Pigs No More

I am bringing you this post after having recently finished "Animal Farm" by George Orwell. It was a great book and I truly enjoyed reading it, short as it was. I was not disappointed with any aspects of the book, and really enjoyed reading what Orwell had to say. If you missed my previous blog posts about this book, it is an allegory for Soviet communism played out through farm yard animals. In this second half of the book the pig Napoleon rose to power using terror tactics, and manipulating rules and the other animals to remain in popular opinion, lying and deceiving the whole way. This is shocking because the original beliefs that Animal Farm were founded under were that all animals were equal, and that to act in any way like a human was to be evil. Napoleon and his fellow pigs ignore both of these and are able to place themselves in a position of great privilege. The animals grow uncertain of their ruler, but feel liberated and are willing to work longer and harder under the pretense that they have been liberated from the harsh humans, only to be replaced by the pigs. In the very end of the book the pigs take neighboring human farmers for a tour of their farm. The other farmers are amazed by how much the animals are working, which the animals had not realized was an excessive amount. The book ends with most of the animals overlooking a scene where the pigs are dining and drinking with the humans, acting as humans, and the animals cannot tell the two species apart.

My favorite quote from the second half of this book was when Orwell says of Clover, one of the older animals on the farm, "If she could have spoken her thoughts, it would have been to say that this was not what they had aimed at." This books main goal was to illustrate the downfall of Communism, and how it could never succeed, especially in the case of the Soviet Empire. Napoleon has recently slaughtered several animals who admitted to be aligned with Snowball, a pig who is Napoleon's arch enemy and old co-ruler, before he was chased off the farm by savage dogs. All the animals are horrified, and beginning to doubt that what they had set out to do had been achieved. Overall I was very impressed by this book, and glad to have had the opportunity to read such a classic.