this post was submitted on 07 May 2025
66 points (97.1% liked)
El Chisme
401 readers
255 users here now
Place for posting about the dumb shit public figures say.
Rules:
Rule 1: The subject of a post must be a public person.
Rule 2: All posts must include links to the subject matter, and no identifying information should be redacted.
Rule 3: If your source is a reactionary website, please use archive.is instead of linking directly.
Rule 4: No sectarianism.
Rule 5: TERF/SWERFs Not Welcome
Rule 6: No ableism of any kind (that includes stuff like libt*rd)
Rule 7: Do not post fellow hexbears.
Rule 8: Do not individually target other instances' admins or moderators.
founded 6 months ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The original story isn't anti communist, but anti soviet. The CIA got involved to make sure the original animated adaption showed all kinds of communism to be bad.
But the story is fundamentally anticommunist. Animal Farm is the typical "well after the revolution it was worse so revolutions are bad and evil". If you denounce state power then you are an anticommunist, simple
I think you'll find many anarchists disagreeing with your last point there.
But if your argument is simply that it's anticommunist because it attacks AES, then fair enough. But I still find it valuable to remember that the American cultural mileau is so anticommunist that the criticism had to extend to the ideas of communism itself being bad, not merely that implementation was bad/unrealistic.
You can see his contempt for the working class through out the book. He'd be against any workers revolution, because he was an elitist prick to say the least.
Just because Orwell claimed he was a socialist doesn't make him one. His work is thoroughly anti-communist. Even if he just claims to be against "bad communism" or whatever, his argument is literally that the people are too dumb to be able to do communism properly.
I read too much Orwell as a teenager. His personal politics outside of fighting in Spain are fairly shit. Most of Orwell is incredibly boring and simplistic, but I think there are a few deeper parts of it are glossed over especially by libs who think 1984 is a book about communism instead of a book about power.
For example everyone knows the quote:
"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face— forever"
Which everyone is like "omg gommunism" to.
This appears in a passage in the book is where O'Brien is explaining the operation of power politics as it relates to parties to Winston as he's torturing him.
This is a Blue No Matter Who society. This is a society pure party politics, a society of us and them. Ironically many liberals cannot see the "us" in the "them" of the book. Liberals on their loss literally went online to reclaim their power by gloating about genocide, by gloating about the coming abuse of minorities, and by gloating about the coming economic instability. They were denied the thrill of victory, the thrill of stomping their enemies, so they must recuperate that feeling of power in another way. This is why every few months they start posting about Susan Sarandon, Bernie Sanders, Muslims in Deerborn, Gaza Activists, or for those who are older Ralph Nader, Ross Perot, Ted Kennedy, or the eternal of evil non-voters.
The Democrats like O'Brien love creating fake enemies to rile up their base. They use the threat of their "enemies" to their "base" in the same way that in 1984 there's always a Goldberg terror cell around every corner.
Ironically the whole "cruelty for cruelty's sake" is a hilarious denial of the core of the whole book which states "cruelty is the expression of political power". Which they themselves do politically (e.g. Blue team owns the leader board in cleansing brown people from the core and in the periphery) and socially when they're in and out of power. Yet they still love citing it.
But of course Orwell was wrong about the form, there's no 20 Minutes of Hate that's conveniently isolated and ignored if like Winston you find it icky. It's a Unending Hate that's dispensed through a voluntary capitalist media system that hooks you into the feeling. Infinite Scroll is 20 Minutes of Hate. 24 Hour News cycles are 20 Minutes of Hate. Hollywood Movies and Sports Games sponsored by the Department of Defense are 20 Minutes of Hate. They serve the same social purpose. They just have a different and less baby brained form, so the baby brains who love this book cannot make the connections.
We live in a power society. Our O'Briens are capitalists. To the O'Brien and Elon Musks of the world there is no difference to torturing you or forcing you to listen to shitty internet jokes from 2009, to them it's an expression of power that demands reverence. Musk knows he's not funny. He knows he constantly eats shit. He does his little shows anyway because he knows people are forced to pay attention to him. They must suffer him because of his station. The entire capitalist system is built that way. You must suffer them, that is the social relation devoid of economics.
There are some ideas that Orwell got right. There's not many of them, and they're just constantly ignored and misapplied.
I do think Orwell understood capitalism fairly well, the problem was, he assumed that all systems would behave exactly the same way as capitalism, or even "worse" somehow. As always with anti-communists, his work was entirely projection.
Honestly it's just because we're too close to the history. It's Dante's Inferno but for children where a large portion of the characters are just personal grievances the author has with their political contemporaries. It's not even a good point, it's just a hate boner for Stalin which essentially buys into the cult of personality anyway.
No, the book very specially has socialism working. Then comunism is showing being just as bad as capitlaism. Implying both are bad. So while he is kinda ideologically incoherent in the way of all reactionaries we should understand the actual text of the work.
The work is a near trotskyite ode to Lenin and Marx and a condemnation of the Soviet Union. That's just true regardless of your feelings about Orwell. The claim is not that the farm animals are too dumb for communism, but that the communist leadership is corrupt and gradually reforms itself away from communism to something indistinguishable from capitalism. It's not subtle, it's not a deep work. That's why it's used as a polemic for children.
Beyond that I won't argue Orwell with you.
Alright, we'll stop there. But here's some reading on Orwell that is worth considering. https://redsails.org/on-orwell/
I'm fully aware he stinks on a personal and political level. We can agree he's a (Really, that word is blocked?) "Someone who commits sexual assault" who ended up condemning the one cool thing he ever did. I just don't find that helpful to the discussion.
Oh whoops, that was the wrong article, sorry! https://redsails.org/jones-on-animal-farm/
I think about this article every time Orwell comes up. There is a reason the CIA would air drop this book into communist nations.
It's such a mindfuck how western "leftists" will often think Orwell, the man who has done more for anti-communism than probably any other single individual is a "true communist" but people like Stalin or Mao are "fake communist" because they didn't do a hypothetical perfect communism. All one needs to be a "socialist" is to just say you are, no matter what your actions end up actually supporting.
It's so surreal it would make for an actually good dystopian fiction/"child-friendly" fable metaphor type of novel.