A review by beabaptistaa
Animal Farm by George Orwell

challenging dark inspiring reflective sad tense fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

“ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL BUT SOME ANIMALS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS.”— Animal Farm

“These people don't see that if you encourage totalitarian methods, the time may come when they will be used against you instead of for you. Make a habit of imprisoning Fascists without trial, and perhaps the process won't stop at Fascists.” — Afterward

Qualquer pessoa com mais de 18 anos devia ler este livro antes de ir votar. Uma pequena fábula inspirada em factos reais, sobre a instrumentalização de ideais políticos. Não achei a história em si aborrecida, mas também não achei surpreendente. O poder deste livro está naquilo que nos faz pensar no final da leitura.

Quero deixar o aviso que, se por um lado acho que devia ser leitura obrigatória, por outro acho muito perigoso que existam edições sem os prefácios adicionados pelo autor mais tarde, ou pelo menos algum contexto sobre a sua vida pessoal. 

 “To experience all this was a valuable object lesson: it taught me how easily totalitarian propaganda can control the opinion of enlightened people in democratic countries.” 

Sinto que os ideias políticos do leitor influenciam bastante a forma como é possível interpretar a crítica que faz, comprovando que realmente os extremos se tocam. Eu já sabia que Orwell se identificava mais à esquerda, como eu, portanto assumi que o livro representava os horrores de uma sociedade fascista, contudo não podia estar mais enganada. Segundo a informação final, “Animal Farm” reconta a revolução vivida na União Soviétiva, onde o porco Old Major representa Karl Marx, o primeiro revolucionário que morre antes do início da revolução, Snowball representa Leon Trotsky e Napoleon representa Stalin, no início dois camaradas (porcos/comunistas) que acabam por se tornar inimigos. 

“We are led to believe he may have been a better alternative to Napoleon but there again he might not. Once a pig always a pig.” 

George Orwell lutou na guerra civil espanhola contra a visão fascista de Francisco Franco, porém, (daquilo que percebi) teve que fugir devido ao perigo que enfrentou, não pelo inimigo à direita, mas pelos comunistas que defendiam o pensamento de Lenin e exigiam a lealdade máxima dos seus militares ao seu líder e, quem não o demonstrasse, seria considerado traidor. Apesar de ser anti-fascista Orwell não se identificava com esta ideologia, muito menos com o seu criador, escolhendo abandonar Espanha para regressar a Inglaterra. 

“Orwell had gone to Spain eager to kill fascists. He left Spain on the run from Communists who wanted to kill him. Sometimes you have to look twice at what you believe in.” 

Durante a Segunda Guerra Mundial, a União Soviética de Stalin foi um dos principais aliados da Grã Bretanha na luta contra o Fascismo de Hitler na Alemanha. Apesar da situação miserável que o povo soviético vivia, não era considerado correto criticar esta potência, que apesar de ter um inimigo em comum, vivia uma época de ditadura severa. Orwell teve então bastantes dificuldades em convencer as editoras a publicarem o seu livro "Animal Farm" durante este período, uma vez que foi considerado demasiado controverso. 

“For all I know, by the time this book is published my view of the Soviet régime may be the generally-accepted one. But what use would that be in itself? To exchange one orthodoxy for another is not necessarily an advance. The enemy is the gramophone mind, whether or not one agrees with the record that is being played at the moment.” 

Depois desta pequena aula de história (que pode ter algumas lacunas, por favor confirmem melhor os detalhes) deixo algumas das minhas quotes preferidas da história e do afterward:

Animal Farm: ─────── ☽ •

"No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal. He would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be?”

“Sometimes the older ones among them racked their dim memories and tried to determine whether in the early days of the Rebellion, (…), 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, (…) everything was getting better and better."

“No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again: but already it was impossible to say which was which.”

Afterward: ─────── ☽ •

“Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban.

“The British press is extremely centralized, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics. But the same kind of veiled censorship also operates in books and periodicals, as well as in plays, films and radio.”

“It is important to distinguish between the kind of censorship that the English literary intelligentsia voluntarily impose upon themselves, and the censorship that can sometimes be enforced by pressure groups. Notoriously, certain topics cannot be discussed because of vested interests. (…) You could, indeed, publish anti-Russian books, but to do so was to make sure of being ignored or misrepresented by nearly the whole of the highbrow press.”

“Naturally, those reviewers who understand the art of denigration will not attack it on political grounds but on literary ones. They will say that it is a dull, silly book and a disgraceful waste of paper. This may well be true, but it is obviously not the whole of the story. One does not say that a book ought not to have been published' merely because it is a bad book. After all, acres of rubbish are printed daily and no one bothers.”

"Is every opinion, however unpopular - however foolish, even - entitled to a hearing?
Put it in that form and nearly any English intellectual will feel that he ought to say 'Yes. But give it a concrete shape, and ask, 'How about an attack on Stalin? Is that entitled to a hearing?', and the answer more often than not will be 'No’.”

"Now, when one demands liberty of speech and of the press, one is not demanding absolute liberty. There always must be, or at any rate there always will be, some degree of censorship, so long as organized societies endure. But freedom, as Rosa Luxembourg said, is "freedom for the other fellow.”

“The same principle is contained in the famous words of Voltaire:I detest what you say; I will defend to the death your right to say it”. (…) means anything at all, it means that everyone shall have the right to say and to print what he believes to be the truth, provided only that it does not harm the rest of the community in some quite unmistakable way.”

“(…) an illusion, there is now a widespread tendency to argue that one can only defend democracy by totalitarian methods. If one loves democracy, the argument runs, one must crush its enemies by no matter what means. And who are its enemies? It always appears that they are not only those who attack it openly and consciously, but those who objectively endanger it by spreading mistaken doctrines. In other words, defending democracy involves destroying all independence of thought.”

"Tolerance and decency are deeply rooted in England, but they are not indestructible, and they have to be kept alive partly by conscious effort. The result of preaching totalitarian doctrines is to weaken the instinct by means of which free peoples know what is or is not dangerous.”

“Up to 1930 I did not on the whole look upon myself as a Socialist. In fact I had as yet no clearly defined political views. I became pro-Socialist more out of disgust with the way the poorer section of the industrial workers were oppressed and neglected than out of any theoretical admiration for a planned society.”

“I would not condemn Stalin and his associates merely for their barbaric and undemocratic methods. It is quite possible that, even with the best intentions, they could not have acted otherwise under the conditions prevailing there.”

"“Indeed, in my opinion, nothing has contributed so much to the corruption of the original idea of Socialism as the belief that Russia is a Socialist country and that every act of its rulers must be excused, if not imitated.”

"Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly and indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it . . . Animal Farm was the first book in which I tried, with full consciousness of what I was doing, to fuse political purpose with artistic purpose into one whole.”

Notas: ─────── ☽ •

“(…) he did not want to see the Soviet Union destroyed, 'so long as people believe in it'. It was the believing in it that Orwell wanted to correct, not the course of Russian history.”

"Thus, insofar as the Soviet Union was seen as the 'dynamo of world Socialism' (his words) it had to be defended,) or 'the working class everywhere would lose heart. At the same time, and in exactly the same way, insofar as the Soviet Union was seen as the dynamo of world socialism, it had to be attacked, or people would never be able to see it for what it really was.”

“Stalinism has gone but there are a lot of messages out there and our world is not short of lies being peddled as truths, of icons being presented as arguments, of barbarism masquerading as freedom. Orwell once said that the hardest thing of all is to see what is in front of your nose.”

✧˖°˖ boas leituras ! ─────── ☾•