[Fwd: [Marxism] Animal Farm]

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-------- Original Message --------
Subject: 	[Marxism] Animal Farm
Date: 	Mon, 18 Aug 2008 10:09:26 -0400
From: 	Louis Proyect <lnp3 at panix.com>
Reply-To: 	Activists and scholars in Marxist tradition
<marxism at lists.econ.utah.edu>
To: 	aorta <aorta at home.nl>



The 1954 CIA-financed Halas and Batchelor animated production of George
Orwell?s ?Animal Farm? is now available on YouTube in eight parts,
beginning here. I can?t remember if I saw this movie in the 1950s, but I
surely remember reading this and ?1984? in high school. I am fairly sure
that our social studies teachers were instructed to assign these cold
war staples. For impressionable teenagers living under the threat of
nuclear attack from the dirty Rooskies, Orwell?s books were designed to
reinforce the belief that it was better to be dead than red.

We never were told that ?1984? was written as an attack on all forms of
monolithic societies, including the Cold War anticommunist west. It was
strictly a warning about the dangers of Communism. ?big brother was
watching you? was only about the GPU, not the FBI. To become an
?Unperson? was something that happened to Soviet dissidents, not the
Hollywood 10, etc. When we got to the final chapter when Winston Smythe
is threatened with having hungry rats dine on his eyeballs, it was all
we needed to wrap ourselves in the American flag. Who would want to say
a good word about socialism when it led to rodent hell?

?Animal Farm? was just as scary and even more directly focused on the
evils of trying to run a society based on human (or barnyard animal)
needs rather than private profit. This was an Aesopian fable about the
USSR, with animals standing in for leaders of the Russian revolution.
Snowball the pig was Leon Trotsky and Napoleon, another pig, was Joseph
Stalin. Like ?big brother is watching you?, Animal Farm?s ?All animals
are equal, but some animals are more equal than others? had the power of
a mantra.

The one thing that never came up in classroom discussions of ?Animal
Farm? was the actual history of the Soviet Union. Unlike the Soviet
Union, the animal-run farm of Orwell?s novel was never invaded by 21
countries, even if populated by penguins or ferrets. The real lesson was
that human nature (or animal nature) was rotten. Once the farmers were
gone from the scene, the pigs would turn out to be just as rotten. So
the moral of the story was ?better the devil you know than the devil you
don?t.?

full: http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2008/08/18/animal-farm/

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