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 narratives about the 2020 pandemic response, which required us to rapidly forget, goldfish memory-style, all conflicting prior narratives. A regime that seeks power and control wants a people with goldfish memories, it requires such a people. Otherwise it cannot fool them--changing laws, slogans, geopolitical alliances, narratives, history or anything else to solidify and expand that control. It's disconcerting and upsetting to say the least how well this book maps to today, and I suspect we'll see more parallels in the coming years.
[As always, a friendly warning to read no further: what follow are just a list of notes and quotes from the text. If I were you I wouldn't even bother to read the bolded parts!]
Notes:
Chapter 1
5: "Because nearly the whole of the produce of our labour is stolen from us by human beings. There, comrades, is the answer to all our problems. It is summed up in a single word--Man. Man is the only real enemy we have. Remove Man from the scene, and the root cause of hunger and overwork is abolished forever." [Blame the existing regime for all problems, use that as justification to remove that regime.]
8: "And, above all, no animal must ever tyrannize over his own kind. Week or strong, clever or simple, we are all brothers. No animal must ever kill any other animal. All animals are equal." [The rhetoric early on always sounds amazing, enticing. We will see how quickly and easily these idealized goals are forgotten (or removed) as needed by the next regime.]
Chapter 2
12: Snowball and Napoleon: two prize pigs that take over leadership after the humans are driven off the farm.
13: "Animalism," an analog for Communism.
14: Sugarcandy Mountain, where animals go when they die: heaven/religion. We'll see a very cynical use of this concept late in the book to keep the peasants happy after a new totalitarianism sets in.
15: Boxer and Clover, the horses, are sort of the useful idiots here.
16: The revolution happens sooner than everyone expected, with no warning the humans were driven off the farm.
18: The animals have a sort of respectful January 6th-type walk through the farmer's house. "They tiptoed from room to room, afraid to speak above a whisper..."
21: Animal Farm's seven commandments:
1. Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy.
2. Whatever goes upon four legs, or has wings, is a friend.
3. No animal shall wear clothes.
4. No animal shall sleep in a bed.
5. No animal shall drink alcohol.
6. No animal shall kill any other animal.
7. All animals are equal.
22: Notable that early on in the story the milk had somehow "disappeared" and nobody knew who took it. Later we learned the pigs took it in one of the first acts of the new regime's leadership siphoning excess production off the working class.
Chapter 3
25: Boxer famous quote: "I will work harder!" Different people have different ways of solving their existential and psychological angst in the face of the lies and irrationalities of creeping totalitarianism. The irony of Boxer's approach here is how virtuous it seems: there can't be anything wrong with good, honest hard work, can there? And yet it overtly helps an unethical system stay in power.
25-6: Old Benjamin, the donkey, cryptic and taciturn: "Donkeys live a long time. None of you has ever seen a dead donkey."
26: The pigs start taking control. They're just a little bit smarter than everybody else. "It was always the pigs who put forward the resolutions. The other animals understood how to vote, but could never think of any resolutions of their own." [Note here the famous dictum "if they let you vote for it it's already been decided." There's far more power in deciding what goes on the ballot than deciding who wins the ballot.]
28: Mollie the horse as a bourgeois decadent. [We later will find out that she willingly returns to slavery in order to wear ribbons, get occasional sugar treats, etc (see note to page 41, below). It's an interesting metaphor, and all the more ironic because ultimately she escapes the eventual totalitarianism of Animal Farm.]
29: "Four legs good, two legs bad." A distilled philosophy of the regime dumbed down for the dumber animals.
29: Snowball the pig takes on the work of establishing various committees as a sort of community organizer, while Napoleon takes on the education of a group of dogs which he ultimately uses as his shock troops/personal guard. [Napoleon is looking much further downfield than anyone else in terms of consolidating his own power; of course no one is looking downfield for the benefit of the overall community.]
