[PEN-L:32540] RE: Animal Farm parodied; Orwell estate is not amus ed

["Devine, James" <jdevine@xxxxxxx>]

Title: RE: [PEN-L:32539] Animal Farm parodied; Orwell estate is not amused

SNOWBALL'S CHANCE sounds like a good book, but it's wrong to see ANIMAL FARM as the Cold Warriors did, i.e., as a simple anti-communist book. As seen in the summary below, at the end of ANIMAL FARM, the animals can't tell the difference between the pig rulers and humans. Orwell seemed to be saying that the "communist" society had ended up being much the same as capitalism. (Similarly, in _1984_, the "West" (Oceania) ends up being a mirror-image of the "East" (Eurasia), while the "book within the book" by Immanuel Goldstein is quite critical of capitalism, though that word is never mentioned.) That's why the ending was changed in the Cold War cartoon version. If capitalism = communism, then that's a critique of capitalism from the Cold War perspective. 

(If there's going to be a fight over Orwell's legacy, we should care about what he was actually saying.)

Wasn't Snowball supposed to represent Trotsky?

Jim
 
> NY Times, Nov. 25, 2002
>
> A Pig Returns to the Farm, Thumbing His Snout at Orwell
> By DINITIA SMITH
>
> What if Snowball had his chance? An American novelist has written a
> parody of "Animal Farm," George Orwell's 1945 allegory about the evils
> of communism, in which the exiled pig, Snowball, returns to the farm and
> sets up a capitalist state, leading to misery for all the animals. The
> book, "Snowball's Chance" by John Reed, is being published this month

<ellipsis>

> Mr. Reed said he was watching the aftermath of the terrorist  attacks on
> television in his East Village apartment on Sept. 11 when the idea came
> to him to rewrite the Orwell classic. "I thought, `Why would they do
> this to us?' " he remembered. "The twin towers attack showed us that
> something is wrong with our system, too."
>
> He decided, he said, that the world had a new form of evil to deal with,
> and it was not communism. It was the evil, he said, within American
> corporate capitalism itself, and American arrogance in protecting its
> interests in the Middle East oil fields. To Mr. Reed, "Animal Farm" was
> the ultimate _expression_ of pro-capitalist ideology. "It has inoculated
> generations of schoolchildren against the evils of  communism," Mr. Reed
> said.
>
> Mr. Reed says he is definitely one of those in the anti-Orwell camp. "I
> really wanted to explode that book," he said of "Animal Farm." "I wanted
> to completely undermine it."
>
> In Orwell's allegory, the animals go hungry and are worked to
> death for the benefit of their communist pig masters. In the final scene the
> animals gaze into the window of the farmhouse watching the pigs
> cavorting with their human oppressors and can no longer tell the two apart.
>
> Mr. Reed decided to turn Orwell's classic back on itself. In his parody
> Napoleon, the Stalinist pig dictator of "Animal Farm," dies, and his old
> rival, Snowball, returns transformed into a corporate capitalist dressed
> in cuff links and a blazer. "Tonight, I present an animalage of such
> erudition that all the wisdom of the village is now ours," Snowball
> says, announcing a new, decidedly free-market credo for the farm: "All
> animals are born equal — what they become is their own affair."
>
> The farm initially expands under capitalism. The animals get hot water
> and air-conditioning, start wearing clothes and begin walking on their
> hind legs. The farm encroaches on the territory of the neighboring
> woodland animals. The pigs bomb the beaver dams and disrupt the free
> flow of water — make that oil — in the forest. Eventually the farm's
> ecology is destroyed by overdevelopment, and it is turned into one giant
> Disney theme park, complete with confessional sideshows.
>
> The woodland creatures, led by the beavers — read Islamic
> fundamentalists — incensed at the destruction of their environment,
> attack the twin windmills, which power the farm and are a stand-in for
> the towers of the World Trade Center. The book ends with the farm
> animals crying out for revenge against the fundamentalists:  "`Kill the
> beavers! Kill the beavers! Kill! Kill!"' <ellipsis>
>
> Despite the brutal ending of "Snowball's Chance," Mr. Reed said, he
> still thinks "capitalism has a better chance of working than communism,"
> but "it would be a true capitalist system rather than a conglomerate
> system."
>
> "We would have an America of true democracy, with equal
> protection under the law for all," he said.