Themes and Significance

[jeffzhou]

There is no question that Animal Farm is about totalitarian governments like communist countries. It's also about human desires for power with ugly politics. Power without check is a great threat to human freedom, and even life. Although written in 1945, I find it quite identitically allures to the situations in China under Mao regime in the 1950s through mid 1970s. The killer weapons Napoleon has to ascend himself to ultimate power are the puppy dogs and Squealer the persuasive pig. No wonder, the communists call their journalists mouthpieces. Look around yourself, if you see a totalitarian leader in your group, he very likely has a talking mouth around him arguing on his behalf. To ensure you're not misled, you need to find a seemingly persuasive person to argue against his propoganda. That's where a contrarian role lies. We need a balance of power and mouth organ.

[jeffzhou]

To continue this discussion, I find some symptoms for dirty politics at play: 1) cutting off of information flow in the organization, especially the flow from his subordinates to his supevisors so that he can manipulate information; 2) snatching others' achievement for his own glory; 3) when his wrong decisions lead the organization astray into trouble, he either finds a scapegoat or use a false enemy to divert people's attention; 4) the player of dirty politics usually has a split personality, high-sounding and presentable in the faces of people but dirty and underhand plotting behind; 5) false vacant promises instead of real solid visions; 6) bullying, even to the extreme of executing, those daring enough to challenge him; 7) corrupt life.