For The Millennial In Your Life

Animal Farm, a Brit animated feature from the fifties, looks like a Disney feature – but it’s a pretty faithful re-telling of Orwell’s classic tale of the inevitable results of socialism.

It’s actually easy enough to find links to the film – most of which link back to sketchy download sites.  This version – Arabic subtitles and all – is the only full-length freebie I’ve found.

And it’s worth a watch:

Although you can pretty much watch video from Venezuela today and get the same results.

12 thoughts on “For The Millennial In Your Life

  1. Mitch,

    I think you know that Animal Farm is now seen as commentary not just on Communism (not socialism), but also on Fascism and really any form of extremism where the press is controlled by the state. Sweden is a socialist state but it is a state with a free press where questions of effectiveness are freely raised. By contrast, states where the truth is blurred, where the narrative is forced, where the government acts without having to be accountable to the people, THAT is an atmosphere where up is down and truth is lies, where fake news is made real and real news is called fake.

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  3. I think you know that Animal Farm is now seen as commentary not just on Communism (not socialism), but also on Fascism and really any form of extremism where the press is controlled by the state.
    Ridiculous.
    The book (novella?) is specifically modeled on the Russian Revolution. Snowball is Trotsky. Napolean is Lenin/Stalin. The dogs are the Cheka.

    Orwell:

    Re. your query about Animal Farm. Of course I intended it primarily as a satire on the Russian revolution. But I did mean it to have a wider application in so much that I meant that that kind of revolution (violent conspiratorial revolution, led by unconsciously power-hungry people) can only lead to a change of masters. I meant the moral to be that revolutions only effect a radical improvement when the masses are alert and know how to chuck out their leaders as soon as the latter have done their job. The turning-point of the story was supposed to be when the pigs kept the milk and apples for themselves (Kronstadt).1 If the other animals had had the sense to put their foot down then, it would have been all right. If people think I am defending the status quo, that is, I think, because they have grown pessimistic and assume that there is no alternative except dictatorship or laissez-faire capitalism. In the case of Trotskyists, there is the added complication that they feel responsible for events in the USSR up to about 1926 and have to assume that a sudden degeneration took place about that date. Whereas I think the whole process was foreseeable—and was foreseen by a few people, eg. Bertrand Russell—from the very nature of the Bolshevik party. What I was trying to say was, “You can’t have a revolution unless you make it for yourself; there is no such thing as a benevolent dictat[or]ship.2

    http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2013/07/11/animal-farm-what-orwell-really-meant/

    Your position is untenable, Pen.

  4. What bothers me about Pen is his ideological blindness. It took less 30 seconds to find what Orwell himself said about Animal Farm. Penigma wrote about what Animal Farm meant without bothering to a simple search.
    Animal Farm and Orwell’s other “anti-totalitarian” books and essays were written after his experience fighting for the anarcho-syndicalists (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista, POUM) in the Spanish Civil War. The POUM would not allow itself to be taken over by Stalin’s Comintern. Hence it found Stalin’s Comintern to be its worst enemy, worse than Franco’s fascists, even.

  5. In Pen’s defense, it is difficult, in 2017, to understand the world of politically-oriented intellectuals between the wars. Orwell can be intelligently criticized from the Left. usually the technique is to point out Orwell’s contradicting himself. In the quote above, he insists that the revolution must come from the ground up, and the revolutionary government must be accountable to the people. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, however, Orwell implies that it is impossible for the people — the proletariat — to control or successfully revolt against a totalitarian government.
    The verbal jousting between the late Christopher Hitchens and George Galloway is instructive, with Galloway taking the part of Stalin and Hitchens taking the part of Orwell. Galloway told Hitchens that he was a posh and a popinjay, and mocked him for his drinking (Galloway is a teetotaler), and that he, Galloway, spoke for the people, not the rich. Hitchens responded that Galloway was an ignorant thug. Galloway was not intimidated; he understood that he could trump Hitchens’ better command of the language and debating technique by taking the gloves off and hinting at personal violence.

  6. One more thing (I am very interested in Orwell). No Leftist of the 30s-40s-50s would describe fascism as a revolutionary movement. It was seen, by Leftists, as a continuation of the old order, adopting the populism required by any modern political movement. Even the fascists did not see themselves as revolutionaries. The fascists believed that the nation was the eternal; the aristocracy might have best represented the interests of the nation in the past, but fascism was the only possible government that could represent the nation in the 20th century. The adherence to the idea of a political state based on national identity was what made the Left of the early to late 20th century regard the fascists as non-revolutionary. Leftists considered fascists dedicated to the idea that utopia lay in an atavistic past rather than a golden future. This made them conservative rather than revolutionary, because fascists wanted to conserve the ancient, outdated idea of the nation-state as an organizing political principle.

  7. One might note that from the people’s viewpoint, communists, fascists & socialists all take from the people to serve some form of state. The only real difference is in whose pockets the ill-gotten gains end up.

  8. In Gironella’s classic, somewhat autobiographical, novel of the Spanish Civil War, “The Cypresses Believe in God”, he describes how the Communists, Socialists and Anarchists formed the Popular Front until they were in control and then the Communists started arresting and/or killing the Socialists, while the Anarchists focused on burning the churches and monasteries.

    And then Franco and the Fascists arrived, and it was really on.

  9. Mammuthus Primigenius wrote:
    “The Aussie’s copyright laws are out of sync with the rest of the world”

    It’s nice to know the entire world is not stupid about copyright.

  10. Penigma wrote:
    “Animal Farm is now seen as commentary not just on Communism (not socialism), but also on Fascism and really any form of extremism”

    … by ignorant trolls …

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