Animal Farm

"Animal Farm", an opera by Alexander Raskatov: the cast receiving the
applause after the performance (March 2023, Music Theatre, Amsterdam)

In his novel Animal Farm (1945) Georg Orwell didn’t want to criticize so much the Stalinist totalitarianism in the Soviet Union, as well as to explain how totalitarianism works. I have explained the mechanism of totalitarian power as described in Animal Farm in a blog three months ago. Orwell saw the need to write his book, because he had noticed that socialists in England easily accepted the Soviet propaganda of his days and thought that if the Soviet leaders (so Stalin) said that something was the case, it must be true. For wasn’t it so that what the English government said was true most of the time, and why should it be different in the Soviet Union? In a Preface to Animal Farm, Orwell said it this way: Although “England is not completely democratic, …. [its] laws are relatively just and official news and statistics can almost invariably be believed. … [Holding] minority views does not involve any mortal danger. In such an atmosphere the man in the street has no real understanding of things like concentration camps, mass deportations, arrests without trial, press censorship, etc. Everything he reads about a country like the USSR is automatically translated into English terms, and he quite innocently accepts the lies of totalitarian propaganda. Up to 1939, and even later, the majority of English people were incapable of assessing the true nature of the [German Nazi regime and the Soviet regime]”
Orwell decided to write his novel as an allegory, when he “saw a little boy … driving a huge cart-horse along a narrow path, whipping it whenever it tried to turn. It struck me that if only such animals became aware of their strength we should have no power over them, and that men exploit animals in much the same way as the rich exploit the proletariat.” This allegory was an effective way to shatter the myth that the USSR was a utopia in the making and to show how totalitarian propaganda works. Moreover, because the novel had been written as an allegory, it didn’t only shatter the myth of the Soviet Union, but it got a wider meaning. Being an allegory, the story of Animal Farm could easily be applied to any situation where power and words are used to disguise the facts instead of revealing them. “Because of that allegorical form, the story is also about the mechanisms of power. It is about how the establishment tries to protect its position, how propaganda and threats are used to control people, and how power is exercised through terror. We still see those mechanisms at work today”, so Damiano Michieletto, an Italian stage director.
In this context, it is also interesting what Orwell writes in his essay “The prevention of literature”: “From the totalitarian point of view history is something to be created rather than learned. A totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy, and its ruling caste, in order to keep its position, has to be thought of as infallible. But since, in practice, no one is infallible, it is frequently necessary to rearrange past events in order to show that this or that mistake was not made, or that this or that imaginary triumph actually happened. (...) Totalitarianism demands, in fact, the continuous alteration of the past, and in the long run probably demands a disbelief in the very existence of objective truth.” Here, Orwell writes about totalitarianism, but in a sense, such processes happen also in democratic societies, often not guided by the state but by certain groups in society interested in rewriting history. I cannot elaborate this point here, but look around and you’ll see many examples of such processes. Isn’t wokeism something like that: rewriting history from another perspective? Every time has its own perspective on history.
Also this passage in the same article is revealing: “It would probably not be beyond human ingenuity to write books by machinery. But a sort of mechanizing process can already be seen at work in the film and radio, in publicity and propaganda, and in the lower reaches of journalism. The Disney films, for instance, are produced by what is essentially a factory process, the work being done partly mechanically and partly by teams of artists who have to subordinate their individual style. Radio features are commonly written by tired hacks to whom the subject and the manner of treatment are dictated beforehand: even so, what they write is merely a kind of raw material to be chopped into shape by producers and censors. So also with the innumerable books and pamphlets commissioned by government departments. (...) Papers … abound with advertisements of literary schools, all of them offering you ready-made plots ... Some, together with the plot, supply the opening and closing sentences of each chapter. Others furnish you with a sort of algebraical formula by the use of which you can construct plots for yourself. Others have packs of cards marked with characters and situations, which have only to be shuffled and dealt in order to produce ingenious stories automatically. It is probably in some such way that the literature of a totalitarian society would be produced... Imagination – even consciousness, so far as possible – would be eliminated from the process of writing. … It goes without saying that anything so produced would be rubbish … As for the surviving literature of the past, it would have to be suppressed or at least elaborately rewritten.”
Isn’t this how chatbots write texts today? Isn’t it a warning of the dangers of such mechanically written texts? And doesn’t the end of the quote make us think of the recent attempt to rewrite books by Roald Dahl?
It was just because of this topicality of Animal Farm that Damiano Michieletto got the idea of turning the novel into an opera, an opera composed then by the Russian composer Alexander Raskatov. See it when you have the chance.
Source: Animal Farm opera programme book