Imagine a boot stamping on a human face — for ever

George Orwell began writing “Animal Farm” in November 1943; four months later, at the end of February, it was done. A cloth copy of the first edition runs to 92 pages. 

Too short for a novel, booksellers and publishers called it a novella. To one friend and political ally Orwell described the work as a “little squib” of a thing.

The story has been called a fable, a beast fable, an allegory, and satire; to some, it’s a religious parable.  

And, because the title of the book, when it first came out, was “Animal Farm: A Fairy Story,” unknowing readers thought it was the British counterpart of “Charlotte’s Web”; “Animal Farm” has pigs, Charlotte has her porker, Wilbur.

Early on Orwell thought the chances of the book finding a publisher were iffy. In his classic biography of the writer, “George Orwell: A Life” (Little Brown, 1980), Bernard Crick quotes from a letter Orwell sent to the Russian-born American poet and literary historian, Gleb Struve, where he tells the poet that “Animal Farm” “might amuse you when it comes out, but it is not OK politically that I don’t feel certain in advance that anyone will publish [it].”

Who would turn down a fairy tale? No one; but “Animal Farm” was a political minefield.   

At one point, Orwell told his long-time publisher Fredric Warburg — of Secker & Warburg who eventually published the book — that, while writing “Animal Farm,” he had already conceived of another work that expanded on the socio-politico tenets found in the fable — which we now know to be “Nineteen Eighty-Four.”

Animal Farm was “the story of the revolution betrayed,” as Crick says, “and [then there’s] the story [‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’] of the betrayers, power-hungry in each case, perpetuating themselves in power for ever.”

And although Orwell did refer to the fable as a squib — and a politically incorrect one at that — Google “Animal Farm” and a zillion hits will come up. People from nearly every age group and cultural stratum say it was on their summer reading list in high school; and these days, those taking the Advanced Placement Exam in English had better know every pig in every sty if they hope to get a Five.

As far back as 1982, a school district in Jackson County, Florida blackballed “Animal Farm,” calling it “pro-communist,” the exact opposite of the words Orwell wrote.

And, internationally in 2002, education ministers in the United Arab Emirates took “Animal Farm” out of circulation with 124 other titles, decrying the book for mocking Islamic and Arab values: They said there were pictures of pigs drinking liquor on the farm, and other “indecent images.”  

And yet more recently, in 2021, Carnegie Mellon University said that, in preparation for the upcoming “Banned Books Week,” it would not offer a list of books for people to examine, but recommend just one title: “Animal Farm.” 

I’m not sure whether they still exist, but the transcripts of the discussions that went into that decision are worth their weight in gold; they’re statements on cultural literacy. A student at the school should be doing a thesis on it.

That Carnegie Mellon took the step in the first place is direct homage to the lasting power of the work.

The story, of course, is about the lives of barnyard animals on the farm of a certain Mr. Jones who, the animals say, has mistreated them and they were not going to take it anymore.

The Spark notes (online edition) begin its summary of the book this way: Once upon a time a prize-winning boar called Old Major, called all the animals of the Manor Farm together into the big barn; he wanted to tell them of a dream he had of a society where all animals lived in harmony, where no boss-man was around to oppress or control them.

Old Major forewarned the community, however, that such societies do not just spring up, but must be worked for; he tells his comrades, “Your resolution must never falter. No argument must lead you astray … among us animals let there be perfect unity, perfect comradeship in the struggle. All men are enemies. All animals are comrades.” 

Then he adds, “Weak or strong, clever or simple, we are all brothers. No animal must ever kill any other animal. All animals are equal.”  

Old Major clearly knew his Marx; he then gave his comrades a Marxist revolutionary song, “Beasts of England,” to sing as a clarion call to animals everywhere to make a society where the needs of every citizen are met — equally, and without resentment. 

But over time — the story continues — differences of opinion arose so that the new chief pig, Napoleon, began to call all dissenters fascists who needed to be annihilated. 

And as the constitution and bylaws of the once-hoped-for just society began to dissolve, the chief pig decreed that thenceforth only one commandment needed to be obeyed: ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL, BUT SOME ANIMALS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS. The revolution was dead.

Of course, great works of fiction like “Animal Farm” and “Nineteen Eighty-Four” easily stand on their own, but their meaning intensifies when we know that Orwell wrote both books after spending six months on the front fighting Franco during the Spanish Civil War. He was relieved of duty after taking a sniper’s bullet in the throat, the doctors saying a millimeter to the left he would have been no more.

During the war there were three “ideologically progressive” units fighting against Franco — Socialists, Anarchists, and Communists. What shook Orwell’s faith in humanity — the cause of the birth of the two dystopian works — was that at one point the Communists turned on their revolutionary comrades.

Crick says it began when, “The Communists spread the tale that the P.O.U.M. [Socialists] were secretly allied to the Fascists, even receiving arms from them across the lines at night, and that the Anarchists were ‘objectively Fascists,’” a canard, he adds, that “was repeated without question by Left-wing and even by some Liberal newspapers in Britain.”

It ended with four-hundred killed and a thousand wounded.

In his 1947 preface to the Ukranian edition of “Animal Farm,” Orwell told his readers that, “in the middle of 1937 … the Communists gained control (or partial control) of the Spanish Government and began to hunt down” every Socialist alive — state Socialists and libertarian Socialists alike.

Among the hunted himself, Orwell says we, “found ourselves amongst the victims. We were very lucky to get out of Spain alive, and not even to have been arrested once. Many of our friends were shot, and others spent a long time in prison or simply disappeared.”

He says the “man-hunts in Spain went on at the same time as the great purges in the USSR and were a sort of supplement to them. In Spain as well as in Russia the nature of the accusations (namely, conspiracy with the Fascists) was the same.” 

Orwell’s Communists were Napoleon the killer pig, the avatar of Stalin, destroyers of every revolution that seeks to meet the needs of all equally and without resentment.

He documented his experiences during the war in the much-lauded classic “Homage to Catalonia,” which, along with “Animal Farm” and “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” makes one of the great, if not greatest, literary triptychs of all time.

To his dying day Orwell could not get over “how easily totalitarian propaganda can control the opinion of enlightened people in democratic countries,” as if he were talking about the United States today.

In “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” the dissenter Winston Smith is warned that, under Fascism, “There will be no loyalty, except loyalty towards the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy … always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless.”

And for those who want “a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — for ever.”