Dark Animals

Recently I watched “Watership Down”, which has been around since 1978 and for whatever reason I never got around to watching it until now.  This is blog #666, but I have no special fascination with the number or anything else associated with it, so this discussion of darker animals will have to suffice.  Yes, I know this has no relevance to the upcoming Winter Solstice holiday, Saturnalia. 

Charlotte’s Web.   Book written in 1952 by E.B. White, most famous animated adaptation 1973.  Nominally this is an uplifting story about a pig, a spider, and other farm animals.  There’s even a rat, who provides the suitable dose of cynicism we can expect from such an animal and keeps this from being too nice and sweet.  Debbie Reynolds – Carrie Fisher’s mom and the star of “The Unsinkable Molly Brown” – voices Charlotte, while Paul Lynde, the center square on “Hollywood Squares”, famously cynical, voices Templeton the rat.  While Wilbur escapes the Pork Chop Block, Charlotte herself doesn’t survive the story, but her children – thousands of spiders – will hopefully continue her legacy.  I don’t recall seeing Mr. Spider enter the equation at any point to make Charlotte’s pregnancy occur, but maybe I forgot something. 

Watership Down.   Everything I heard about this was always “whoa, dark!  Not for kids” etc.  I didn’t find it particularly cynical, but here’s the story.  The book was written by Richard Adams in 1972, the most famous animated adaptation dates from 1978.  Jon Hurt was the only voice I recognized. 

A bunch of rabbits live in one warren (rabbit complex).  One of them, Fiver, gets all these visions which predict something bad will happen.  Enough rabbits take him seriously to leave and try to find a new place to live.  Along the way they find a goose with an injured wing; in exchange for helping him restore his health, the goose acts as their aerial reconnaissance once he recovers. 

When they arrive at their desired destination, atop a hill, they find a competing warren run by some total asshole old rabbit.   It doesn’t help that apparently 100% of those rabbits who came here were male, and need female rabbits to continue the warren.  They find some “Does” at a farm, defended by a dog on a chain and a nasty cat, as well as some in the police state warren.

Eventually there’s a final confrontation.   For all the “darkness” bitched about, the good guys win, although some of the rabbits have to indulge in devious methods to achieve their goals.  The most cynical thing you might observe about this is a tacit acknowledgement that sometimes the good guys have to do things which aren’t entirely kosher in order to win, but since they’re up against thoroughly bad guys, the latter aren’t really in much of a position to complain.  The story contains many made-up words repeated sufficiently that their meaning can be fairly easily ascertained by the context, e.g. “Owsla”, the secret police/military arm of the warren.

  

Having said that, unlike the next installment, I don’t see “Watership Down” as an allegory for human behavior.  It looks more like a straight story about rabbits, period.  To the extent some human stories have some parallels (e.g. Homer’s Odyssey) that looks more like Adams simply used those as a template for this story rather than intending this story to act as an allegory for anything else.   Count it as appropriate for children in grades 7-12.

Animal Farm.  I’ve commented on Orwell on multiple occasions already.  My sixth grade teacher in Paris referred me to this back when we had a presentation on McCarthy, but I couldn’t digest the story with my limited intellect at the time.  I read it later and purchased the animated film on DVD.  My prior comments on this were actually fairly limited, so it looks like a more detailed description and analysis is appropriate given the current context.  Orwell wrote it during WWII but it couldn’t be published until after the war was over - an obvious critique of Soviet Russia while Hitler still breathes?  Wait a bit....  The most famous animated adaptation dates from 1954, obviously well within the Cold War. 

The animals on the farm overthrow the farmer and establish their own government, run by the pigs, ostensibly for the benefit of all the animals.  Initially the animals are excited and everyone does their part to help rebuild the farm and make it self-sufficient.  Boxer, the horse, naturally does most of the heavy work and the rest of the animals have no choice but to rely upon his brute strength to get things done.  They successfully fight off an attack by farmers to reclaim the farm (farmer with his colleagues worried that their own farms will suffer the same fate) – an excellent analogy to the Russian Civil War.   But the pigs begin dealing with the town banker (capitalist) and begin using the dogs, orphaned in that battle and now grown up under the pigs’ control, as enforcers against the animals themselves (Cheka > NKVD).  Eventually the animals realize that the pigs have simply taken over the role as oppressors and are running the farm for their own benefit, not that of the animals as a collective.  Cue famous addition to the barn-scrawled rules:  ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL, BUT SOME ANIMALS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS.

