Equal Ain't So Equal

Louis Goldsmith

Mr. Hertz

English 2

22 May 2013

Equal Ain’t So Equal

The book Animal Farm is about a farm that is being run by a corrupt farmer who is always drunk and doesn't take care of his duties as a farmer. Eventually, the animals get together and form a revolution to usurp the farmer and to rule themselves. George Orwell wrote the book, Animal Farm, to let people know how terrible communism is and that it is very destructive when put in the wrong persons hand.  When reading this book is so similar to Communist Russia that it makes it seem as if he wrote this book trying to educate the reader about communist Russia and how it is run.

        The story begins with the farmer, drunk in bed, at two o'clock in the afternoon having ignored his duties of feeding the animals and taking care of them. The animals start to get annoyed with this pattern and decide to take matters into their own hands. They bust into the food barn and gorge themselves with food.  At the same time, Mr. Jones, the farmer awakens to the lock busted off of the door. He comes down to the food barn and starts whipping the animals. At first they cower back and pretend to be scared and then as he keeps on going they charge at him. A if he does not move he's going to get killed. The revolution has begun.  The story follows this progression of the animals and how they develop a new way of governing their barnyard. They choose a leader and all goes well for a while. Eventually, the power gets into the leaders head and he abuses it.  At that point, the other animals rise up and overtake the leader.   There is a similarity of this story to real life during Communist Russia.

        In the book, Animal Farm, George Orwell talks about Communist Russia without ever saying Communist Russia.  He is able to talk about Russian leaders without using their names but giving the reader an idea of who he is talking about.  For example, when old major proposes that the animals take over the farm; this is supposed to represent Karl Marx. When Mr. Jones, the owner of the Manor Farm is forced out of the farm, Czar Nicholas the second is represented.

        Snowball, Napoleon and Squealer are portrayed as Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky.  Snowball was very nice to the other animals. He was trying to be equal and fair to the rest of the animals like Lenin was to the people of the USSR before Stalin became corrupt. Napoleon was Stalin. He was to represent Stalin because Stalin was very unfair and unkind.  He drank a lot and would never give back to the people. He always made them work very hard for little money and food. In the book, Napoleon was very unfair to the farm animals. He disobeyed all of the rules and went behind the animals’ backs and changed the rules for his benefit. He would do anything for extra money to buy alcohol. Trotsky was portrayed by Squealer.  Both Trotsky and Squealer were loyal to whomever was the leader at the time. It did not matter who the person was or if they were corrupt or not, as long as they were the leader Trotsky or Squealer would follow and say that they were right.

        On the farm, when the animals ruled, the animals were promised to have a warm bed, a place to sleep, a great life. They were promised that they would be able to work until they got old and then they could retire and spend their days at the farm. But in reality, they could not do any of this because the corrupt leaders made them work hard and did not give them what they had promised. While the leaders had a very high class way of living including a bed to sleep in and plenty of food to eat.

        This was a very unjust and unfair system because when you have people that aren’t taken care of, the leader of those people will suddenly lose popularity.  When a leader loses popularity mayhem and chaos follows. Often, this ends in some type of revolution, with violence, with disruption of all aspects of society requiring a total rebuilding of government.

        I found this book to be very interesting.  It did not occur to me at first what this book was really about. During discussions about the story with my father, it became so obvious that this was, in fact, a mockery of Communist Russia. I found it very clever how it was written to portray this.

Works Cited

Orwell, George. London: Penguin, 1946. Print.

"Animal Farm By George Orwell Critical Essays The Russian Revolution." Animal Farm: Critical Essays: The Russian Revolution. N.p., n.d. Web. 14 Feb. 2013.

"Who Does Old Major in the Book Animal Farm Represent in the Russian Revolution?" WikiAnswers. Answers, n.d. Web. 14 Feb. 2013.