Animal Farm

Audio Version: Animal Farm, 1945, downloaded from Wisconsin Digital Library.

Orwell was so good at distilling chicanery. He identified the political and social manipulations that have worked for centuries and continue to work today. "Gaslighting" is just a currently popular name for lying your way out of what you did.

Ok, maybe you never read the novel or watched the animated film. Here is the story: the animals on an English farm rise up against the brutal farm owner and drive him and his laborers off the land. They are lead by a wise old boar, Old Major. The animals rejoice and come together in comradeship to run the farm on their own. After Old Major dies two other pigs step in to lead. Over time the two pigs disagree and one pig, Napoleon, uses the dogs to purge the opposition. Over time Napoleon continually tightens his grip on power: The dogs are his police. The other pigs are his politburo and propaganda.The other animals are forced to labor under progressively more difficult conditions and with lessened rations. The pigs consistently amend the governing rules of the farm to stengthen their control and become the horrid rulers of the original farmer.

If you want a modern analysis on Animal Farm's prescience or adaptability look somewhere else. These are some of my thoughts:

1. The story is rage inducing. The compact length keeps the plot tight and the animals's successes are quickly followed by the defeats and then the traitorous actions of the pigs.  All the events keep piling on. Lots of lies. Lots of abuse. Lots of manipulation.
2. I suppose Orwell's decisions to use animals has been well documented and discussed. I was certainly sucked in. Doing so ends up a way to avoid all the biases readers may have against real people. It also avoids having to really develop the characters. Orwell mostly kept the animals as animals, he did not anthropomorphise them so there was no need to develop the characters. After all, how much personality do you want in a chicken? 
3. Mind you, chickens are just little dinosaurs. If they were large enough they would eat us.
4. How do you read into the idea of the smart pigs tricking the dumb horses? Is this to say smart people will take advantage of dumb? The cream rises to the top? I don't know. Make your own decision.
5. The story takes place over a few years which, in the life span of some farm animals, is a few generations. As the story ends many of the animals have no memory of the cruelty of the previous farmer. They've been taught that Napoleon is good and wise and that he deserves the luxuries he lives in. Unspoken is the fact that dissension means death by dog bite. How do you fight back against that? The animals won the first battles against humans because they worked and planned together. Napoleon has split their ranks and subdued them under his authority as ruler so that there is no unified resistance.
6. I watched the film version in school. I suppose that was early 1980s. Anti-communism was going strong in the Reagan era. Several of the film's images stick with me: frightened Snowball the pig fleeing the dogs, the horse bucking and attacking humans, the farm rules painted on the barn and then added on to, the pigs walking on two feet and gorging themselves in the farmhouse.
7. The end of the novel has a comment that made it clear to me that this was not just a allegorical treatise against communism. I cannot recall the portion but it directly refers to despotism and/or fascism. I learned of the book as a anti-commie lesson and still think of it as such.