You didn’t understand Animal Farm in your teens? It’s the world’s most unsubtle allegory.
To be fair when I was a teen I thought the part with Boxer gets shipped to the glue factory even though he was such a loyal worker perfectly mimiced what it’s like for workers under capitalism. Particularly because my father worked manual labour and was fired after his body broke down from the hard labour.
It is what happens to workers under capitalism. The accusation is that Stalin is like the capitalists.
Aye, teenage me didn’t think of it that way as I knew nothing about Stalin and could only relate to my own experiences
Same usually happens with 1984, ime. I didn’t know that it was an anticommunist book until I joined Lemmy
It’s because American schools don’t teach international history or reading comprehension. Animal farm was basically my introduction to Russian history at 14 years old and I had to Google Stalin, Trotsky, and Lenin to figure out wtf was going on.
What is embarrassing is that people come back to the text as adults (many college educated!) when they’re supposed to be smarter and they read it with the critical skills of a 15th century Bavarian peasant.
It hits you over the head so hard with it that they use it to teach 11 and 12 year olds how to analyze text for allegories lol
Even though animal farm is definitely anti-USSR and AES, I don’t understand how you read it and have the takeaway be that the farmers are the good guys.
If anything, the takeaway is gulag the liberals before they wreck the revolution lmao
The proper takeaway is to let minority groups (other farm animals) have representation in government
Which Soviets have no problem with, even before the USSR was founded, for example in first Sovnarkom of RSFSR on 17 seats 5 were members of minorities.
Hmmm… But at what cost?
Looking from British colonial cop PoV, probably that one of them was a Jew
The real point is that Russian workers are stupid, illiterate, and incapable of complex thought, and thus destined to be taken advantage of by anyone more intelligent, good or bad. Genuinely, Orwell dedicates a huge portion of the book to explaining just how stupid the animals are and uses that as justification for them allowing the Pigs to get worse over time.
Even ignoring the misrepresentation of history, the required assumption is that the workers were incapable of understanding anything to begin with.
Orwell was a purveyor of average upper-class
twit takes, and of course anticommunists still use them as circlejerk fodder 80 years laterIn a lot of ways, he was the Ur-gammon
He’s perfect fed material, which explains why he worked with British Intelligence. A perfectly controlled “opposition.”
The takeaway is that revolutions are bad, even if they mean well. Specifically socialist revolutions because they promise prosperity for all, but then turn into authoritarianism. You’re supposed to sympathize with the
pigBut liberal revolutions, like the American one, are fine and great actually.
Mandatory link to A Critical Read of Animal Farm and On Orwell. Orwell’s chief critique and point of Animal Farm isn’t that the Bolsheviks were bad or anything, it’s that Russian workers are stupid, illiterate, incapable of learning, and deserve to be taken advantage of. This is because of Orwell’s aristocratic chavuanism at play. He justifies logically why the animals let the pigs get worse and worse by explaining that the animals are incapable of understanding anything. The historical misrepresentation of the Bolsheviks is secondary to that central thesis, actually.
Giving it 2/5 because they missed that the manifesto is an allegorical guide to proper farm animal handling. So clueless
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I don’t know how a short story that gets lost trying to figure out it’s own metaphor in the middle can possibly a 5/5
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Even if Animal Farm was completely accurate, the communist manifesto was written almost 100 years prior. If only someone suggested that we look into the historical context to understand things!
The Communist Manifesto features actual history, to boot, versus a metaphor for children. So obviously the liberal can only absorb information from the one that’s fictional.
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Doesn’t know what facetious means but
Then praises bookshop for ‘humour’ which actually is facetious
I’m sure they know, it makes sense. They thought Marx and Engels were writing a bit of satire, or at least hoped.
I mean this in three sense that it makes sense as a joke a dumb shit liberal who’s not read a word of political or economic theory would make. It’s the comedian’s trick, telling a bs story that even if the audience knows it’s bs doesn’t detract from the joke. Fitting too, since much like most reactionary western comics, they’re both illiterate and unfunny.
It’s always funny to me that people use animal farm as a reason why communism and the soviet union was bad and not historical facts (as warped as they are). Like cmon, that book is for indoctrinating children, no adult should be referencing it.
The adults referencing it are the children who were indoctrinated by it, after they grew up
I reread it and came away with deeper insight (what any child who hasn’t even read the book could tell you)
Calling the manifesto a book is the most obvious giveaway that you’ve never read it. It’s like the communist version of the ordering beers scene from inglorious basterds. If you call the manifesto a book, I know you’re lying.
I wonder if the review would also go down to 2/5 if they knew Orwell was a militant socialist. Even if he wasn’t a great one.
To be clear, the Anarchists fighting alongside Orwell questioned why he wasn’t “on the other side.”
“Orwell had no understanding of the world-wide significance of the struggle in Spain, he knew little of the national efforts of the Popular Front government to achieve a united front against fascism, he had never seen the Republican flag, he did not agree with the actions of the POUM — he took a rifle in the role of an outsider, a journalist looking for experiences to figure in a future book.” — Bill Alexander, commander of the British Battalion of the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War, in George Orwell and Spain (1984)
lmao basically a war tourist then?
Absolutely, dude was awful. He would intentionally live in impoverished communities as a tourist as well, fuel for his books, all while maintaining a chauvanistic attitude and feeling himself superior.
The manifesto has barely any dialogue or sex scenes. 2/5
Reviews written by twelve year olds
Never had to read animal farm in school, not gonna read it as an adult.
Communist manifesto isn’t that great, I’ll agree with that. More of a pamphlet for peasants than a book, though