30ff: The pigs begin skimming the system; they were the ones who took the milk we later find out; Squealer (sort of the propaganda agent for the pigs) justifies the extraction of these extra resources, explaining, "Comrades!" he cried. "You do not imagine, I hope, that we pigs are doing this in a spirit of selfishness and privilege? Many of us actually dislike milk and apples. I dislike them myself. Our sole object in taking these things is to preserve our health. Milk and apples (this has been proved by Science, comrades) contain substances absolutely necessary to the well-being of a pig. We pigs are brainworkers. The whole management and organization of this farm depend on us. Day and night we are watching over your welfare. It is for your sake that we drink that milk and eat those apples." [Note here the use of SCIENCE!! as justification, this sounds oddly and disturbingly familiar today, doesn't it?]
30-31: Another effective rhetoric technique of a repressive political system is the manufacture and use of external enemies: here Squealer uses farmer Jones as a device. "Do you know what would happen if we pigs failed in our duty? Jones would come back! Yes. Jones would come back! Surely, comrades," cried Squealer almost pleadingly, skipping from side to side and whisking his tail, "surely there is no one among you who wants to see Jones come back?... Now if there was one thing that the animals were completely certain of, it was that they did not want Jones back. When it was put to them in this light, they had no more to say. The importance of keeping the pigs in good health was all too obvious. So it was agreed without further argument that the milk and the windfall apples (and also the main crop of apples when they ripened) should be reserved for the pigs alone." [Another important element here is the hypocognition of the citizens: a regime or an elite actually wants less intelligent subjects! Less intelligent people are easier to rule--even the most obvious and transparent tools of rhetoric are effective in persuading them.]
Chapter 4
34: Interesting here to see how the neighboring farms, still run by humans, propagandize against what is happening on Animal Farm. "Nevertheless, they were both thoroughly frightened by the rebellion on Animal Farm, and very anxious to prevent their own animals from learning too much about it."
35ff: Jones attempts to recapture his farm; Snowball had studied Julius Caesar's campaigns, he handles the defense, and interestingly, leads the defense as well. We will see later how this episode is "rewritten" by Napoleon. The animals execute a feigned retreat and then surround and defeat the humans.
38: Boxer accidentally kills--or at least thinks he killed--a stable-lad, and he's traumatized by it. "'I have no wish to take life, not even human life,' repeated Boxer, and his eyes were full of tears." Note again that Boxer's ethical compass actually keeps him naive about the sophistication of this repressive system around him.
38: Note also Mollie the mare (the "bourgeois decadent" from the last chapter who loves to have ribbons in her hair) ran away and hid during the fight.
Chapter 5
41ff: Mollie begins shirking, she's accused of consorting with humans, she prefers sugar and ribbons in her hair (the baubles of slavery); she changes sides, leaves the farm and goes to work for a human run farm. "None of the animals ever mentioned Mollie again." [Another aspect of a repressive system is to shun dissidents and defectors, or pretend they never existed.]
43ff: Conflict begins to grow between Snowball and Napoleon; see the dispute over the windmill. [Is the windmill some sort of existential threat on some level, say of capital over labor?]
46: "Vote for Snowball and the three-day week." [Delusional promises of repressive or soon-to-be-repressive systems.]
48ff: The reader now learns that Napoleon had bred and trained the puppies to be his KGB/personal guard; he uses them to drive off Snowball and then installs a dictatorship where "there would be no more debates."
50: The sheep function is a sort of peanut gallery that bleat loudly whenever there's any potential debate: their bleating puts an end any chance of discussion; [Perhaps the sheep represent a sort of captured media or a captured intelligentsia/pundit class.]
50ff: Squealer justifies Napoleon's power play, and he also starts rewriting Snowball's role in Animal Farm's history: "Snowball, who, as we now know, was no better than a criminal...' 'Surely, comrades, you do not want Jones back?'" "Once again this argument was unanswerable." [Again, this rhetoric easily manipulates a hypocognized society--and it works even better when that society is under a certain amount of emotional duress which lowers cognition still further.]
51: Boxer unfortunately defends the regime. "If comrade Napoleon says it, it must be right. Napoleon is always right." The animals' meetings also take on a sort of pecking order for where people sit.
52: Napoleon then claims the windmill plan was his all along, despite most everyone seeming to remember that Napoleon was against it before he was for it. Squealer lays on more propaganda: "Tactics, comrades, tactics!"
