Published 75 years ago in 1945, George Orwell’s Animal Farm presents revolution as a thing true to its name: revolving and returning like an infernal circle to the despotic power and blind capitulation originally repulsed. It is a principle suggestive of an ingrained brutality in political animals that cannot be broken. And the political animals in the “land of the free” are not always better off than the pitifully enslaved animals of Orwell’s Animal Farm.
Animal Farm tells of a revolution that went wrong and the gradual, yet total, overthrow of the original doctrines of governance. Though this modern classic is traditionally read as a satire of Stalinism, it might also be read as a satire of our own politics. When America declared independence from foreign tyranny, it slowly yoked itself to domestic tyranny. Benighted and beset as Americans are nowadays, they are working as hard as carthorses to prove Orwell a prophet by demonstrating that mass illusion, mass intimidation, and mass indifference are the engines that produce political complacency and political corruption. Like Orwell’s animals, Americans are attesting that man is an animal doomed to the wheel of fate, ever returning to the tragedy he flees from, rendering evil inevitable and revolution pointless.
The American indifference and disregard for good government is an Orwellian capitulation. As in Animal Farm, the fears and confusions bred of a rapidly changing culture and its permeating devices may be disorienting and discouraging; but, in the end, they are mainly disarming. “What can I do?” The phrase is common. “What difference can I make?” Everyone has heard it, if not thought it or said it oneself. The answer to these questions of passivity is enacted in surrendering and succumbing to the cogs—or teeth—of the system as Americans go along with everything from the madness of same-sex “marriage” to the murder of unborn babies.
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