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Jampine t1_j13ereb wrote

Reply to comment by wjbc in I just read Animal Farm and I loved it. But I got some questions. by Prize_Effort_4478

Interesting tidbit: the original Animal Farm animated movie was co-funded by the CIA.

Orwell was a socialist, but after seeing how the USSR went, he started writing about how people can twist the goals of communism, and turn it into an authoritatian hellscape.

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wjbc t1_j13ov1n wrote

Orwell was an anti-Stalinist socialist — essentially a Trotskyist, or at least allied with Trotskyists. He saw what Stalinists were like while fighting Franco in the Spanish Civil War. The Stalinists fought the Trotskyists harder than they fought Franco.

Then Orwell saw millions of Englishmen fall for Stalin after WW2, when times were desperate in England. Orwell was genuinely afraid Stalinists would rise to power in England. And Stalinists did infiltrate the highest levels of government in the U.K. It wasn’t until the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 that public opinion in the U.K. firmly turned against Stalin.

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BigCommieMachine t1_j145f9q wrote

I think the book is about human nature and how easily power corrupts. You start off with good intention and some power because somebody has got to be in charge. But you keep seeking more power until you forgot what you set out to do in the first place.

It is just more upsetting in communism because at least in capitalism that was the goal in the first place.

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Joe_Doe1 t1_j16z4l0 wrote

I would agree. They set out to overthrow a tyrannical hierarchy, replacing it with a more just society where all animals are equal. Soon, they become tyrannical themselves, and a new hierarchy develops where some animals are more equal than others.

People see it as pessimistic, but I see it as realistic.

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Great_Hamster t1_j1bx7wc wrote

The goal in capitalism is freedom from feudalist and mercantilist restrictions on trade and profession. Where you getting this other thing?

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ithsoc t1_j14wuog wrote

> the original Animal Farm animated movie was co-funded by the CIA.

Tons of literature was funded and directed by the CIA beginning in the early 1950s.

The CIA were some of the principal orchestrators of the entire Iowa Writers Workshop program that steered literature away from material concepts and into a more postmodern framework where objectivity was not valued and individualistic feelings were centered.

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