Friday, March 16, 2012

What are five passages from Animal Farm that make it questionable in terms of content appropriateness (banned in Soviet Countries) with specific chapter references?

Animal Farm is a 1945 work by George Orwell that critically satirizes the Russian Revolution by placing it in the setting of a farm.
Several passages in the book make particularly pointed jibes at the life and history of the Soviet Union and make it questionable as a literary work appropriate for cultivating revolutionary solidarity in a communist state.
Periodically, throughout the story, mention of the anthem Beasts of England is made, to increasingly satirical effect, as in Part III:

The Meeting always ended with the singing of Beasts of England, and the afternoon was given up to recreation.

This is intended to lampoon the The Internationale.
Also, in Part III, democratic centralism is criticized as producing the same type of inequality that it seeks to obliterate.

The animals had assumed as a matter of course that these would be shared out equally; one day, however, the order went forth that all the windfalls were to be collected and brought to the harness−room for the use of the pigs. At this some of the other animals murmured, but it was no use.

When Boxer accidentally kills the stable boy during the repulse of the human counter-attack, Snowball reveals a lack of remorse, with the robotic regurgitation of a slogan.

"No sentimentality, comrade!" cried Snowball from whose wounds the blood was still dripping. "War is war. The only good human being is a dead one."

When Mollie defects to Foxwood it is noted that "None of the animals ever mentioned Mollie again." This is similar to the rewriting of history to eliminate those found guilty of ideological apostasy that occurred during the Stalinist era in the USSR.
As the animals prepare for a second human attack, discussions about the farm's defenses mirror the disagreement between Stalin's concept of "socialism in one country" and Trotsky's idea of "permanent revolution" which argued that the international could not survive in a capitalist world and non-capitalist states must be made communist.

As usual, Snowball and Napoleon were in disagreement. According to Napoleon, what the animals must do was to procure firearms and train themselves in the use of them. According to Snowball, they must send out more and more pigeons and stir up rebellion among the animals on the other farms. The one argued that if they could not defend themselves they were bound to be conquered, the other argued that if rebellions happened everywhere they would have no need to defend themselves.
https://pen.org/animal-farm-banned-by-the-soviets-promoted-by-the-cia/

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