Animal Farm: How do the character's in George Orwell's book relate to current events since 2000?

Essay by NoahKUniversity, Bachelor'sA+, December 2004

download word file, 3 pages 4.0

Like I always say, "It's not homework unless it's due the next day". I read Animal Farm for the first time last week over a period of two hours in a Starbucks Coffee shop. I must say George Orwell kept me extremely intrigued during that time. I knew that he was writing a satire about Socialism, Marx, Stalin, Trotsky, and the entire Russian Revolution, but even so I could not help myself from comparing the story in Animal Farm to current events that are happening in my own time. I am always somewhat amazed when an author can write a story that has an inferred message which can be applied to almost every aspect of life, not just whatever historical context the book was originally written for. In this paper I will discuss how the various animals relate to people and events that have happened in recent years, which is why I believed we were assigned to read this book in the first place.

Animal Farm could be used as a great tool to criticize our President, George W. Bush. The first major parallel was when the Animalism laws were written down on the barn wall. This reminded me somewhat of the recent Patriot Act that was passed back in 2001. Not many people in congress understood exactly what they were passing, but they were so gung-ho to do something about 9/11, or in the case of Animal Farm, the enthusiasm left over from the liberation of the farm from Mr. Jones, that they hurried and passed the bill without thoroughly going over all the details, and how words could be twisted in the future.

Later when some of the animals could not remember what was written on the wall, one of the leaders, the pig Napoleon taught...