by Thaxton Lewis

Created on: July 17, 2008

George Orwell was a writer with his pulse on world events and how society was transforming.

His two best known works, 1984 and Animal farm, have shaped many dissident views on where government is going and why it is going there.

Both of these works have been made into films, Animal Farm an animated film and 1984 a live action release.

While 1984 painted a picture of a drab, dark world where the masses are expungened at will by a faceless, merciless government, Animal Farm is not quite the same.

Animal Farm focuses more on interpersonal relationships, and how those who control others use the ignorance and innocence of others to dominate and contol them, leading them into a 1984 world.

I suppose Animal Farm, which preceded 1984 by 4 years (Animal Farm was published in 1945, 1984 was published in 1949) is literally the embodiment of act one in what Orwell observed to be what was happening around him at the time.

Whereas 1984 is the embodiment of this full nightmare reality, how it works and its repercussions, Animal Farm shows the beginning of it all.

Animal Farm focuses on class stratification first with the seperation of the animals from the humans.

Mr. Jones is a heavy drinker who ignores the animal needs and pursues his own reckless self destruction until he is usurped by the animals.

Once the animals are in charge, a power struggle develops between the smartest of the animals.

In this instance, the pigs are the smartest animals.

A power struggle develops between the two smartest and best known pigs, Napolean and Snowball.

Whilst Snowball wishes to achieve a egalitarian utopia and works heavily towards this goal, Napolean has other plans.

In fact, Napoleon is constantly preplanning a different agenda.

Napolean had taken the pups of Jessie and Bluebell and turned them into his secret police.

Then he used the pups, now vicious attack dogs, to dispose of Snowball.

Once Snowball is out of the way, Napolean alters the laws the animals created to be treated as equals so that he can do as he wishes and not be challenged.

The class stratification becomes a top down model where the pigs rule, their closest followers are next, followed by the dogs and horses and sheep, who are always last and not often thought of as significant in any way.

This stratification does not find much questioning by the otehr animals, who even after the death of the strongest and kindest, albeit also dumbest, animal on their farm, the horse Boxer, they continue to believe the lies of the pigs and all their grandstanding until the pigs are walking around getting drunk like their old human counterparts.

In a way, this type of class stratification is symbolic of an age old adage that seems to prove true. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.( I believe this idea can be directly attributed to Lord Acton.)

After all, once Napolean had his way, he basically straified the society through force and coercion, and then he made the laws suit his will, all the while causing those who helped bring about the revolution to suffer greater social injustices under the animals then under the human beings.

It seems that when human beings are placed in categories, they usually accept these categories unquestioningly, even if their is a disturbance in their hearts and minds as to why they are feeling this discomfort.

The pigs, especially Napolean, are inherently greedy, and use their false comraderie with their fellow animals to alter the egalitarian spirit of their initial enterprise in favor of a self serving undertaking that incorporates the very tactics that the animals initially eschewed, human tactics.

In the end, this is the Animals undoing, and eventually they end up in circumstacnes far worse that where they began.

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