Read It In Books:Animal Farm.

"What is the nature of this life of ours? Let us face it, our lives are miserable, laborious and short. We are born, we are given just so much food as will keep the breath in our bodies, and those of us who are capable of it are forced to work to the last atom of our strength; and the very instant that our usefulness has come to an end we are slaughtered with hideous cruelty" - Old Major

Old Major, or Willingdon Beauty as his owner Mr Jones called him, was an old, overweight, dying boar (and father of over four hundred children) but, in a dream, he saw things how they were for the animals of Manor Farm and the animals of all English farms. He knew he lived on fertile soil and he knew he deserved to live in comfort and dignity. He also knew that the reason he and the other animals did not do these things was because the land, the dignity, and the comfort had all been stolen from them by one breed - human beings.

Of course, George Orwell's Animal Farm has been analysed to death (do the humans represent capitalism? do they represent communism? Orwell made it pretty clear it was Stalinism while allowing enough wiggle room so that people could debate and dispute this) and everyone, more or less, knows the story but I'd never actually sat down and read it. Until now that is. Old Major calls the animals to the barn and both relates his dream, expands on his ideas, and sets forth a vision in which the animals will rise and take over from the humans.

The revolution itself is achieved fairly easily but, of course, what follows does not run smoothly. Old Major's ideals of unity and equality turn out not to be shared by all and isn't that the way it so often is in rebellions and revolutions? Bad actors, grifters, and genuinely nasty individuals seek to exploit them to further their own ends. You can see it now with the likes of Trump, Putin, Nigel Farage, Modi, Xi, and tech bros like Elon Musk. Not just exploiting existing anxieties and divisions in the world but gleefully creating new anxieties and divisions.

Orwell could see this for two reasons. Because he lived in a time of rebellions, revolutions, and war and because he was an incisive and individual thinker and, it seems clear to me, not a follower or a joiner of gangs. Not someone who would align himself easily with any consensus. In Animal Farm it is the pigs (Napoleon, Snowball, and Squealer) that make the first moves. Pigs being the most intelligent of farmyard animals.

When Mr and Mrs Jones and the men who worked for them are forced off the farm by the rebellion it is the pigs who learn to read and write, come up with the concept of Animalism, write the seven commandments of Animalism, and, to all intents and purposes, take over as leaders. First among equals? Or meet the new boss, same as the old boss?

Not that the two leading pigs, Napoleon and Snowball, always see eye to eye. Despite this, however, they do a good job of convincing the other animals that it was they, the pigs, who should have the bulk of the milk and apples. Other things, that you may find familiar from infamous human led revolutions, start to happen. Mollie, a mare,goes missing after being spotted conversing with a two legged enemy, one of the pig leaders forms his own private army with inevitable consequences, a rival pig leader is denounced as a criminal and removed from the farm, and, soon enough, even the most minor of transgressions becomes punishable by brutal execution.

Propaganda plays a part. A big part. Lies are recast as truths, history is altered when it serves the purpose of the leaders, and hungry animals are informed that they are not actually hungry. Always, the threat of a potential return to being again enslaved by humanity is present. Yet the new leaders start to do a lot of things that the old leaders did. Sometimes to comedic effect, sometimes to chilling effect.

It is a warning about the oft-perpetuated myth that the Soviet Union was some kind of a socialist utopia. Orwell had the vision to see that not only was it not a socialist utopia but that it wasn't even a socialist country. Napoleon is Stalin to Snowball's Trotsky (with Old Major the Lenin, or more likely Karl Marx, figure) and events at Manor Farm (renamed Animal Farm) echo and rhyme with well known events from the Russian Revolution and the early decades of the Soviet Union.

Although it is primarily a specific warning about events in the Soviet Union it is also more than that. It's a reminder that unstinting belief in any ideology can lead people, or - here - animals, to act in blind faith and carry out atrocious cruelties. It highlights the hypocrisies and power grabs that lie behind the purity spirals and holier-than-thou sentiments that are the public facing side of these ideologies. As such it could as easily apply to the likes of Donald Trump, Nigel Farage, Marine Le Pen as it can to Stalin or Mao.

Originally written as a kind of fairy tale, you could read the story to children and though it is, in places, gruesome (like most fairy tales) I think they'd enjoy it and even be moved by it. You could read it if you barely know who Stalin and Trotsky are and still get something from it. You can read it if you're knowledgeable about that region and that era and get even more from it. Perhaps where Orwell's talent really lies, and this also shows us the tragedy of how little we have moved on in the intervening eighty years, is that you can read it right now and it still makes perfect sense. The lessons of Animal Farm haven't gone away. Not at all. Four legs good, two legs bad!