Orwell’s Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four: Critiques of Stalinism
`from the left’?
by Alex Miller
This essay is the result of a re-reading of George Orwell’s two most
famous novels. Both Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four have acquired
the status of textbooks, and are routinely used in schools to
demonstrate to children the inherent dangers of social revolution. It
is time for a reappraisal.
The ``Centenary Edition’’ of George Orwell’s Animal Farm contains a
preface written by Orwell for the first edition (Secker and Warburg,
1945) but never published, together with a preface that he wrote
specially for a translation for displaced Ukrainians living under
British and US administration after World War II.
If we are to take Orwell at his word in the first of these prefaces,
Animal Farm is intended as a critique of the Stalinist Soviet regime
``from the left’’. He explicitly dissociates himself from conservative
critiques, which he describes as ``manifestly dishonest, out of date,
and actuated by sordid motives’’.
Full: http://links.org.au/node/379
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