“They had come to a time when no one dared speak his mind, when fierce, growling dogs roamed everywhere, and when you had to watch your comrades torn to pieces after confessing to shocking crimes.” -Animal Farm (1945)
It was reported recently that Hollywood is making a new animated version of George Orwell’s classic Animal Farm, directed by and starring Andy “Gollum” Serkis.
The book is an explicit allegory of the 1917 Russian Revolution. Following a pig named Napoleon’s flag of equality, talking barnyard animals overthrow their human master under, only for “Comrade” Napoleon to quickly become an even worse dictator. Perhaps the most famous quote from the book is Napoleon’s justification that, “All Animals Are Equal. But Some Animals Are More Equal Than Others.”
Animal Farm is frequently paired with Orwell’s more influential 1984, so much so that when it was first adapted in 1954, the filmmakers coined the term “Pig Brother is watching you.”
While details about Serkis’s adaptation are still largely unknown, he has promised to “update” the material for the modern era. Quote:
“I mean, look around the world, what's happening, you can see how eternally relevant that book is still. But the ways and the language of telling that story have changed. And the targets, the characters that are being satirized are not Stalin and Trotsky and all of those people, they are — I'm not going to say who.”
Eventually Serkis will of course, but those of us paying attention figure the targets will not be the actual communists among us today. The mindless pawn who wrote the afore-hyperlinked SlashFilm article mentions “totalitarian threats as pervasive and ruthless as Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and the Republican Party of the United States.” Yes, it shows an astute understanding of modern events to lump together parties who have respectively 1) invaded a foreign country, 2) put their own citizens in actual concentration camps, and 3) sent out mean tweets.
There’s every reason to update Animal Farm, but no intellectually honest way to update the villains as anything other than the woke.
For whatever reason, many leftists in academia or otherwise look the other way at communism’s century of butchery, insisting they’re Marxists as a sign of moral purity. Bernie Sanders loves the Soviet Union, Jen Psaki owns a cute, pink hammer-and-sickle hat, and the Communist Party votes lockstep with Democrats now.
So-called progressives are following the communist playbook since they’ve (deep breath):
- Weaponized federal law enforcement
- Advocated street-level political violence
- Threatened the rights to free speech and self defense
- Fomented tribalistic hatred with vague threats of “equity”
- Taken millions in bribes from the literal Chinese Communist Party
- Polluted the education system with communist dogma to separate children from their parents
See, this is the fundamental difference between progressives and conservatives right now. Everything we do is a slippery slope to some imagined totalitarian horror … but when we point at their own press releases, we’re conspiracy theorists.
Indeed, the relevance of cautionary tales about communism and the current subversion of Western Civilization are so horrifyingly obvious that during the “pandemic,” 1984 topped Amazon’s best-sellers list.
Orwell was hardly conservative, but his politics were on the spectrum of Western values. He understood the inarguable evil of communism, comparable to the way once-liberal darling Bill Maher has started warning his viewers about the threat of impending violent, woke purges unless some dramatic changes take place.
Stalin’s revolution was responsible for somewhere between 9 million and 60 million deaths. There’s a lot more consensus on the figure of 45 million killed by Mao Zedong’s communist revolution. When your value system’s death toll is in the tens of millions it doesn’t really matter at that point, but it does prove the Chinese are better record keepers than the Russians.
(Oops, that’s a stereotype. Someone send me to the gulag implicit bias training.)
We definitely live in a time where reasonable people dare not speak their minds, fierce, growling dogs roam everywhere, and our friends are torn to pieces – figuratively, for now – after public confessions. But maybe this paranoia will be proven wrong, and Serkis will surprise us all. Maybe Napole-Obama will introduce his own satirical version of Critical Pig Theory, complaining about people who’ve “made enough money” while buying $12 million mansions.
Though it’s more likely that it’s followed up by a remake of 1984, with a gender-swapped Big Sister.