By George, He Got It! or: George Orwell Explains It for Us.

"How did we ever grasp the true nature of the politics of uplift before Orwell explained it so precisely?" writes author Russell Baker in his 1996 preface to the Signet edition of Animal Farm. 

Sixty years after his death, George Orwell, the pen name for Eric Arthur Blair (1903-50), still exerts a powerful influence on popular culture.  The term "Orwellian," along with many of his word plays, have become part of our idiom.  "Orwellian" itself became a catchphrase for any sort of brutal social circumstances or events antithetical to a free society.  

When he travelled to Spain in 1937 to fight on the side of the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War, he became part of a Trotskyist contingent.  This was at a time when Leon Trotsky's association with the Russian Revolution was being wiped out by the Stalinists.  (Stalin was supposedly supporting a democratic Spanish government.) 

Many of Orwell's cohorts were shot and killed; others were imprisoned for lengthy amounts of time or quietly disappeared.   "This narrow escape from the long reach of Moscow-style politics left him alarmed about the gullibility of other well-meaning, decent people in Western Europe.  He thought too many decent people in the Western democracies had succumbed to a dangerously romantic view of the Russian Revolution that blinded them to Soviet reality," Baker writes. 

August of 1941 found Orwell doing his part toward the war effort by taking on a full-time position with the BBC's Eastern Service, supervising cultural broadcasts to India to counter Nazi propaganda.  He did this until resigning in September 1943 in order to focus writing on Animal Farm.  At this time,  the USA and Britain were under the spell of Stalin's Soviet Union.  Any form of criticism was largely unheard and unheeded as he found when, with great difficulty, he sought a publisher for the book. 

In 1943 at the height of World War II, British and American socialists (idealizers of the 1917 Russian Revolution) lauded the bravery of the Red army as well as the Soviet rank-and-file.  Many British conservatives themselves were pro-Soviet!  Thus, in those days of fighting the Nazi menace, any sort of anti-Soviet criticism was verboten.  Several publishers thought Animal Farm to be an attack on the Soviet regime, then a critical ally of the USA and Britain.  "It was as though the West had willingly put on blinders," writes Baker. 

Animal Farm finally found publishers Secker and Warburg, and first made its appearance in Britain on August 17, 1945, followed by publication in the US one year later on August 26, 1946.  It was George Orwell's first popular success, and made him known worldwide, hitting a distinct chord in the post-war world. 

Orwell retained a lifelong belief in British or democratic socialism.  Animal Farm, he insisted, was written for the democratic West as a cautionary tale.  Russell Baker concludes that Orwell  helps us comprehend why a previous generation was willing to expend so much of their own comfort and well-being, and take enormous chances - at their own peril - to hold back the oppressive forces of totalitarianism. 

"In Animal Farm Orwell left us a lesson about the human contribution to political terror that will always be as up-to-date as next year's election." 

~~ Allegory?
~~~ Fable?
or
~~~~~ "Fairy Story," as Orwell himself called it.  Will our generation take those risks to fend off the internal and external threats to our freedoms?