Animal Farm

Napoleon is also a pig who is associated with being the infamous communist leader, Joseph Stalin.  A corrupt leader who exiles Snowball, as Stalin exiled Trotsky in Russia.   In contrast to Snowball, Napoleon was only interested in fulfilling his own needs and eventually became more like a human than a pig.  Napoleon executed anyone who opposed him under the excuse that they were in league with snowball, a parody of the great purge in Russia which saw similar persecution.  Napoleon throughout the book keeps his speeches short, simple and to the point.  However in sharp contrast he makes use of rhetoric through Squealer, a proficient propagandist whose art of persuasion is unmatched in the book.  He uses rhetoric effectively by complicating language which seemed to work well on the uneducated animals of the farm, for example “a bird’s wing . . . is an organ of propulsion and not of manipulation.” Confuses the animals with an elaborate explanation and when the animals question Napoleon’s motives and actions he simply replies “tactics, tactics”.  He particularly seems keen on using the threat of Jones returning if they ask too many questions.  After he seizes power the communist leader quickly abolishes the Sunday meetings and declares that they are unnecessary and wasted time.   From that point on the pigs would decide on the decisions of the farm and then issue their orders to the other animals.  This is not unlike the communist rule of Stalin and the communists themselves where they similarly ruled over the economic decisions of Russia.

Old Benjamin is a donkey on animal farm that is the most sceptical of all the animals.  His expression “nothing ever changes” shows his scepticism at the new government and revolution which has taken place.  He seems like a much wiser and mature character and is seemingly the only animal on the farm who is immune to the propaganda of Napoleon.  Some of the quotes themselves can indeed be seem as being counter rhetoric in that “donkeys live for a long time” which would seemingly suggest that he has seen it all before and nothing will change.  He often takes a back seat in many things and is able to read as well as any pig, something that that he keeps to himself until the very end of the book.  Eventually though after Napoleon sends boxer off to the glue factory, there is a subtle change in Benjamin’s demeanour.  He is no longer just willing to sit back and watch the changes happening as he finally stands up to Napoleon for the first time and reveals his knowledge of the pig’s hypocrisy.  It is thought he may represent the sceptical people both in and out of Russia who believed that Communism would not help them, or perhaps Orwell himself who fought in the Spanish civil war for the leftists.  This thought left him feeling disillusioned with socialism and especially for any totalitarian system which perhaps was his motivation for writing Animal Farm.

In labelling Animal Farm a fairy tale, George Orwell implies that his book has what most fairy tales have, a moral point to make. In the way that Little Red Riding Hood’s moral point would most likely be “don’t talk to strangers”, Animal Farm seems to say “power corrupts”, something which was said by Lord Acton, in a letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton, 1887. 'Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men'.  This is very true of the pigs and Napoleon in particular, demonstrated clearly in the seven commandments.

The seven commandments were made to ensure that the animals never succumb to the ways of humans. Most animals though were unable to remember them and so were eventually compiled into one saying which was more easily memorable by the animals “four legs good, two legs bad.”, something which is bleated repeatedly by the sheep in order to drown out any criticism or argument against Napoleon.  However towards the end of the book all of the commandments have been broken and even the simplest slogan is changed to “four legs good, two legs better” to accommodate for the fact that pigs now stood on their hind legs and adopt the position of their former master Jones.  The pigs become indistinguishable to the original humans who ruled them, in the same way that Stalin had become indistinguishable from the elite

classes who once ruled Russia.  The pigs break another rule by having trade relations with other humans and at the end of the book invite them to marvel at their achievements of oppression on the farm "...the lower animals on Animal Farm did more work and received less food than any animals in the county”

I believe that the book is one of the greatest illustrations of human greed.  It is often said that the path to righteousness is narrow and in the case of Napoleon and Stalin it was unobtainable.  The book contains so many valuable lessons which society would do well to learn by heart.  Stalin was allowed to reign because no one opposed him.  The masses were generally too dumb and uneducated to even realise they were no longer living under communism, but a totalitarian dictatorship.  This is something which could easily happen even today.  For example, we believe we have a good democracy, but the reality is the government of the UK, in my opinion, is closer to a dictatorship than many would like to believe.  Tony Blair controls all major decisions and doesn’t even bother with cabinet meetings, a place where all the decisions of the government are taken, rather it is now the case that Tony Blair makes the decisions before hand and then informs the rest of the cabinet.  This bears a striking and scary similarity to Napoleon in how he delivered his orders to the animals.