My Scrapbook On Animal Farm

My scrapbook on Animal Farm.

A brief summary of Animal Farm.
Old Major, the old boar on the Manor Farm, summons the animals on the farm together for a meeting, during which he refers to humans as parasites. When Major dies, two young pigs, Snowball and Napoleon, assume command and consider it a duty to prepare for the Rebellion, which the old boar had mentioned. The animals revolt and drive the drunken and irresponsible farmer Mr. Jones from the farm, renaming it "Animal Farm".
The pigs elevate themselves to positions of leadership and set aside special food items, ostensibly for their personal health. When Snowball announces his plans to build a windmill, Napoleon has his dogs chase Snowball away and subsequently declares himself leader of Animal Farm.

Napoleon changes the governance structure of the farm, replacing meetings with a committee of pigs who will run the farm. Through a young pig named Squealer, Napoleon claims credit for the windmill idea. The animals work harder with the promise of easier lives with the windmill. When the animals find the windmill collapsed after a violent storm, Napoleon and Squealer convince the animals that Snowball is trying to sabotage their project. After Snowball being known as the “traitor”, Napoleon begins to purge the farm with his dogs, killing animals he accuses of consorting with his old rival. Beasts of England is replaced by an anthem glorifying Napoleon, who appears to be adopting the lifestyle of a man. However, the animals were still convinced that they are better off than they were under Mr. Jones.

Mr Frederick, one of the neighbouring farmers, attacks the farm, using blasting powder to blow up the restored windmill. Though the animals win the battle, they do so at great cost, as many, including Boxer the workhorse, are wounded. Despite his injuries, Boxer continues working harder and harder, until he collapses while working on the windmill. Napoleon sends for a van to take Boxer to the veterinary surgeon, explaining that better care can be given there. However, Napoleon has sold his most loyal and long-suffering worker for money to buy himself whisky.

Years pass, and the pigs start to resemble humans. The Seven Commandments are abridged to a single phrase: "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others". As the animals look from pigs to humans, they realise they can no longer distinguish between the two.

More about the author
Eric Arthur Blair , born on 25 June 1903 and died on 21 January 1950, who used the pen name George Orwell, was an English novelist, essayist, journalist and critic. His work is marked by lucid prose, awareness of social injustice, opposition to totalitarianism, and commitment to democratic socialism.

Commonly ranked as one of the most influential 20th century English writers and chroniclers of English culture, Orwell wrote literary criticism, poetry, fiction, and polemical journalism. He is best known for the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) and the allegorical novella Animal Farm (1945). His non fiction works, including The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), documenting his experience of working class life in the north of England, and Homage to Catalonia (1938), an account of his experiences in the Spanish Civil War, are widely acclaimed, as are his essays on politics, literature, language, and culture.

Orwell's work continues to influence popular and political culture, and the term Orwellian—descriptive of totalitarian or authoritarian social practices—has entered the language together with several of his neologisms, including cold war, Big Brother, Thought Police, Room 101, doublethink, and thoughtcrime.

What each of the characters in Animal Farm represent.
Old Major – An aged prize Middle White boar provides the inspiration that fuels the Rebellion in the book. He is an allegorical combination of Karl Marx, one of the creators of communism, and Lenin, the communist leader of the Russian Revolution and the early Soviet nation, in that he draws up the principles of the revolution. His skull being put on revered public display recalls Lenin, whose embalmed body was put on display.

Napoleon – "A large, rather fierce-looking Berkshire boar, the only Berkshire on the farm, not much of a talker, but with a reputation for getting his own way". An allegory of Joseph Stalin.

Snowball – Napoleon's rival and original head of the farm after Jones' overthrow. He is mainly based on Leon Trotsky, but also combines elements from Lenin.

Squealer – A small, white, fat porker who serves as Napoleon's right-trotter pig and minister of propaganda, holding a position similar to that of Molotov.

The young pigs – Four pigs who complain about Napoleon's takeover of the farm but are quickly silenced and later executed. Based on the Great Purge of Grigori Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev, Nikolai Bukharin, and Alexei Rykov.

