Animal Farm: Lessons for a Free Press

On the scariest children's story of all time

When I was about six or seven, my father found me up past bedtime one night watching A Nightmare on Elm Street. I wasn’t supposed to be up so late, and I certainly wasn’t supposed to be watching slasher flicks on HBO. When he asked why I’d done it, I told him I liked scary movies. At that very moment, one of the most famous scenes in horror cinema was playing across the screen, when Freddy Kruger pulls Johnny Depp into his own bed, followed by a glorious eruption of blood that fills the room. My father chuckled and asked, you think that’s scary?

Dad didn’t let me finish the movie, but he didn’t want to stamp out my morbid curiosity either. Any curiosity, he believed, was a good thing if properly channeled. So the next morning at breakfast, instead of Freddy the Bastard Son of 100 Maniacs, he slid a book over to my side of the table and said, “See if you find this scary.”

Was I being punished? Or insulted? The cover had no picture, just the orange and white of a Penguin Books work of fiction and the lame title “Animal Farm.” What a dumb name for a book, I thought. Let me guess, it’s about animals on a farm. I wanted real horror and instead Dad was giving me some variation on Charlotte’s Web. Was this meant to be scarier than the Dream Demon tearing teens open with razor blades? Pfft.

But I always read the books he gave me to read, so I started into this one. I read about Manor Farm, the farmer Mr. Jones, the death of the wise and elderly boar Old Major, the rebellion of the hungry animals against Mr. Jones, the pigs who take milk and apples for themselves to fuel their “brainwork,” and their efforts to build a windmill.

The story was okay. I suppose I was enjoying it. But Dad was delusional if he thought any of this was scary. Then I got to Chapter 7. The animals were now on the brink of starvation. Their new leader, a Berkshire boar named Napoleon, was by now obviously lying to them and scapegoating others. Finally, I came to the scariest scene in the book, when Napoleon becomes the farm’s tyrannical leader and calls a meeting with all the animals in which he forces them to confess to crimes they didn’t commit.

Each time one of the animals confesses, Napoleon’s dogs instantly maul them to death in a chilling symbol of the show trials and purges of Stalinist Russia. Of course, I didn’t get the reference. But what was clear to me was that this marked a turning point in the story. What had seemed like a children’s tale with its talking farm animals was, in fact, a shivering and gruesome horror.

I read on, eagerly now. Napoleon becomes god-like in power. The good old working horse Boxer, my favorite character, gets injured and instead of retiring him as Napoleon had promised, he sells him to a glue factory for profit. The animals, who had forsworn humans and their behavior, begin to imitate them — walking on two legs, drinking alcohol, living in the farmhouse. The Seven Commandments they had devised to create a better society were by now reduced to a single law:

“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”

This was to Charlotte’s Web what Game of Thrones was to Lord of the Rings. But I wasn’t yet half as scared as when Dad asked if I had liked the book. I said yeah, but added that it was a little unrealistic. He asked why, smiling with the knowledge that I’d already walked into his trap. Well, I explained, it’s about a bunch of talking animals.

Dad leaned in close and said, “You know what, though? It really happened. All of it. Except instead of animals, it was people.”

I thought about that for a second. I thought about the various scenes in the novel. The vicious dogs, Boxer’s fate, Napoleon’s bottomless cruelty. My eyes widened. All of it? The more I thought, the more it started to scare the shit out of me. Kruger, I knew, was fake. But this … was real? Dad said something ever scarier. It would happen again. Many times. In many places. My child’s brain was reeling. There had to be a way to stop it. But it wasn’t just a farm, he said, it was an entire country. Russia.

But, but, I tried, Now that there’s this book people can read it and know about what happened and next time people will fight and we can win.

“Maybe,” he said with sadness in his voice, “but many people want this to happen.”

No. No, that couldn’t be right. Nobody reading this book wants Boxer to be turned to glue, I thought. Nobody wants the hens to have to give up their eggs. No way.

But I learned a painfully valuable lesson that day. Namely, that the scariest thing of all is not the monsters we imagine under our beds, but the darkness of the human soul. All our imaginations of evil are projections. Monsters, demons, ghouls — all symbols of human truths. As any zombie fan can tell you, the most dangerous thing in a zombie apocalypse isn’t the horde of the brain-eating undead, but the humans who survive. Or as Sartre said in No Exit, “hell is other people.”

