Orwell is widely read and rarely heeded. His death at a relatively early age and the slow dissolution of the liberal anti-Communist movements that were launched by, among others, his publisher Warburg, in the early days of the Cold War, also made it all too easy to hijack his legacy, but the stark satirical novels he wrote toward the end of his life remain sharp rebukes.
80 years later, Animal Farm mocks not only the Soviet Union, but the idea that liberation movements concentrating and clinging to power would ever amount to more than totalitarian farces. It offers a warning to contemporary American and European liberals who, like their counterparts in Orwell’s day, allowed themselves to be hijacked by Communism, of how it all ends, not in Obama’s ‘Right Side of History’ but in terror, tyranny and mass death.
Alas, many people never seem to learn except through hard, direct experience, when, more often than not, it is too late.
Related I have always been struck by this dramatic scene from the 1999 film version of Animal Farm, depicting the apotheosis of Napoleon the Pig. The music has an undeniably Soviet vibe.
