Essay: Animal Farm uses satire to convey a deeper message about Russian communism & Stalinism

Animal Farm is a fable that uses satire to convey a deeper and more relevant underlying message about Russian communism and Stalinism. This animal allegory written by George Orwell challenges the beliefs and exposes events in the Russian revolution and the cycle of communism. By using animals, he is able to portray this piece of writing as an innocent story but a strong political view and perspective lie behind it. He thinks that communism is just a fantasy in which ideally individuals can accomplish an uncouth society through transformations. Also, he thinks this perfect world is destined to disappointment since human instinct is just greedy and falls for temptations to easily. It is likely that the desire for control felt by people who are cleverer and more skilful than the others will over come their conscious and turn them into power hungry dictators which are the opposite of what communism is. In this piece, I will compare George Orwell’s novel animal farm with a satirical cartoon and discuss how they use satire to communicate ideas
Through out the book, you are able to to see how ignorant some of the animals are to the power that they hold. The same is shown in the image by the cartoonist. Satire is shown through the ignorance of the animals in the farm. They are ignorant of the power that they hold and the impact that they have on who they think actually has all the power. What they don’t understand is that the only reason that Napoleon is in power is because the rest of the animals are keeping him in power. Napoleon knows that this is the case and to stop people questioning his decisions he puts an end to the council meetings and states that “in future, all questions relating to the working of the farm would be settled by a special committee of pigs, presided over by himself. These would meet in private and afterwards communicate their decisions to the others.” This is a great example of satire through out the book. Orwell uses actual events that happened in Russian communism and shows that some animals think they are more equal than other animals and think that they should have the power when animal farm and communism is about equality and sharing the wealth amongst the citizens. The cartoonist also uses ignorance to show satire in his cartoon. Because the only reason that the man giving a speech is there is because he has the people on the other end supporting him and holding the beam up. Those people are also ignorant of the power that they have and think that they only play a minor role in whatever is going on but that person in power is only in power because the people are keeping him there.
Another way satire is shown in both the cartoon and in Animal Farm is that a lot of the time the people just follow the crowd and even though they know they could and should make a change they just stay with the crowd. In the cartoon you can see that they are all in neat lines they all wear the same clothes and have a long nose. What I take from this is that the people are all wearing the same clothes and are in neat straight lines are just followers who go along with the crowd and who are oblivious to what is actually going on. The long noses could be trying to show that the person with the biggest nose which is the man in power who is talking is telling them lies. The rest of them who have large noses as well shows that they believe the lies and pass them on and they don’t really question what they are told. In animal farm. In the book, many of the animals just go along with what Napoleon says because he is the leader in an “equal society”. They don’t question his decisions because partly because of fear and partly because it would be too much effort. The eventually leads the farm and the animals to a worse than when the humans were in charge. A key character in the book is Boxer who is a hard working horse with little intelligence. Boxer is meant to represent the low class working people in Russian communism. He just does what he is told and tries to think things through but he doesn’t understand it. His motto becomes “Napoleon is always right”. This shows that he is just going along with what ever he is told because he doesn’t understand what is actually happening and it is his way of reassuring himself.
I think that both the cartoon and animal farm utilize satire really well to communicate social ideas and issues. By comparing both sources it is easy to see how in a way they are similar in how people perceive power and that a lot of the time they don’t understand their role in those situations.