"We're All Animals, Really"

Animal Farm is such a convincing "fairytale," that sometimes it's difficult to remember that it's also a story intended to reveal George Orwell's feelings about politics, socialism, society, and humanity as a whole. Two different points seem to be strongly made through the book: the way power can corrupt people and the willingness of the weak and desperate to acquiesce to the manipulations of society and government.

Orwell demonstrates how he feels about the seductive lure of power and the way it corrupts throughout the entire book, but his point hits home in the form of the character Napoleon the pig. When Snowball introduces his plans for the windmill, Napoleon sees an opportunity and decides to grasp it, unknowingly taking the first step down the path of what will become his deadly addiction to power. The most obvious scene in the book where Napoleon displays an utterly wrong (and disturbingly familiar) misuse of his power is in Chapter Seven when four of the most rebellious pigs are somehow persuaded into lying about Snowball and Napoleon order them viciously murdered, along with "the three hens who had been the ringleaders of the attempted rebellion over the eggs," "a goose (who) secreted six ears of corn," "a sheep (who) urinated in the drinking pool," and "two other sheep (who) murdered an old ram, an especially devoted follower of Napoleon." The slaughter (and the way it is done – publicly) suggests Orwell is building up an event so exaggerated in its brutality that it clearly depicts what power hungry people can be like when provoked.

In the direst of situations, it is easily understood that those being hurt are willing to turn a blind eye toward the evils of their highers. George Orwell seemed to think that this was an important part of humanity's behavior and depicted it through the characters of Animal Farm. Not just one character, though, but all of them – all of the animals were willing to listen, to be persuaded by Squealer in the end. Whatever it took to lesson their suffering, from willingly rewriting their own memories to fit whatever Napoleon had to say of Snowball's "bravery at the Battle of the Cowshed" in Chapter Seven to allowing Napoleon to get away with altering the very Seven Commandments of Animalism to fit his own agenda.

In conclusion, George Orwell obviously did use this book to convey his feelings on the human race, and his feelings were this: while the animals in Animal Farm may have done some very horrific things, in the end…aren't we all animals, really?