Totalitarian Leadership In George Orwell's Animal Farm

In the 1945 novella, ‘Animal Farm’, George Orwell presents his views on totalitarian leadership by constructing a cynical representation of the events surrounding the Russian Revolution. By using farmyard animals to embody the allegorical elements, Orwell demonstrates the inevitable failure of the revolutionaries’ utopian dream. The pigs, who owe their initial rise to leadership to ideologies of equality, merely exchanged a corrupt human society with a strict totalitarian regime where they hold complete power. It is revealed, in ‘Animal Farm’, though the pigs’ actions where their power was abused that a lust for authority is addictive and there are corrupting effects if a ruling elite has absolute control over a population. Orwell illustrates
that the pigs can enforce their will upon the animals through their mental superiority, the excessive use of propaganda techniques and the ability to distort the naïve working class’s perception of reality.