Chapter 6
54: "All that year the animals worked like slaves. But they were happy in their work..." [This is quite an interesting comment, it's true, labor does give people a sense of meaning and purpose and happiness, you can think of it as yet another leg in the stool of a repressive system]
 |
| "To work, comrades!" This sh*t actually works? |
57: Note that Animal Farm is not self-sufficient: they can't make iron, they can't obtain seeds, tools, etc., thus trade is a necessary expedient; they have to sell or extract still more surplus production from the workers to keep the farm going.
59: The pigs/elites become even more overtly dismissive of Animal Farm's original commandments; they begin dealing with humans, they start using the house, etc. [This is always justified with whatever expedient and rhetorically persuasive reason is available at the time. It's now more and more baldly about control and repression. The pigs are now obviously the ruling class; they continue to rewrite the past using rhetoric that always works on a now-fully hypocognized lumpenproletariat. "Surely none of you wishes to see Jones back?"]
62: One clear takeaway here is that you can fool people and keep them relatively happy a very long time before anyone wakes up.
63ff: The windmill, partially constructed, disintegrates during a storm. Napoleon blames Snowball. [The regime continues manufacturing internal enemies of the state as a mechanism of control.] "We will teach this miserable traitor that he cannot undo our work so easily."
Chapter 7
67: Again, Boxer unfortunately helps the regime by being blindly obedient, determined and incredibly hardworking.
68: Now the regime moves to a sort of "Potemkin village" phase: the sheep are instructed to "mention" that their rations were increased whenever they are in the presence of humans from the other farms. This is to "show" that everyone on the farm is happy and healthy despite the fact that the farm is rapidly approaching starvation. Also the pigs begin putting out falsely full grain barrels, again, to appear to the outside world as if they're thriving.
68ff: The hens learn that all of their eggs need to be surrendered to the regime to meet a contract with the farm's human trade representative; the hens begin destroying their own eggs [you will gladly destroy your own production before if it's just going to be summarily taken from you by the State]. The hens even try a (very quickly suppressed) mini-rebellion.
71: The regime continues to blame Snowball for everything, and then rewrites the famous revolution battle to give all the heroic credit to Napoleon; and the people actually swallow this rewriting despite knowing that it isn't true.
74ff: Now the "show trials" period of the regime begins. Napoleon and his guard dogs choreograph the entire thing as four pigs are seized: it is to be the liquidation of potential threat from within the pig leadership. "The four pigs waited, trembling, with guilt written on every line of their countenances. Napoleon now called upon them to confess their crimes. They were the same four pigs as had protested when Napoleon abolished the Sunday Meetings. Without any further prompting they confessed that they had been secretly in touch with Snowball ever since his explosion, that they had collaborated with him in destroying the windmill, and that they had entered into an agreement with him to hand over Animal Farm to Mr. Frederick. They added that Snowball had privately admitted to them that he had been Jones's secret agent for years past. When they had finished their confession, the dogs promptly tore their throats out, and in a terrible voice Napoleon demanded whether any other animal had anything to confess." [It's not just shocking enough that the events these pigs confessed to couldn't have happened, but right after this first pantomime happens, right away several other animals come forward and confess to crimes they likewise clearly couldn't have committed. Everyone who comes forward is slain on the spot until there was a pile of corpses.] This is exactly what happened during the show trials period of the Soviet regime.] "When it was all over, the remaining animals, except for the pigs and dogs, crept away in a body. They were shaken and miserable. They did not know which was more shocking--the treachery of the animals who had leagued themselves with Snowball, or the cruel retribution they had just witnessed." [Note that part of the choreography is the spontaneous participation of other "criminals" who are quickly executed; furthermore, everybody automatically assumes all of these confessants are truly guilty. The whole thing just cooks everybody psychologically into a sense of collective guilt and makes them still more controllable.]
76-7: Boxer tries to work out what happened: "It must be due to some fault in ourselves. The solution, as I see it, is to work harder." The other animals lack the words and cognition to express what they're feeling and what's going on. [This is also part of the structure of this type of choreographed "regime control event" when executed in human history.] The animals eventually begin singing their Farm hymn. "Beasts of England." Then they are instructed by Squealer, attended by two guard dogs now, that that song had been abolished. "It is no longer needed, comrade... 'Beasts of England' was the song of the Rebellion. But the Rebellion is now completed. The execution of the traitors this afternoon was the final act."
