Animals on the Farm
American high schools have assigned George Orwell's 1945 book Animal Farm for generations. Sometimes, Orwell is listed as a science fiction writer, but he rarely writes about science. I tend to call him a “political futurist,” which is more accurate. As a “political futurist,” he’s been remarkably accurate.
They assign “Animal Farm” in high school because it’s a short book, and slow readers (like me) can finish it in time and get a decent grade. An obedient student can also include things about how American capitalism is great and communism is evil to get a good grade. This was especially true for those of us who grew up during the Cold War,, when any deviation from the national memes spelled trouble and personal danger.
“Animal Farm” is a book about how communism in Russia failed. More specifically, it’s about how the men who fought the Russian Revolution fell victim to greed and avarice. They betrayed their own principles, each other, and, more importantly, the workers that the entire movement was supposedly about.
In college, I knew a family from Latvia, who had bumper stickers on their cars that read “Nie ma wolności bez Solidarności.” It was the slogan of the Polish workers’ union movement fighting for better conditions under the Soviet Communist government. In English, it meant: “There is no freedom without solidarity.”
As the Solidarity movement grew, Ronald Reagan sensed a weakness in Soviet culture. In 1987, when I was a senior in college, Reagan stood before the Brandenburg Gate and famously said, “Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” Peter Robinson, a young (six years older than me) speech writer, wrote this address.
Two years later, during the Christmas season, I was drinking coffee drinks at Scrooges with a girl named Holly. On television, we watched people our age attack the Berlin Wall with sledgehammers. “Let’s go to Berlin,” I said, and I meant it. “I’d get fired, " she said, and she meant it.
Suffering under a bad king, in a line of bad kings, the Russian people wanted to imitate the revolutions in America and France and have the opportunity to govern themselves. While the American Revolution ended with the Constitution and the (then) almost two hundred-year-old American Experiment, the French Revolution ended with one of history’s most notorious autocrats, Napoleon Bonaparte.
Napoleon was so popular in Europe that they exiled him twice. Once, after a somewhat ironic attack on Russia, considering the context of this essay. The Russians in 1917 never considered the possibility of being ruled by yet another autocratic government. They thought the principles of Marxism would protect them from that. They didn’t. It turns out that having the state control everything was just about as bad as having the Tsar control everything, and pretty soon, the men who led the revolution were pigs living in the farmer’s house and wearing the farmer’s clothes, just like Orwell said.
The Solidarity movement again thought it could escape the crushing, bad government of the autocrats in Moscow by banding together. Just like when Frederik Willem de Klerk stepped down in South Africa, it worked for a while, and Gorbachev, much like Reagan suggested, worked to tear down the Berlin Wall.
The people of Russia and Poland were again betrayed, though, when an ambitious KGB agent with ties to organized crime rose to power. Vladimir Putin became Russia’s Napoleon. Although he lacks the military power of the former USSR, he makes up for it by hosting the world’s largest money-laundering operation. Now, some of the world’s most notorious criminals owe him money, including a failed casino owner from Queens and an expert at getting government contracts from South Africa.
For generations, over two hundred years, America has been held as an example of a revolution that didn’t eat its children. We threw off the dictatorial rule of Great Britain and began to govern ourselves, but there are pigs living in the farmer’s house, and I’m beginning to be worried.
Ironically, China never gave up on communism. While their reign was initially one of the world’s most infamous, most Chinese now seem satisfied with their government and how it treats them. Maybe they did learn something from Tiananmen Square. Industrially, they’re beating us like a red-headed stepchild, and while some of their cities suffer, some others have the most effective infrastructure in the world. When Dubai needs ideas and expertise to build infrastructure, it does not go to the U.S.A. but to China.
I’d rather there not be pigs living in the Farmer’s House, or pigs living in America’s House on Pennsylvania Avenue. America has gone almost two hundred and fifty years without eating the children of our revolution. It would really suck if, in my sixth decade, we were to start.
