"Somehow it seemed the farm had grown richer without making the animals themselves any richer"

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BBC Archive @BBCArchive · Aug 17
#OnThisDay 1945: George Orwell's Animal Farm was first published.

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from 'Open Rights Library' :

“Animal Farm” is an allegorical novella by George Orwell, first published in England on 17 August 1945. According to Orwell, the book reflects events leading up to the Russian Revolution of 1917 and then on into the Stalinist era of the Soviet Union. Orwell, a democratic socialist, was a critic of Joseph Stalin and hostile to Moscow-directed Stalinism, an attitude that was critically shaped by his experiences during the Spanish Civil War. The Soviet Union, he believed, had become a brutal dictatorship, built upon a cult of personality and enforced by a reign of terror. In a letter to Yvonne Davet, Orwell described Animal Farm as a satirical tale against Stalin (“un conte satirique contre Staline”), and in his essay “Why I Write” (1946), wrote that Animal Farm was the first book in which he tried, with full consciousness of what he was doing, “to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole”. The original title was Animal Farm: A Fairy Story; U.S. publishers dropped the subtitle when it was published in 1946, and only one of the translations during Orwell’s lifetime kept it. Other titular variations include subtitles like “A Satire” and “A Contemporary Satire”. Orwell suggested the title Union des républiques socialistes animales for the French translation, which abbreviates to URSA, the Latin word for “bear”, a symbol of Russia. It also played on the French name of the Soviet Union, Union des républiques socialistes soviétiques. Orwell wrote the book between November 1943 and February 1944, when the UK was in its wartime alliance with the Soviet Union and the British people and intelligentsia held Stalin in high esteem, a phenomenon Orwell hated. The manuscript was initially rejected by a number of British and American publishers, including one of Orwell’s own, Victor Gollancz, which delayed its publication. It became a great commercial success when it did appear partly because international relations were transformed as the wartime alliance gave way to the Cold War.


read here:

ANIMAL FARM – George Orwell / eBook
https://www.openrightslibrary.com/animal-farm-ebook/

[ck4829]

1. AKA "Dow hits a new record high!"

[rgbecker]

2. Probably had as much to do with the establishment of the COLD WAR as anything else.

When I grew up in the 50's it was all about how the communists and socialists were actually fascists. Propaganda against the "Individual American Spirit". Get a gun and protect America from the "worker's party" and the Union bosses that had brainwashed American workers.

The books was and is great, but its popularity at the time drove the everything from the Korean War through the Viet Nam War to the fighting in Latin and South America.

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3. Orwell hated Stalin

...more importantly, he hated the influence of Moscow on Britian's politics, on the Left, his political affiliation.

wiki:

Having witnessed the success of the anarcho-syndicalist communities, for example in Anarchist Catalonia, and the subsequent brutal suppression of the anarcho-syndicalists, anti-Stalin communist parties and revolutionaries by the Soviet Union-backed Communists, Orwell returned from Catalonia a staunch anti-Stalinist and joined the British Independent Labour Party, his card being issued on 13 June 1938. Although he was never a Trotskyist, he was strongly influenced by the Trotskyist and anarchist critiques of the Soviet regime, and by the anarchists' emphasis on individual freedom. In Part 2 of The Road to Wigan Pier, published by the Left Book Club, Orwell stated that "a real Socialist is one who wishes—not merely conceives it as desirable, but actively wishes—to see tyranny overthrown". Orwell stated in "Why I Write" (1946): "Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it."Orwell was a proponent of a federal socialist Europe, a position outlined in his 1947 essay "Toward European Unity," which first appeared in Partisan Review. According to biographer John Newsinger:

"The other crucial dimension to Orwell's socialism was his recognition that the Soviet Union was not socialist. Unlike many on the left, instead of abandoning socialism once he discovered the full horror of Stalinist rule in the Soviet Union, Orwell abandoned the Soviet Union and instead remained a socialist—indeed he became more committed to the socialist cause than ever."

In his 1938 essay "Why I joined the Independent Labour Party," published in the ILP-affiliated New Leader, Orwell wrote:

"For some years past I have managed to make the capitalist class pay me several pounds a week for writing books against capitalism. But I do not delude myself that this state of affairs is going to last forever ... the only régime which, in the long run, will dare to permit freedom of speech is a Socialist régime. If Fascism triumphs I am finished as a writer—that is to say, finished in my only effective capacity. That of itself would be a sufficient reason for joining a Socialist party."

...the Independent Labour Party was anything but anti-union.

[rgbecker]

4. I totally believe and agree that Orwell was against the way the Soviet

Revolution played out and that the book was essentially about that fact. But the RW conservatives used the book, and only allowed the book in the schools, to promote an anti-socialist and anti communist line of "Reason". They were happy to conflate the two, Socialism and Stalinist rule, to promote the capitalists' line that Socialism never works and that line is still a daily one on our "all new internet media."

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5. that's not my recollection of how the book was presented or received

...but I grew up in the seventies and I don't really listen to what RW conservatives. say about anything, at least I never heard anyone refer to Animal Farm that way.

Besides, we can all see the same conservative demagogues today have revealed their anti-Stalinism to be a canard. As I pointed out, Orwell's anti-Stalinism was anti-Soviet, not a hit on socialism, so to wrap this book around conservative claptrap is a tragic misunderstanding or representation of the author's intent. It's about revolution gone awry.

It's like any other misappropriation. This one substitutes fascism for socialism.