Mr Jones – The former owner of the farm, Jones is a very heavy drinker. The animals revolt against him after he drinks so much that he does not feed or take care of them. He is an allegory of Russian Tsar Nicholas II, who abdicated following the February Revolution of 1917 and was executed, along with the rest of his family, by the Bolsheviks on 17 July 1918.

Mr Frederick – The tough owner of Pinchfield, a small but well-kept neighbouring farm, who briefly enters into an alliance with Napoleon. He is an allegory of Adolf Hitler, who enters into a neutrality pact with Joseph Stalin's USSR only to later break it by invading the Soviet Union.

Moses – The raven "was Mr. Jones's especial pet, was a spy and a tale-bearer, but he was also a clever talker." Initially following Mrs. Jones into exile, he reappears several years later and resumes his role of talking but not working. Napoleon brings the raven back (Ch. IX) as Stalin brought back the Russian Orthodox Church.

What the story represents…Events in real life.
Communism-The strong rules over the weak, getting priorities and privileges which the weak cannot get,which often leads to the abuse of power and the overthrowing of the strong by the unhappy weak.

The Spanish Civil War-17 July 1936 – 1 April 1939. In 1868, popular uprisings led to the overthrow of Queen Isabella II of the House of Bourbon. In 1873, Isabella's replacement, King Amadeo I of the House of Savoy, abdicated due to increasing political pressure, and the short-lived First Spanish Republic was proclaimed. After the restoration of the Bourbons in December 1874, Carlists and Anarchists emerged in opposition to the monarchy.

Spain was neutral in the First World War. Afterwards the working class, the industrial class, and the military united in hopes of removing the corrupt central government, but were unsuccessful. Fears of communism grew as a military coup brought Miguel Primo de Rivera to power in 1923. Support for his regime gradually faded, and he resigned in January 1930. He was replaced by General Dámaso Berenguer and then Admiral Aznar, who both continued to rule by decree. There was little support for the monarchy in the major cities, and King Alfonso XIII gave in to popular pressure for the establishment of a republic and called municipal elections for 12 April 1931. The socialist and liberal republicans won almost all the provincial capitals and with the resignation of Aznar's government, King Alfonso XIII fled the country. The Second Spanish Republic was formed and would remain in power until the culmination of the Spanish Civil War.

The revolutionary committee headed by Niceto Alcalá-Zamora became the provisional government. The republic had broad support from all segments of society. In May, an incident where a taxi driver was attacked outside a monarchist club sparked anti-clerical violence throughout Madrid and south-west Spain; the government's slow response disillusioned the right and reinforced their view that the Republic was determined to persecute the church. In June and July the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo called several strikes, which led to a violent incident between CNT members and the Civil Guard and a brutal crackdown by the Civil Guard and the army against the CNT in Seville; this led many workers to believe the Second Spanish Republic was just as oppressive as the monarchy and the CNT announced their intention of overthrowing it via revolution. Elections in June 1931 returned a large majority of Republicans and Socialists. With the onset of the Great Depression, the government attempted to assist rural Spain by instituting an eight-hour day and giving land tenure to farm workers.

Foreshadowing the conflict: Salvador Dalí's Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War) (1936)
Fascism remained a reactive threat, helped by controversial reforms to the military.[29] In December, a new reformist, liberal, and democratic constitution was declared. It included strong provisions enforcing a broad secularization of the Catholic country, which many moderate committed Catholics opposed.[30] In October 1931, Republican Manuel Azaña became prime minister of a minority government.[31][32] In 1933, the right won the general elections, largely due to the anarchists' abstention from the vote, increased right wing resentment of the incumbent government caused by an illegal decree confiscating the land of the aristocracy, the Casas Viejas incident, the socialists' (Spanish Socialist Workers' Party) dissatisfaction with the caution of Republicans and perceived brutality of Manuel Azaña and the formation of a right-wing alliance, Spanish Confederation of Autonomous Right-wing Groups; women's newfound right to vote also contributed to this (most women voted for centre-right parties).

