What happens when leaders lose
sight of ideals and principles framed under revolutionary
circumstances? What happens when corruption, cruelty, ignorance, greed,
short-sightedness, to name a few, grip the minds of leaders and control their
actions? Dystopia.
George Orwell's classic fable Animal
Farm (1945) traces how the principles of Animalism, adopted by the
animals after the revolution, are slowly, systematically, cynically betrayed through
a process of distortion and cruelty, hunger and hardships, confessions and
liquidations. Napoleon the pig and his aides, through their false rhetoric of
equality and liberation, finally betray the egalitarian principles behind the
revolution so that the fable ends with the dictum: "All animals are equal, but some
animals are more equal than others."
Born in Bengal, as the son of a colonial official in British India,
George Orwell (1903-1950)—the political writer, whose experience of war
and revolutionary politics resulted in works like Animal Farm and the prophetic Nineteen
Eighty-Four—"made a single life contain, at first hand, the
experiences of imperialism, of revolution, of poverty." It was during those
troubled years of depression, war and fascism that Orwell developed as a writer.
His major works include Down and Out in Paris and London, Burmese Days,
A Clergyman's Daughter, The Road to Wigan
Pier, and Homage to Catalonia.
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