All three stories are worthy in and of themselves, probably suitable for enjoyment by children in increasing age and maturity (Charlotte’s Web >> Watership Down >> Animal Farm).   Perhaps follow this up with Pink Floyd's epic tales of dogs, pigs, and sheep.   :D     

Orwell Rocks!

Well, really this is a review of Road to Wigan Pier, but since that title is supremely lame for the book itself, I couldn’t use it as the blog title either.

Wigan is a city in England, northwest of Manchester.  It is not on the coast, so the “pier” was just a riverfront with no access to the Atlantic Ocean, much less any beaches.   The title really says almost nothing about what the whole thing was about.  [All I knew about Wigan before this is that they have a soccer team.]

For those of you familiar with only 1984 and Animal Farm, let me clue you in.  Orwell had a substantial volume of nonfiction as well, and remarkably, his non-fiction is at least as entertaining as his fiction.  Mainly it’s because he had such a phenomenal way of describing things, a perpetual WTF attitude, that he could describe paint drying and it would be interesting. 

Up until this point I considered Homage to Catalonia, his “WTF” account of his brief experience in the POUM (non-Stalinist, socialist militia) in the Spanish Civil War, to be his best nonfiction.  He was in Barcelona in May 1937 when the various Republican factions – Fascists miles away – took shots at each other.  If you want to know about the Spanish Civil War, read this one.

Anyhow.  In Road, he goes up to northern England and visits different cities, notably Wigan, but also Sheffield (home of Def Leppard, not mentioned herein).  In particular he went into the coal mines to see what that was like.  As a tall guy, he had a hard time.  He came away with a much better understanding, tactically, of what coal miners do.  But he also came away with a better understanding of the bigger picture of working class relations in that part of the country.  There’s really no substitute for actually going somewhere to see with your own eyes, hear with your ears, smell with your own nose, taste with your own tongue, and feel with your own appropriate body part, what is actually going on. 

In the second half of the book, he takes issue with the contemporary socialist movement.  At that time – 1937 – Hitler and Mussolini were well in power, but so was Stalin in the USSR.  Capitalist democracies appeared helpless to fight the two extremes (what he would say once the US entered the war, might be something else).  One thing he noticed was that very few socialists were actually FROM the working class.  Most were bourgeois.  Another thing he noticed is that very few of these bourgeois socialists had ever even met, much less associated with, any members of the working class they professed to champion.  To the contrary, they could not bring themselves to shed their existing unease and contempt for these folk.  Moreover, on the few occasions in which they did, they could not resist acting as snobs, intellectual and otherwise, and using Marxist jargon, and going on about how great Stalin was and what a wonderful place the Soviet Union was.  The perverse result was that too many workers, whose interests were served by the socialists and opposed by the fascists - and were often even able to recognize that for themselves - were driven into the enemy's arms by the spectacularly poor job the socialists did of selling their cause.  Socialist Facepalm.  

I recall a Nation article ages ago written by Michael Moore.  Yeah, the fat “Roger & Me” guy.  He bitched about ivory tower socialist intellectuals who never come near a factory worker, wrapped up in Marxist ideology and jargon – “proletariat”, “bourgeois”, “class consciousness”, etc. – none of which means anything to the GM, Ford, and Chrysler workers who the socialists are trying to reach.   His advice (copying Orwell’s): “Hang out with them, go to a hockey game, go hunting with them.  Talk about how the company is screwing them over.  Whatever you do, don’t go on about Marxism.”  I assume Moore had read Road, as Orwell said the same thing to his colleagues in England in 1937. 

Orwell also reviews much of the contemporary socialist literature, plus H.G. Wells and Aldous Huxley (Brave New World).  Again, I found his analysis of the contemporary situation and his fellow socialists to be riveting.  What I find especially refreshing is his ability to concede points and play devil’s advocate. 

