rises to power, they all eventually adopt the party line of the extreme Left. Israel is a true Orwellian country, where everything is backwards and upside down. Just as the pigs in  Animal Farm were G-d less and thought they were all powerful, so is the Israeli ruling “elite”. In Israel, the Jews are called evil and the Arabs are called good. The Secular Jews are called law abiding citizens while while the religious Jews are called “obstacles to ‘peace’”. Religious Jewish civil rights protestors have their skulls cracked open by the Israeli Police while Arab terrorists are allowed to maim and murder innocent Jewish men, women, children, and babies. The same is true in the United States when the Democratic Party and the Republican Party apart from a few issues, are basically carbon copies of each other.

Animal Farm and 1984 are the all time classics on the corruptness of governments of today’s World. George Orwell could only have imagined how things would turn out. We today have seen his words come true.