George Orwell’s slim little novel, Animal Farm, has been a staple of American schools and culture since it was published.

Animal Farm, a political allegory by George Orwell,1 remains one of the most widely read and influential books in our culture, in part because it is a staple of the high-school English class. Animal Farm was written for a specific time and place: expressly as an allegory for the formation of the Soviet Union. And yet, the novel has captured our cultural imagination far beyond that pocket of history. References to Animal Farm can be found across decades and mediums of art, from comics to Pink Floyd. It has become a cultural touchstone around which misinformation has dominated. The novel has grown far past its original context to take on new meanings and interpretations. Beginning in the classroom, many students are given flawed information about the novel and the author’s intention. This narrative around Animal Farm has extended to its use in the political arena. Parallels have been drawn, for example, between the novel and an eclectic collection of issues, from Obamacare to the 1%. These disparate connections demonstrate the novel’s peculiar vulnerability to appropriation. The social context in which any book is read changes the reader’s perception of its meaning, but Animal Farm seems more flexible than other works. It has been misused by many political movements, but I will examine three of particular interest: western propagandists from the Cold-War era, neoconservatives from the 1960s who were opposed to communist ideals, and the modern left who support elements of democratic socialism. Finally, after examining these three movements in relationship to Animal Farm, I will posit that Animal Farm is vulnerable to this kind of appropriation because it is an allegory, a form that is predisposed to misinterpretation, and because it only provides negative political commentary. By this I mean that it does not offer any solutions or constructive insight. This is a peculiarity of the book, not necessarily a flaw.

In the decades since Animal Farm’s publication, many political groups, often with conflicting ideologies, have latched onto it. In his essay, “The Dual Purpose of Animal Farm” Paul Kirschner examines a timeline of abuse that exemplifies the variety of interpretations this novel has gone through:

Sure enough, English communists attacked Animal Farm as anti-Soviet, while a conservative chided Orwell for forgetting that private property is a prerequisite for personal freedom. Western propagandists hijacked the book after Orwell’s death, but twenty years later George Woodcock found it showed the identity of governing-class interests everywhere, by 1980 Bernard Crick had to caution against reading it as a case for revolution. In 1998 critics were still debating whether Animal Farm implied ‘that revolution always ends badly for the underdog, hence to hell with it and hail the status quo.’ The confusion…came not only from the readers’ prejudices, but also from the story itself. (Kirschner 760)

Kirschner goes into interpretations even beyond the limitations of this article that illustrate the many confusions surrounding the book. As Kirschner discusses, Animal Farm has been read as both advocating for and cautioning against revolution. There is a case for both it being specific to the Soviet Union and it condemning all governing classes. Animal Farm exists in a cloud of contradiction and ambiguity, but I will explore which form of government and economy these different political groups have read Animal Farm as supporting. The first political group to make a positive reading of Animal Farm as advocating for a particular form of government are the western propagandists Kirschner mentions, who projected onto Animal Farm their own capitalist agendas.

Cold War era propagandists and British and American intelligence agencies were the first to co-opt this book, turning Orwell’s politically dissident parable into capitalist propaganda. In 1950, around the beginning of the Cold War, George Orwell died of tuberculosis, and almost immediately after, intelligence agencies became interested in the novel because of its seemingly anti-communist stance. CIA operative Everette Howard Hunt obtained the film rights to the book. Using copies of the book and a film adaption that simplified and intensified the anti-communist message, western intelligence agencies turned Orwell’s story into a kind of war propaganda and disseminated it both in the west and abroad (Menand). In his article for The Journal of Comparative Poetics, Andrew Rubin discusses the distribution of Animal Farm as propaganda. According to Rubin, the CIA smuggled the novel into the Soviet Union and provided funding to translate the book into a host of languages including Farsi, Telugu, Malaysian, Greek, Vietnamese, and Arabic (82). These translations were meant to target “at-risk” areas like India and Vietnam, and were considered to have “excellent propaganda value and wide popular appeal in the middle east” (Rubin 82). It is difficult to assess the success of the dissemination of Animal Farm abroad, but it was an effective rallying point for anti-communist sentiment in the west. On a similar note, in his New Yorker article, “Honest, Decent, Wrong.” Louis Menand claims that “the great enemy of propaganda was subjected, after his death, to the deceptions and evasions of propaganda—and by the very people, American Cold Warriors, who would canonize him as the great enemy of propaganda.” Menand is explaining the irony of the Cold War perspective on Animal Farm. During this period, the American government and anti-communist political thinkers held up this book as a bastion of free speech while at the same time distributing it as capitalist propaganda. The still prominent perception of Animal Farm as wholly anti-communist was consciously manufactured by Cold War propagandists.

https://pitjournal.unc.edu/2023/01/05/some-interpretations-are-more-equal-than-others-misinterpreting-george-orwells-animal-farm/