Events in the period following November 1933, called the "black two years," seemed to make a civil war more likely.[33] Alejandro Lerroux of the Radical Republican Party (RRP) formed a government and rolled back changes made under the previous administration[34] and also granted amnesty to the collaborators of the unsuccessful uprising by General José Sanjurjo in August 1932.[35][36] Some monarchists joined with the Fascist Falange Española to help achieve their aims.[37] Open violence occurred in the streets of Spanish cities, and militancy continued to increase,[38] reflecting a movement towards radical upheaval, rather than peaceful democratic means as solutions.[39]

In the last months of 1934, two government collapses brought members of the right-wing Confederation of the Autonomous Right (CEDA) into the government.[40][41] Farm workers' wages were cut in half, and the military was purged of Republican members.[41] A Popular Front alliance was organized,[41] which narrowly won the 1936 elections.[42] Azaña led a weak minority government, but soon replaced Zamora as president in April.[43] Prime Minister Santiago Casares Quiroga ignored warnings of a military conspiracy involving several generals, who decided that the government had to be replaced to prevent the dissolution of Spain.

The Russian Revolution-The Russian Revolution of 1905 was said to be a major factor to the February Revolutions of 1917. The events of Bloody Sunday triggered a line of protests. A council of workers called the St. Petersburg Soviet was created in all this chaos, and the beginning of a communist political protest had begun.

World War I prompted a Russian outcry directed at Tsar Nicholas II. It was another major factor contributing to the retaliation of the Russian Communists against their royal opponents. The war also developed a weariness in the city, owing to a lack of food in response to the disruption of agriculture. Food scarcity had become a considerable problem in Russia, but the cause of this did not lie in any failure of the harvests, which had not been significantly altered during war-time. The indirect reason was that the government, in order to finance the war, had been printing off millions of ruble notes, and by 1917 inflation had made prices increase up to four times what they had been in 1914. The peasantry were consequently faced with the higher cost of purchases, but made no corresponding gain in the sale of their own produce, since this was largely taken by the middlemen on whom they depended. As a result they tended to hoard their grain and to revert to subsistence farming. At the same time rising prices led to demands for higher wages in the factories, and in January and February 1916 revolutionary propaganda, aided by German funds, led to widespread strikes. The outcome of all this was a growing criticism of the government rather than any war-weariness. Heavy losses during the war also strengthened thoughts that Tsar Nicholas II was unfit to rule.

The Liberals were now better placed to voice their complaints, since they were participating more fully through a variety of voluntary organizations. Local industrial committees proliferated. In July 1915, a Central War Industries Committee was established under the chairmanship of a prominent Octobrist, Guchkov, and including ten workers' representatives. The Petrograd Mensheviks agreed to join despite the objections of their leaders abroad. All this activity gave renewed encouragement to political ambitions, and, in September 1915, a combination of Octobrists and Kadets in the Duma demanded the forming of a responsible government. The Tsar rejected these proposals. He had now taken over the position of commander-in-chief of the armed forces and, during his absence from Petrograd while at his military headquarters at Mogilev, he left most of the day-to-day government in the hands of the Empress.She was intensely unpopular, owing, in part, to her German origin and to the influence that Rasputin, an unsavoury "monk", exercised over her.

All these factors had given rise to a sharp loss of confidence in the regime by 1916. Early in that year, Guchkov had been taking soundings among senior army officers and members of the Central War Industries Committee about a possible coup to force the abdication of the Tsar. In November, Pavel Milyukov in the Duma openly accused the government of contemplating peace negotiations with Germany. In December, a small group of nobles assassinated Rasputin, and in January 1917 the Tsar's uncle, Grand Duke Nicholas, was asked indirectly by Prince Lvov whether he would be prepared to take over the throne from his nephew, Tsar Nicholas II. None of these incidents were in themselves the immediate cause of the February Revolution, but they do help to explain why the monarchy survived only a few days after it had broken out.

It was these views of Martov that predominated in a manifesto drawn up by Leon Trotsky (a major Bolshevik revolutionary) at a conference in Zimmerwald, attended by thirty-five Socialist leaders in September 1915. Inevitably Vladimir Lenin strongly contested them. Their attitudes became known as the Zimmerwald Left. Since the autumn of 1914, he had insisted that "from the standpoint of the working class and of the labouring masses from the lesser evil would be the defeat of the Tsarist Monarchy"; the war must be turned into a civil war of the proletarian soldiers against their own governments. Thus, Lenin remained the enfant terrible of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, although at this point in the war his following in Russia was as few as 10,000. Lenin, however, then executed the protests of Petrograd which set off the 1917 Russian Revolution.