Chapter 8
80: The animals discover another one of their commandments rewritten from "No animal shall kill any other animal" to "No animal shall kill any other animal without cause." "Somehow or other, the last two words had slipped out of the animals' memory." [The final stage of control is when the animals assume they must be misremembering reality, that they must be wrong and the regime must be right...]
81: The pig regime begins lying to them outright about what their production numbers are and what's going on in the farm.
81ff: The regime begins a sort of deification process with Napoleon; he's seen less and less, he shows up only at holidays and specific times, the regime begins to celebrate his birthday, he's now referred to in formal style as "Our Leader, Comrade Napoleon" as well as other honorific names, portraits of him begin appearing everywhere, there are poems written about him, etc. Squealer becomes the public figure of authority. The animals began exhibiting increasingly worshipful behavior: "Under the guidance of our Leader, Comrade Napoleon, I have laid five eggs in six days."
84: An assassination plot against Napoleon is manufactured by the regime; it is used to justify giving Napoleon even more personal protection.
85: The regime also spreads false stories of the cruelty of the human farm next door.
86: Constant manipulations of the truth, further and further away from what actually happened: now the people are told--and believe--that Snowball had been censured for showing cowardice in the original battle for the freedom of the Animal Farm, and the idea that he had received the award of "Animal Hero, First Class" for bravery in that battle was a mere legend spread by Snowball himself.
87: Also Snowball can be used as a proxy reason for the rapid flip-flops of slogans and ideology; Animal Farm quickly switches allegiance from one nearby farm to another--the very farm that [two pages ago, see page 85 above] had supposedly been committing all the atrocities against animals. [Readers of 1984 will recognize this of course: "Wait, I thought we just were at war with Eurasia, now all of a sudden they are our allies?" "No, we are at war with Eastasia. We have always been at war with Eastasia."] Note here that all the regime needs to do to make any prior regime position untrue is to say that it was Snowball's fault, or based on false rumors spread by "Snowball and his agents." The animals are just credulous and hypocognized enough to follow along and believe.
88ff: Interesting section here where the next door farm's owner Frederick, who paid Napoleon and the Animal Farm with banknotes for some lumber, but the banknotes turned out to be "forgeries." Then there was a strange attack from Frederick and his men on the farm to destroy the windmill, the animals managed to fight them back at the cost of several animals lives, and then various celebrations and speeches were performed after the victory, and "the unfortunate affair of the banknotes was forgotten." [An allegorical/storybook example of an all-too-real phenomenon where a regime uses a war--triggered via false flag or even invited via green flag--in order to get people to forget an outright theft or crime by the regime against its own people.]
93ff: The pigs discover a case of whiskey in the farmhouse cellar and get drunk and sing songs; Napoleon is seen running around the yard with an old bowler hat from Mr. Jones. The next morning Napoleon is dying: "A rumor went round that Snowball had after all contrived to introduce poison into Napoleon's food." Napoleon then decrees that alcohol drinking is punished by death; Napoleon recovers and then directs the pigs to purchase booklets on brewing and distilling; the pigs lay plans to grow barley.
95-6: Further cracks start to show in the comportment of the leadership; Squealer is more or less caught repainting one of the commandments from "No animal shall drink alcohol" to "No animal shall drink alcohol to excess."
Chapter 9
97ff: The regime begins to backtrack on its initial promises for old-age pensions, it continues to cut food (using the euphemism "readjustment" never "reduction" of course). Squealer fluffs the animals with positive statistics about life expectancy, how there are fewer fleas, how much more straw they have in their stalls, etc. "The animals believed every word of it... doubtless it had been worse in the old days." Except nobody even remembered the old days anymore!
99ff: Still more rules giving the pigs more status: other animals have to stand aside as pigs cross their paths, rations are explicitly set higher for pigs, pigs receive a pint of beer daily, etc.
101ff: Songs, speeches, processions, marches, other mechanisms of a totalitarian state; note that the sheep are "the greatest devotees" of these demonstrations.
102: Animal Farm is proclaimed a "republic" and presents Napoleon as the only candidate to rule; he is elected unanimously.
