‘Animal
Farm’, George Orwell’s magnificent and
timeless satire on political corruption and arrogance
ends in a way that Sinn Fein’s recently materialized
dissidents should take time to read and reflect
upon as they prepare to watch their erstwhile
leaders ‘suck the PSNI truncheon’ at
the forthcoming special ard-fheis. (I was about
to write ‘revisit’ instead of ‘read
and reflect’ before realising that if they
had ever read and understood this book this article
would never have been necessary!)
Those
familiar with ‘Animal Farm’ will remember
that it is set on a farm which is taken over by
its much abused animals who, led and guided by
the pigs, drive the tyrannical ‘Mr Jones’
the farmer from the farm. With their revolution
a success they pin their political proclamation
on the wall of the barn, the most important sentence
of which reads: ‘All animals are born equal’,
and a new era dawns.
All
goes well for a while. The chief pig Snowball
is a wise and compassionate leader. He teaches
the other animals to read and write and the farm
is organised well and harvests are bountiful,
enough to feed all the once starved animals. But
another pig, Napoleon has his eyes on Snowball’s
job and he begins a feud with him. Snowball announces
plans for a windmill to ease the animals’
labour but Napoleon opposes the idea. Secretly
Napoleon has been training the farm’s dogs
as attack dogs. During a meeting of animals to
discuss the windmill, Napoleon summons his dogs
and they chase Snowball from the farm. After this
Napoleon takes charge and announces that the windmill
idea was really his and had been stolen by Snowball.
Life
starts to change for the worse on Animal Farm.
The pigs, led by Napoleon, take more and more
privileges for themselves and begin to rewrite
history, putting Napoleon at the leadership of
the revolution not Snowball. The animals must
work harder and they are whipped into line by
the savage dogs and by other pigs, one of whom,
Squealer coins the phrase ‘Napoleon is always
right’.
Slowly,
the political proclamation is altered but the
animals are not that bright and most of them don’t
realise what has happened until it is much too
late. For instance the slogan ‘All animals
are born equal’ is changled to ‘All
animals are born equal but some animals are more
equal than others’.
Perhaps
the most stupid of all the animals is a horse
called Boxer who believes everything that Napoleon
and the pigs tell him. Boxer gives his all for
Napoleon. He is badly wounded in skirmishes with
allies of ‘Mr Jones’ who are always
trying to take back the farm and he works like
a slave to help the farm succeed, despite his
bad wounds. But eventually, while working on the
windmill, he collapses exhausted. Napoleon sends
for a van from the vet but when it takes Boxer
away, Benjamin the donkey reads what is written
on the side: ‘Alfred Simmonds, Horse Slaughterer
and Glue Boiler’. When Benjamin tells the
other animals, Squealer arrives to tell them that
Benjamin is a liar. The hospital, he says, had
bought the van with old writing still on it and
Boxer had peacefully passed away in the hospital.
The animals accept Squealer's word - after all
Napoleon is always right.
I
hope, dear new dissidents, that by now you recognise
at least a part of your own story in all of this:
Napoleon is of course ‘The Big Lad’
who got to power via a similar feud with a rival
who was chased off by attack dogs (actually there
were several - Billy McKee, Ivor Bell, Ruardhi
O Bradaigh, Daithi O Connail, Micky McKevitt);
the other pigs are his ‘Think Tank’;
Squealer is....well take your pick: McGuinness,
Morrison, Gibney, Hartley, Storey, Big Ted, Gerry
Kelly and so on; as for Boxer well the name ‘Slab’
springs to mind but there are many, many other
candidates residing in the cold clay of Milltown
and other cemetery plots around the North who
would qualify just as well.
Does
the lie about the Glue Boiler’s van not remind
you of lies that you were told about decommissioning
- or what about the assurance that Sinn Fein would
never accept Stormont; whatever happened to the
slogan 'Disband the RUC'; why was there never
an IRA Convention before the 1994 ceasefire, as
promised by McGuinness? Napoleon’s attack
dogs are of course the IRA, or at least the internal
security unit bit of it and you must admit that
altering the slogan about ‘All animals being
equal’ is uncomfortably close to saying that
the struggle of the last thirty years was never
for a socialist republic but really about achieving
Catholic 'justice and equality'. As for all the
privileges going to the pigs ask yourself how
it is that 'The Big Lad' and his family own two
homes in Belfast and a luxury holiday home in
Donegal, that Gerry Kelly has a villa in Spain
and a flat in Portugal, that Storey owns property
in Turkey, that Dessie Mackin is a property millionaire
- and so on?
‘Animal
Farm’ ends with Napoleon hosting a dinner
party for his fellow pigs and humans who were
once their enemies. They announce a new alliance
(call it the Good Friday Agreement, the St Andrews
Agreement) as the festivities begin but then during
a drunken, post-prandial poker game an argument
breaks out when Napoleon and one of the humans,
a farmer called ‘Mr Pilkington’ both
play the Ace of Spades. The animals are watching
all this through the windows and suddenly they
realise that the pigs are walking upright and
are indistinguishable from the humans.
For
‘Mr Pilkington’ read Blair, Bush or
Paisley. But it doesn’t really matter since
the point of the story is this: you, dear new
dissidents, are the animals looking in through
the windows at ‘The Big Lad’ playing
cards with the people he once persuaded you to
risk your lives and your souls to kill, now indistinguishable
from the once hated enemy. ‘Animal Farm’
ends on the same depressing note as your own story
- with the victory of the pig/humans and the animals
realising far too late what has happened to them,
the farm and the revolution they began in so much
hope and joy. But the real message from Orwell’s
work of genius is that none of what happened on
‘Animal Farm’ would have been possible
without the stupidity of the animals.
Now
do you get it?