Communism in the modern world.
Although the world we live in isn’t as troubled as before,there are
Still some cases of communism in the world,such as The Republic
Of China,where Mao Ze Dong and the communist party ruled the
Country after the Nationlists lost and fled to Taiwan after the Civil War which happened in China. In 1950-53 China engaged in a large-scale but undeclared war with the United States, South Korea and United Nations forces in the Korean War. It ended in a military stalemate, but it gave Mao the opportunity to identify and purge elements in China that seemed supportive of capitalism.

Nepal too, the Communist Party of Nepal , leader Man Mohan Adhikari briefly became Prime Minister and national leader from 1994 to 1995, and the Maoist guerrilla leader Prachanda was elected Prime Minister by the Constituent Assembly of Nepal in 2008. Prachanda has since been deposed as PM, leading the Maoists to abandon their legalistic approach and return to their typical street actions and militancy and to lead sporadic general strikes using their quite substantial influence on the Nepalese labor movement.

In Moldova, the communist party won the 2001, 2005 and 2009 parliamentary elections. However, the April 2009 Moldovan elections results, in which the communists supposedly won a third time, were massively protested and another round was held on July 29 in which three opposition parties won and formed the Alliance for European Integration. However failing to elect the president, new parliamentary elections were held in November 2010 which resulted in roughly the same representation in the Parliament. According to Ion Marandici, a Moldovan political scientist the Moldovan Communists differ from those in other countries, because they managed to appeal to the ethnic minorities and the anti-Romanian Moldovans.

There also are some wars started because of communism. Wars were started because different people have different values and perspective of things,and couldn’t come to a conclusion.There were wars such as the Spanish Civil War,the cultural Revolution in China,the Cuban Revolution and many more.So,communism can cause wars to happen,so it is best to live in a world without communism. Imagine a world with no Communism through the 20th century. No Stalin purges or Siberian prisons. No Communists revolution in China that would lead to the horrid “Cultural Revolution” which saw the deaths of countless historical artefacts as well as teachers, professors, musicians, etc. Imagine new Cold War, no runaway fear and spending between the US and Russia, imagine a US with no communism, no “Red Scare” no McCarthy.However,this is greatly impossible because of the beliefs that some people have,that they are more superior than others,often is the beginning of communism.And,it is also because of that,the lower class people become unhappy as communist leaders tend to abuse their powers,and thus,a revolution begins.

Marxism
Marxism is a worldview and a method of societal analysis that focuses on class relations and societal conflict, that uses a materialist interpretation of historical development, and a dialectical view of social transformation. In simpler terms, it is the fight for the self-emancipation of the working class, subjecting all forms of domination. Marxists believe that the transition from capitalism to socialism is an inevitable part of the development of human society; as Lenin stated, "it is evident that Marx deduces the inevitability of the transformation of capitalist society [into a socialist society] wholly and exclusively from the economic law of motion of contemporary society."

Marxists believe that a socialist society will be far better for the majority of the populace than its capitalist counterpart, for instance, prior to the Russian revolution of 1917, Lenin wrote that "The socialization of production is bound to lead to the conversion of the means of production into the property of society ... This conversion will directly result in an immense increase in productivity of labour, a reduction of working hours, and the replacement of the remnants, the ruins of small-scale, primitive, disunited production by collective and improved labour."

The government during the Russian Revolution
At the inception of the Russian Revolution, the government was the monarchy of Tsar Nicholas II. After the February Revolution, the government was the Provisional Government formed after the Tsar resigned in order to maintain order until a Constituent Assembly could be elected. After the October Revolution the government was more like an oligarchy being run by select members of the Communist Party only.

Writing techniques for Animal Farm.
He uses this simple language, because he wants to make a clear statement that no one can manipulate. The normal reader would also understand it, if it were a bit harder, but the press could then change it to their own liking and that’s exactly what he didn’t want, as if that happened, the story would be inaccurate.
By creating a smaller, compressed version of the USSR within a farm in England, Orwell shows how easily someone can grasp power by abusing the communist principles and shaping them to his liking and benefit. He also associated the animal characters within the story, with communist party members, peasants, workers and army.