103ff: Moses the Raven reappears, talking again about Sugarcandy Mountain. "A thing that was difficult to determine was the attitude of the pigs towards Moses. They all declared contemptuously that his stories about Sugarcandy Mountain were lies, and yet they allowed him to remain on the farm, not working, with an allowance of a gill of beer a day." [In other words, the regime allows religion to exist as a sort of safety valve, an opiate for the masses, the regime even indirectly supports it, but yet the regime's elites mock it as a delusion of the lumpenproletariat. Note also the elites' quality of life is excellent, so unlike the suffering proletariat class, they don't need to imagine a "better" life to come in the afterlife. Religion here exists as another indirect control mechanism of the regime.]
104ff: Boxer collapses; the pigs say they will have them taken to a veterinary surgeon; it turns out they send him to a renderer instead; the animals are told that Boxer died in a hospital "in spite of receiving every attention a horse could have." Squealer tells the animals that Boxer's last words were "Napoleon is always right"; Squealer also calls it a "wicked rumor" the idea that boxer was sent to a horse slaughterer, "Surely they knew their beloved Leader, Comrade Napoleon, better than that?" [Here, even the simplest, most naive, most hardworking and most "good" members of the system are exploited by the regime, right up until their deaths, and including the value of the raw materials of their bodies...]
Chapter 10
112: "Years passed. The seasons came and went, the short animal lives fled by. The time came when there was no one who remembered the old days before the Rebellion, except Clover, Benjamin, Moses the raven, and a number of the pigs."
112: "...in fact no animal had ever actually retired."
113: The animals brought into the farm were "willing workers and good comrades, but very stupid. None of them proved able to learn the alphabet beyond the letter B. They accepted everything that they were told about the Rebellion..." [Other good examples here of why a regime intent on control needs to have a hypocognizant people; especially among its laboring classes.]
114: "Somehow it seemed as though the farm had grown richer without making the animals themselves any richer--except, of course, for the pigs and the dogs."
116ff: The sheep are taken out to a field at one end of the farm, and then the pigs are seen walking on two legs. "It was as though the world had turned upside-down." And then the sheep are brought back in, now saying "Four legs good, two legs better!"
118: Two of the horses go to look at the seven commandments that were written on the wall of the barn, but now there's only one commandment: "All animals are equal. But some animals are more equal than others."
118ff: The pigs now begin wearing Mr Jones's clothes, carrying around whips while they're supervising the work of the farm. [Is Orwell mocking Eurasian Soviet elites for trying to be Western here?]
120: One of the humans makes a toast to the time when Animal Farm was regarded with hostility, or at least misgivings, but now, "a long period of mistrust and misunderstanding had now come to an end." [Perhaps this is a metaphor for the West embracing the Soviet Union during and after World War II, as necessary, to maintain control over their own societies...]
121: In fact the exploitation on Animal Farm is worse than any of the other human farms: one of the humans comments that "the lower animals on Animal Farm did more work and received less food than any animals in the county. Indeed, he and his fellow-visitors today had observed many features which they intended to introduce on their own farms immediately." [Here Orwell was three generations ahead of his time, as we see now how the so-called "free" West currently uses many tools of what we would once blame totalitarian regimes for using; we see how labor exploitation, inflation, mass surveillance and other mechanisms are just part of the toolset of the elites to stay elite.] "'If you have your lower animals to contend with, he said, we have our lower classes!' This bon mot set the table in a roar; and Mr. Pilkington once again congratulated the pigs on the low rations, the long working hours, and the general absence of pampering which he had observed on Animal Farm."
122: Napoleon gives a speech in response, saying "for a long time there had been rumors--circulated, he had reason to think, by some malignant enemy--that there was something subversive and even revolutionary in the outlook of himself and his colleagues. They had been credited with attempting to stir up rebellion among the animals and neighboring farms. Nothing could be further from the truth! Their sole wish, now and in the past, was to live at peace and in normal business relations with their neighbors. This farm which he had the honor to control, he added, was a co-operative enterprise. The title deeds, which were in his possession, were owned by the pigs jointly."
122ff: Note here that all of the flourishes of revolutionary-era Animal Farm (like calling each other comrade, the imagery on their flag, etc.) are removed; the pigs change the name back to "The Manor Farm."
124: "Twelve voices were shouting in anger and they were all alike. No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which."