What I Just Read

I was too young and didn't know my history well enough the first time I read Animal Farm. I couldn't appreciate the layered subtlety of this short fable. Not only does it show the process of regime change, but it also shows all the mechanisms of that process: the propaganda techniques, the re-narration of history as needed, the show trials, the choreographed violence, even a taxonomy of personality types (sheeple, useful idiots, credulous normies, rebels, regime apparatchiks, etc.), who play their roles as the new regime establishes control. Of course, as the turnings happen and one government collapses into the next, it always seems like an idealistic revolution for all the right reasons. Yet somehow it always devolves into another exploitative elite siphoning all the value from a naive, well-fooled society. Now, I've lived long enough to see fractals of the Animal Farm process play out in my own nation. See for a blatant example the rapidly changing official narr...