Animal Farm Intro
Science
Intro about the Animal Farm
Not only is animal farm an unforgettable tale about animals rebelling against their human owner, it's also an allegory for the Russian Revolution. And the book has animals wearing human clothes. What more could you want? But first, what is an allegory? Lucky, my mom told me to bring this whopping big dictionary. An allegory is a story which has actually an extended metaphor. All the elements in the story symbolize things from a similar real-life situation. And while the story has a simple surface meaning, it also carries another meaning.
One that is often about a real political or historical event. So who was George Orwell? What was his motivation for writing animal farm? And why did he take an allegorical approach to criticize the Russian Revolution? Eric Arthur Blair was born in 1903 in India. George Orwell was his pen name. Orwell was a police officer, soldier, teacher, journalist, and an acclaimed author. In the late 1920s, Orwell chose a life of poverty. This experience gave him material for his novel down and out in Paris and London. He even tried to get arrested to see what prison life was like. He failed. Orwell was concerned about social injustice and the mistreatment of the lower classes. He was particularly interested in the effects of totalitarianism on ordinary people and in the ability of political power to corrupt good people. In fact, Orwell's most famous novels, animal farm in 1984, a profound smackdown on totalitarian regimes.
So what is a totalitarian regime? A totalitarian government controls everything. The economy, the media, the beliefs and values of its people. No. No, I can't mom. I'm still presenting. A totalitarian government is like having really strict controlling parents. By the early 1900s, the Russian Tsar, Nicholas II faced an angry nation. Russian peasants struggled to survive under the ruthless government who controlled all the wealth, leaving the people in poverty and dying of starvation, disease and overwork. By 1917, I mean the suffering of World War I, a revolution began. In two major showdowns, the Tsar's government was toppled, then taken over by Vladimir Lenin. This established the USSR, the union of Soviet Socialist republics.
The world's first communist state. So what is communism? Communism is a social system in which personal freedom the right to an education, independent business operation, and private ownership of property are not recognized. The intention behind communism is that everyone gets an equal share of the rewards of labor, which is all controlled by the government. Well, that's the theory. So what went wrong in Russia? When Lenin died in 1924, Leon Trotsky, popular revolutionary and intellectual, and Joseph Stalin, head of the Communist Party, battled for power. They had a cage fight and Stalin won the championship belt. Well, of course, Stalin and Trotsky didn't really have a cage fight. But Trotsky was exiled. And later, murdered. For the 30 plus years Stalin was in power, Russians were crippled by his totalitarian rule.
The government controlled the flow of information to maintain power. During Stalin's reign, illegal arrests and rigged trials led to the executions of millions of citizens. As a socialist, Orwell advocated equality among the working class. Some of the sharing ideas of socialism are theoretically beneficial, but he was disgusted by Stalin's regime, a regime that manipulated the socialist ideas Orwell supported. He wrote animal farm as an attack on stalinism and to show that Stalin's communist state should be condemned by world leaders. Traditionally, a fable is set in an unspecified place and time. All users this principle in animal farm.
By using animal characters, instead of the real-life figures from the Russian Revolution, Orwell's cautionary message becomes clearer for the reader to understand. While animal farm is an allegory for the Russian Revolution, the story is still relevant to the latest grabs for power from people in oppressive regimes around the world. Can you see any similarities between the animals and animal farm and political leaders today? No, no, mom. Now the dictionary didn't come in handy at all. No, not at all.