A version of this article was published in 2018.
Rebelion on the farm, one of the most popular classics of 20th century literature, the book that half of the Anglo-Saxon tweens of the last 70 years have been reading is not exactly what we had been told. As far as the school commentary went, it is about a satirical fable that warns us of the corruption to which power leads. The pigs in this tale manage to expel the oppressive men from the animal enclosure only to, little by little, end up walking on two legs.
The group is forced to abandon the dream of an egalitarian community and allow pig dominance over chickens, horses or sheep under the dogma “all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.” Same dog with different collar.
The political metaphor was obvious to readers of 1945, as well as to anyone who has approached afterwards with a modicum of knowledge of the context of the work. It’s about a anti-Stalinist essay, a psychological unfolding of the process of forced revolution that the Russian leader imposed on his population. But George Orwell, writer of the novel, did not forget to point out both fronts: for the farm the government of the communists was as tyrant as that of the capitalists, represented in the distant figure of Mr. Jones.
Depending on whether we want to make a pessimistic or optimistic reading, we can both reach the conclusion that the common people will never find justice or that they must fully commit to a revolution, this time without being carried away by the siren songs of moral leaders. corrupt like Stalin.
We move forward in time nine years. Orwell has died and someone is adapting his story to the big screen. An animated movie that will be seen by thousands, if not millions of children. The Halas and Batchelor company was born in London in 1940 to supply all the production of war propaganda in Great Britain, and years later the North American director Louis de Rochemont contacted them. He tells them he has the rights to Orwell’s play and a very advanced idea for the script.
As the journalist Frances Stonor Saunders would explain for her book The CIA and the Cultural Cold War, and the agency itself would also confirm, Louis de Rochemont acted as a front for the US intelligence agency. They were the real producers of the film. Halas and Batchelor featured $ 300,000 budget and 80 animators under his charge to carry out the work, although the script included some tweaks with respect to the original work of the writer.
First and foremost, in the new animated version the regime of the pig Napoleon (Stalin’s allegory) was not to be the same as that of humans, but “worse and more cynical.” Second, Snowball, the pig who fought Napoleon and who represented Trotskyist values, it should not seem as fair and equitable as in the novel. If Snowball seemed “intelligent, dynamic and courageous” in the original text, he must now be a “fanatical intellectual whose plans, had they been carried out, would have led to a disaster no less than that which the animals came to under Napoleon. “.
The animators accepted the suggestions and all this is reflected in the final film.
The cultural Cold War, demonizing Stalin
Because yes, the Cold War was also fought in the cultural field. Orwell and his film thus became part of the cultural gear with which the United States showed itself to the world as a capitalist axis but open to ideas, indirectly promoting a mass of left-wing but democratic and anti-communist intellectuals (in specific episodes there were Nabokov or Hannah Harendt), valid for capitalist ideology.
In the tense ’50s, when both sides were still balanced, Americans feared that communism would captivate Europeans, as in Italy or especially in France, where a part of the intellectuals and young people sympathized with the socialist regime and there was a more or less equidistant look with the systems on both sides of the curtain. In the 1970s, the American country itself published papers that explained its financial program for events such as the Congress for the Freedom of Culture, from Encounter magazine, or its Spanish version, Cuadernos para la Libertad de la Cultura.
Other examples of this North American propaganda was the influence of the CIA at the time of incorporating black secondary in its films, since a typical reproach of communism was to speak of the racism of the so-called country of freedom. For this same reason, Louis Armstrong’s tours throughout the old continent were also economically promoted.
Orwell, whose real name was Eric Blair, was the son of British aristocrats, and in his youth he enlisted in the imperial police, leading to his service in Burma. Seeing the horrors of British imperialism, he would begin to flirt with socialist ideas. Tribute to Catalonia is the result of the years he was alongside anarchists and republicans fighting against Francoism, although the cocktail of ideological aspects was enormous, he felt close to Leninist and especially Trotskyist positions.
Over the years, and with the Stalinist drift, he ideologically distanced himself from Russia, but not from the leftist or at least reformist gaze. Orwell is also the writer of 1984, work after Rebellion on the Farm, and where Big Brother was the Papa State that sees everything and creates Ministries of Truth or doublethink, there may be the face of Stalin, but also of any other authoritarian state that abuses its power to control citizens.
Paradoxes of life, Orwell also betrayed himself, or did something close to this, moments before his death in 1950. Timothy Garton Ash, director of the Center for European Studies at Oxford, tells how Orwell betrayed a good handful of his companions left-wing on a blacklist of “38 crypto-communists” that would end up in the hands of the formation Research Department (IRD), a semi-secret section that the Foreign Office and part of the US propaganda system. The closest hypothesis is that Orwell was in love with a left-wing woman under the command of the IRD who asked the writer to help him fight against the Stalinist propaganda launched by the Soviet Cominform.
We will never really know why he wrote it, but the fact is that he identified 38 personalities, including Charlie Chaplin or the historian EH Carr, who seemed worthy of vigilance for their ideas. Only a year away from when he wrote his magnum opus against intolerance, he himself helped fight against that freedom of thought and support an all-powerful vigilante state.
What is clear is, after all these years, who has won.