View attachment 379108
Cover to
Animal Farm, by Eric Blair; this version is a new independently-published British edition criticizing Siberian leader Vladimir Putin's authoritarian leanings and continued failures to bring British and American standards of Syndicalist reform to East Russia.
The book begins with the animals of Manor Farm suffering under the tyrannical and incompetent rule of Farmer Jones, a belligerent buffoon who works the animals to the bone in a contest of profit with a nearby farm. After the farmer fails to feed them one morning, the animals rise up, driving the farmer away after a brief battle, and set about building a new society, called Animal Farm. Initially led by Old Major, a sickly but kindly old pig, the farm suffers great challenges in its attempt to become independent, but the courage and proletarian spirit of the animals keeps it going.
Old Major dies as winter begins, and two pigs, Snowball and Napoleon, announce their candidacy for Farm-Leader. Snowball, a proponent of allowing each animal species to work as best they can with equal standing, wins, while Napoleon, who advocates for centralized control under a ruling body of pigs, fumes. Initially, Snowball's regime seems to be going well, but then the neighboring farm, seeking to destroy Animal Farm's revolution and re-subjugate them beneath human rule, attacks.
The animals, caught by surprise, fight bravely, but the treacherous Napoleon uses a team of attack dogs he'd trained to wound and imprison Snowball in the confusion and take control, framing Snowball as a traitor who allegedly let the humans in. Setting his cronies in positions of power, he declares himself Grand Protector of the farm and begins installing a totalitarian regime. His lackey Squealer makes selective edits to the laws of Animal Farm, and Napoleon forces the animals to work for the pigs' profit while feasting in the farmer's old house.
The animals are terrified of the dogs, and so keep their heads down to avoid notice, but Napoleon's tyranny grows until it inspires a protest from the chickens when Napoleon tries to take their eggs to sell to a Human trader. The chickens are beaten and several executed for their rebellion, and Napoleon infamously declares
All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others--a perversion of the Animal Farm law
All animals are equal.
Deciding that enough is enough, the animals unite against Napoleon, and with the help of heroic horse Boxer, old sheep dog Benjamin (who had joined the revolution after being wounded in a clash with the nearby farm's dogs when Jones insisted on grazing his sheep on the other farmer's land), overthrow Napoleon and feed him to his own dogs. Snowball is reinstalled as leader, but Animal Farm's Syndicalist-esque system has been deeply shaken.
Animal Farm is perhaps Eric Blair's most subtle work, more so than his propagandistic
1984 (an optimistic fantasy about a then-future 1984 where socialism has spread across the planet, war is a distant memory, and all of Earth has been united beneath a federation of labor unions that stand for the interests of all humanity) and
The Last Man in Europe (a dystopian piece about a totalitarian "Airstrip One", explicitly dedicated "to Mr. Oswald Mosley, 500 Satan's Halls Way, Hell"), but remains a very blatant commentary on Mosley's attempted coup and a warning against allowing totalitarian regimes to flourish under the guise of helping the people. Some commentators have also likened it to Savinkov's rise in Russia, but Blair himself rejected that analysis, saying that "National-Populism's vileness is self-evident".
Blair himself was one of the Union of Britain's most popular early authors. A volunteer in the Spanish Civil War and later soldier in the Second Weltkrieg, Blair was a fierce advocate of "exporting the Revolution", and had a noted falling-out with Annie Kenney at the 1936 Trade Union Congress as a result of this. Blair turned on Oswald Mosley in rage during the Maximist leader's attempted coup, and wrote propaganda for Horner's faction before T.E. Lawrence kicked Mosley's ass and locked him up. The next two books Blair wrote were basically middle fingers to Mosley and anyone who thought he wasn't a total bastard.
Blair would go on to serve on the German, Amero-Canadian, and East Russian fronts of the chaotic and brutal Second Weltkrieg. Contracting pneumonia in Russia, the always somewhat illness-prone Blair went down hard, and died with a high fever before he could be evacuated to America or Britain. He was given a brief state funeral, and memorialized in British newspapers as a hero of the Revolution.
Blair is still considered a seminal Socialist author by much of the Internationale, but his books are considered somewhat sophomoric, biased, and unsubtle by most scholars. Although
Animal Farm is still read in many Syndicalist classrooms,
1984 is mostly forgotten and
The Last Man in Europe is widely considered Blair's worst work due to its over-the-top dystopia (where "Miniluv" tortures people, "Minipax" is responsible for an endless war, "Minitrue" spreads lies, and "Miniplenty" intentionally starves the people while Legally Not Mosley rules as supreme dictator). Recently, however, some scholars have championed Blair as an underappreciated and clever author, and wonder what the world would have looked like if the Union of Britain had indeed fallen to Totalism, and Syndicalism as the dominant socialist ideology had failed in favor of something like Mosley's vile creed or the belligerent, authoritarian ideas of failed Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin.