George Orwell on the real meaning of Animal Farm: get rid of the pigs

[robertmckenna]

@thomdunn

The implication here was that these authoritarian tragedies existed in diametric opposition to the the unique American-ness of our freedoms.

I mean the pigs literally turned into the exact same oppressors as before the revolution so that interpretation makes no sense at all.

[ClutchLinkey]

@thomdunn

And, like most Americans, I was taught as part of that public school English curriculum that the book, along with Orwell’s 1984, was all about the evils of the Soviet Union.

Huh, I did not know that! Your post makes me even more appreciative of my Maine public school education than I already was.
@Tamsin_Bailey - same here. I think I was a sophomore when we did the whole utopia/dystopia reading list. Awesome teacher, awesome fellow students, never crossed our minds that the message was what appears to be the common message, based on the OP!

[mspie500]

@VeronicaConnor

Between this and the pledge of allegiance, it’s a miracle any Americans grow up anything other than totally brainwashed.

It really depends on what school system you went through. The pledge was optional in mine and while we never had to read Animal Farm, I had several teachers that didn’t hide their more socialist values.

[thomdunn]

Well yeah, that’s why the All Revolutions Are Inherently Bad (Except The One That Started This Country, That Was Good) interpretation works!

[VeronicaConnor]

@mspie500

The pledge was optional in mine

That’s good! My set of American friends all did it every day and seemed oblivious to the fact that it’s the creepiest fucking thing ever to come out of an allegedly enlightened modern democracy. None of them thought much about it because whatever you grow up with seems normal, but holy cow is that not fucking normal.

[AnnaTheWeird]

Part of why my mom and dad decided to move to Canada from the US when they did was that I was about to start school and my parents didn’t want me to be indoctrinated by the US school system. The pledge was cited as an example when they told me about it later when I was an adult.

[Mungrul]

I shouldn’t laugh, but I did.

[leidentech]

Snowball was alright.

[SheiffFatman]

I mean, he was shot by fascists and nearly shot by Stalinists, which is about as far from purely theoretical as you can get.

[Kaleberg]

Surely, I can’t be the only one to have made it to the end where the pigs looked at men and the men looked at pigs and neither could tell the slightest difference. I guess a lot of people were counting on this. I was tipped off because I was told it was a fable, so I read through to the end for the moral.

[Melizmatic]

@Kaleberg

Surely, I can’t be the only one to have made it to the end where the pigs looked at men and the men looked at pigs and neither could tell the slightest difference.

Clearly not, and don’t call us ‘Shirley.’