Now when I think of the book, I of course understand the whole thing is an allegory for communism. Everyone knows this. But what many forget, or never knew, is that the purpose of Orwell’s classic was not merely to argue against communism but in favor of freedom of the press.

Orwell was troubled by the British media, and in particular, its practice of self-censorship around sensitive issues. If the public saw their own press refusing to speak boldly on controversial topics, he believed, they would cease to trust the news media and the country would tip into a crisis of information. On this as with so many other issues, he beheld a vision darkly that in time proved to be prophetic.

We forget how central this theme was in the story. But remember, it’s the lack of dissent and control of information that gives Napoleon so much power. His henchman Squealer, the pig who serves as spokesperson to the new regime, constantly twists the truth, revises events, and spreads lies to control the narrative, ensuring the animals remain loyal to their new porcine overlord.

In fact, the original preface, which was ultimately never used, was titled “The Freedom of the Press.” In it, Orwell wrote:

At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is “not done” to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was “not done” to mention trousers in the presence of a lady.

In other words, it may not be illegal to say politically incorrect things, but it is so strongly frowned upon that the result is nearly the same.

Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.

Here too, Orwell saw into the future, for if these lines don’t make the hairs on your neck stand up with their familiarity, God bless you and the rock you’re living under. As for the rest of us, there are clear lessons to be drawn from the novel on this point.

First, consider the Seven Commandments. These are eventually whittled down to one, which is then inverted to mean the opposite of what it originally did. I’ve written elsewhere about the subversion of our culture, as in the essay “How Marxism Subverted America,” but the fundamental lesson here is that when basic truths and values are challenged, the process is often too slow to detect — and then it’s too late to prevent. Most folks, like the animals in the story, are too naive or afraid to speak up. This is how they slip the chains unseen to get you, with your voluntary silence.

Second, in one of the early chapters of the book, Old Major teaches the animals of the farm the lyrics of a song titled “Beasts of England.” It’s a patriotic anthem crafted to instill pride in their community, a call to dream of a brighter dawn. But soon, Napoleon abolishes the song, replacing it with one that sings only of him.

Let this be a lesson, that when they criticize our patriotism, call it problematic, or characterize our country as inherently evil, then you shall know them by their work. When they seek to replace our songs and flags of old with newer ones that celebrate not the nation and all of us within it but themselves and their identities, and especially when they seek to censor or stifle dissent, then whatever label they may slap on it, and however good it sounds in theory, authoritarianism follows not far behind.

Finally, consider how the character Snowball, who initially vies for power and loses to Napoleon, is chased off by the dogs and blamed when the windmill is later destroyed. Authoritarians always cast their flaws on those who seek to heal. Therefore look to the deplatformed, the canceled, the silenced, the exiled — those dissident voices — and there you’ll find the good among us, and the truth. And if not the truth, then at the very least, you’ll find what they fear us to hear, and that alone has value.

This is the sacred duty of a free press, to offer not just the facts but the full tapestry of voices encircling them. Not just a chronology of events, but the clash of ideas and the spirit of dissent. Just as vital as the medical facts surrounding abortion, for example, are the views on both sides of the debate trying to discern the moral path.

It is for this reason that in 1768, Sam Adams famously wrote in the Boston Gazette, “There is nothing so fretting and vexatious, nothing so justly TERRIBLE to tyrants, and their tools and abettors, as a FREE PRESS.”

But this is not what we find when it comes to our news media today. Even once-noble institutions have betrayed their ideals, trading their Seven Commandments for a single hollow creed and swapping cold facts and balanced reporting for slanted narratives that serve political ends. This is no longer news. This is the very definition of propaganda. Even the simplest scientific truths have fallen into dispute, as we have willingly surrendered those most precious gifts of faculty that set us apart from the beasts, while our very society seems to unravel in the grips of radical ideology.

These are powerful and important lessons, for an adult no less than for a child. If we do not heed them, soon others might look upon us and wonder where are the people among all these dumb livestock. Or as the book so hauntingly puts it, “The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”