This is an interesting posts debating the meaning behind George Orwell’s work, specifically Animal Farm and 1984.
Debating George Orwell
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That may have been Orwell’s intent but just as how English teachers can make a throw away line (“The blue curtains”) mean what they want it to mean, when I did both Animal Farm and 1984 in school they were presented as being anti-communist texts. At 14 opinion presented as fact can be hard to distinguish, especially when from someone who you’ve been told is there to dispense facts.
Animal Farm is very much anti-communist propaganda. 1984 is a very prescient warning about how the consolidation of wealth and power in the hands of a few leads to totalitarian control regardless of whether it started out as communist, capitalist or something else. And specifically, about power’s ability to control information in order to maintain itself. The irony is that the oligarchs of the US continue to successfully manipulate both stories as propaganda to support their form of oppression as morally superior to “communism” (which doesn’t really exist in any major power anywhere in the world anyway).