Wednesday, March 05, 2008

Animal Farm: Lenin Left Out?



There comes a time in life when you are supposed to read Animal Farm (George Orwell 1945), or at least in my case, watch the movie.

Watching a movie usually has good, relaxing connotations, but nooo, our teacher just has to toss us a packet and tell us to fill it out as we watch.
So we start filling it out. We establish in class that Snowball Leon Trotsky, Napoleon the evil Stalin. But when all was said and done, we were missing someone. I racked my mind. Hitler? No. George W. Bush? Ahah! It was Lenin.

At first glance, it seems like Old Major could be Lenin. It still does seem like Old Major could be Lenin at second glance. But my history teacher says that Old Major is Marx. So we go on to talk about Benjamin the jackass and all the other "common" animals, but still no Lenin. Outrageous. There could be no Russian Revolution without Lenin! What was George Orwell thinking?
So, as we are supposed to do when we have questions, I asked the teacher. She kept saying, "We're not there yet," although she keeps talking about the Building of the Windmill even though we truly aren't there yet in the movie. So I wait, and the movie's over and still no sign of Lenin.
Perhaps the Russian Revolution never really happened*?

*A poke at those idiots who don't believe the Holocaust or the Armenian Genocide.

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3 comments:

kiddietyte said...

Old Major is actually both Lenin and Marx. Lenin and Marx's ideas of communism are practically equal (hence the "Leninist-Marxist" communism...).

So Orwell's intentions were pretty darn accurate.

Your teacher is weird.

Alan said...

Yea, good point. I also thought that Snowball was part Lenin as well since he made the idea of building a windmill; kind of like the New Economic Plan.

kiddietyte said...

Ehhhhhh building the windmill was more of an industrial move haha.

Snowball (IMO) is clearly Trosky since he believed in Lenin's ideas and tried to carry on his legacy.