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Journalism of Courage
Eighty years ago, George Orwell published a slim book about talking animals who overthrow their farmer and start a new world order, dreaming of equality. By the final pages, the pigs are walking on two legs, the other animals can’t tell them apart from humans, and the revolution has eaten itself.
When Animal Farm was first published days after World War II ended, it was an indictment of totalitarianism and a sharp allegory of the Russian Revolution’s descent into dictatorship. The book, even today, has not aged into a period piece. It continues to offer a mirror to political and social realities far beyond its original context.
Orwell’s tale is often read as a satire of Stalinism but its endurance lies in its universality. The mechanisms it describes – how power consolidates, how ideals are compromised, how language is manipulated – can be found in settings as varied as parliaments, boardrooms, grassroots movements, and online platforms today.
“All animals are equal” sounds suspiciously like campaign manifestos, shareholder reports, or the breathless speeches of tech CEOs – until the fine print kicks in: “…but some animals are more equal than others.” The phrase has become shorthand for hypocrisy and double standards in today’s time.
The scary part is that this isn’t nostalgia for totalitarian regimes long gone. It’s right now.
It’s the kind of allegory that never leaves the syllabus, the stage, or the cultural bloodstream. And while many “classics” fade into quaint irrelevance, Animal Farm has the survival instincts of its own pigs. In 2025, you can read it as a Cold War artefact, sure, but it’s also a sharp, unsettling portrait of how power mutates, how propaganda coats lies with moral varnish, and how collective memory is erased one small revision at a time.
The allegory doesn’t stop at borders. It works inside democracies, workplaces, and even activist spaces with the promise of fairness, only to harden into hierarchies that look eerily like the systems they fought. Charismatic leaders morph into gatekeepers; their decision-making grows opaque, and accountability evaporates. The farm becomes not just a nation but any human system where ideals give way to self-interest.
When you strip it down, the book insists: Power doesn’t need a dictatorship to corrupt; it just needs a structure and human ambition that further corrodes to arrogance. And what is arrogance without an audience?
Orwell understood that revolutions don’t have to fail overnight. They fail in increments. In the book, it starts with the pigs keeping the milk and apples “for the good of everyone.” And when dissent brews, it is silenced through fear or persuasion. In life, it’s small exceptions, one-off justifications, “temporary” measures that somehow become permanent. The shift is so gradual that by the time you notice the rules have changed, you have already internalised them.
The book is also a study in propaganda. Orwell shows how language can be weaponised to obscure truth and manipulate perception. Slogans are repeated until they feel self-evident, and inconvenient facts are revised or erased. In the digital age, this tactic is amplified by the speed and reach of social media. Misinformation spreads quickly, narratives can be reframed in minutes, and the distinction between fact and opinion becomes increasingly blurred as social media flourishes as an Orwellian playground.
In Animal Farm, the Seven Commandments on the barn wall get altered when no one’s looking; today, it’s the algorithm deciding which version of events trends, which quietly disappears, and which gets “context” added. The tools have changed; the manipulation has not.
And perhaps the most devastating part: complicity. Animal Farm isn’t about villains versus heroes – it’s about how ordinary, well-meaning creatures enable the very systems that oppress them. Boxer, the hardworking cart-horse, responds to each setback with “I will work harder,” convinced that diligence will bring the promised utopia. His faith is never rewarded. The character forces us to ask: in our own societies, how often do we mistake endurance for justice, especially when doing so feels risky or futile?
In contrast to Boxer, we have Snowball – the idealistic pig who was chased out – who represents another kind of cautionary tale. He is the revolutionary who dreams of progress but is undone by power struggles and propaganda. In the aftermath, his name becomes a convenient scapegoat for every failure on the farm, a reminder of how leaders rewrite history to tighten their grip on power.
Snowball embodies the ease with which dissenters are erased. That pattern feels familiar today: movements often turn on their brightest reformers, workplaces sideline famous voices when they threaten entrenched hierarchies, and political systems recast inconvenient figures as traitors or cautionary examples. Snowball’s exile shows us how quickly idealism can be rewritten into infamy, and how power survives by controlling not just the present but the depiction of the past.
Then there’s the question of memory. Orwell’s animals can’t remember life before the pigs took over, which makes resistance almost impossible. We’re not any better. News cycles bury stories in days. Broken promises are replaced by shinier ones. Historical amnesia lets the same patterns repeat without triggering alarms.
Perhaps the most enduring lesson of Animal Farm is that the fight for equality and justice is never finished. Orwell makes clear that revolutions are not endpoints but fragile beginnings. Gains can be reversed, freedoms eroded, and ideals diluted if vigilance is lost. In this sense, the novella is less a relic of a specific political era and more a manual for recognising and resisting the slow, often imperceptible slide toward inequality and abuse of power.
On this anniversary, Animal Farm remains relevant not because it predicts one political ideology’s failings, but because it dissects the universal fragility of equality. It warns that the fight for fairness doesn’t end with a victory; it ends when vigilance does. The barn is always one charismatic speech away from rewriting the rules.
Orwell’s genius wasn’t just the satire. It was the recognition that the barn is a mirror. Eight decades later, we are still looking in and, hopefully, not liking the resemblance.
(As I See It is a space for bookish reflection, part personal essay and part love letter to the written word.)
