Animal Farm & U.S.

indaschaenen / February 11, 2017 / Leave a comment / Blog

I’ve taught George Orwell’s Animal Farm to 7th & 8th graders for the last two years. In 2015, we read the book as an ominous warning. Last fall, its plot hit even closer to home.

Today, journalists note a current surge in the reading of dystopian fiction. Here’s the complete text of Animal Farm, written in 1945.

I’m also including a few references to the parallels between our current political landscape and Orwell’s fictional unfolding of totalitarian governance: Animal Farm & U.S.

Please feel free to submit additional parallels. The essential question is this:

Who might have done what so that things would have gone differently after Chapter 6?

animal_farm

ANIMAL FARM PLOT EVENT	PAGE
Expulsion of visionary leader	page 21
Role of lackey spokesperson in twisting public’s understanding	page 21
Presentation of “alternative facts” (lies spread as facts )	pages 22-23
Relationship between literacy and acceptance of “alternative facts”	page 26
Sowing fear to justify cronyism, nepotism, and oppression	pages 27 & 31
Scapegoating an imaginary enemy to instill fear & compel hard labor	page 28
Leader sequestered and protected by militarized personnel, thereby cut off from hungry, suffering, laboring populace	page 30
Resistance & protest quashed by criminalization & execution	page 30
Coerced false confessions	page 33
Sham election of leader	page 45
Final betrayal of laborers by sham leader	pages 46-47
“Alternative facts” of betrayal disseminated and believed	page 48
The End	page 50 “As for the others, their life, so far as they knew, was as it had always been. They were generally hungry, they slept on straw, they drank from the pool, they labored in the fields; in winter they were troubled by the cold, and in summer by the flies. Sometimes the older ones among them racked their dim memories and tried to determine whether in the early days of the Rebellion, when Jones’s expulsion was still recent, things had been better or worse than now. They could not remember. There was nothing with which they could compare their present lives: they had nothing to go upon except Squealer’s lists of figures, which invariably demonstrated that everything was getting better and better. The animals found the problem insoluble; in any case, they had little time for speculating on such things now.” “All Animals Are Equal, But Some Animals Are More Equal Than Others”