I’m not now, nor have I ever been a socialist, and I doubt I ever will be.  However, by far the most persuasive case that can be made, is made by Orwell.   His closest contemporary equivalents are Christopher Hitchens (RIP) and Michael Moore.  Neither are very persuasive; both are too arrogant, too stuck up, too self-satisfied.  I’m not aware they were coordinating on the same team, though Hitchens seemed to fight the more intellectual capitalists while Moore focused on the trenches, as it were.  I don’t consider either to be particularly effective.  Judging by the outcome last November, Moore did a poor job getting the American proletariat to oppose Donald Trump.  What’s even more remarkable, and what Orwell was noting in his own time, is that most of Trump’s opposition, and Hillary’s support, came from people we’d describe as bourgeois:  upper class white people.  In fact, much of what Orwell describes in 1937 could also apply to 2017 – a surprising amount.  I have to wonder how recently Bernie Sanders or Jill Stein have consulted Orwell.  Not recently, it seems…if at all.  Then again, I doubt Trump is even aware of Orwell’s existence, much less having read any of his books.

As for my own readers, I would advise everyone, socialist or not, to read this book if they haven’t already.  Orwell’s analysis is superb.  It’s witty.  It’s funny (far more so than 1984 or Animal Farm).  Non-socialists will probably enjoy reading Orwell take the piss out of his fellow socialists.  And the socialists among you may well enjoy Orwell’s wit and honesty. 

Or maybe not.  

Communism vs. National Socialism vs. Capitalism

This is NOT a rehash of my GULAG v. HOLOCAUST blog, nor is it an attempt to apologize for or glorify National Socialism, but more of an overall discussion on a wider topic, authoritarianism vs. totalitarianism vs. capitalism.

Authoritarian regimes are typically the right-wing dictatorships and juntas, such as Brazil’s military from 1964-85, Marcos, Pinochet, Salazar, Batista, the various South Vietnamese governments from 1955-75, etc.  Really you just have a thug or general who wants power for its own sake, little excuse beyond that, and all he cares about it making sure he gets his “piece of the action” and enough pussy (or whatever his particular vice happens to be).  He has no grand vision, no big plans, no grandiose scheme or desire to micromanage the entire country down to the last molecule – and no pretensions thereof.

Totalitarian regimes are what we think of like 1984, where the state encompasses the entire society and attempts to control literally everything.  With the exception of Nazi Germany, they are invariably communist regimes: Soviet Russia, Red China, Vietnam, Eastern Europe, Cuba, North Korea.  From cradle to grave, the regime seeks to modify not merely our behavior but our very thoughts.  Unlike authoritarian regimes, which rarely bother to justify their existences, power, or authority, totalitarian regimes cloak their actions in the veneer of ideology and moral superiority.  “We represent the PEOPLE – if you oppose us, you oppose the people, and must be struck down.”

Class.  According to Marxist doctrine, there are three classes: the aristocracy (kings, queens, nobles), the bourgeois (merchants and capitalists), and the proletariat (workers and peasants).  Under feudalism, the aristocracy rules, with a small but growing bourgeois class.  Eventually the bourgeois overthrows the aristocracy and institutes capitalism, then sets about exploiting the proletariat until it too is eventually overthrown in a proletarian revolution - and we get socialism.  Eventually the state withers away to a point of anarchy called communism, and we all live happily ever after.  “Communist” regimes are actually socialist, as true communism has never been achieved in any country – nor is it ever likely.

Under a socialist dictatorship, the state is supposedly the legal representative of the proletariat.  The bourgeois are dispossessed and thrown into re-education camps to be rehabilitated into socialist society.  Without any class besides proletariat, such a society is, theoretically, classless.  By comparison, under the fascist/National Socialist dictatorship, all three classes are subjugated to the state, which represents the people.  Worker, farmer, businessman, industrialist, all are enslaved to the state.  For this reason, fascists and communists ostensibly hate each other and oppose each other vigorously, yet the reality is that they have far more in common than the theoretical ideological deviations would suggest.

In many countries in Western Europe, the socialist party has taken power, yet without installing the dreaded dictatorship of the proletariat.  Instead, they maintain the market system, individual rights, and otherwise a capitalist democracy, though with 90% taxes, free health care, free education, 40 hour work week, pensions, etc.  These are essentially capitalist countries with substantial doses of socialism added.

Stalin v. Trotsky.  Neither had much of any ideological differences with the other: Trotsky was merely the loser of the power struggle.

Cult of personality.  Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro, Tito, Ho Chi Minh, Ceaucescu.  Despite being about “the people”, communist regimes oddly focused on strong single personalities, individual leaders.  The reality was, none of these leaders cared about the people: they simply cared about power for its own sake, and were predictably brutal and ruthless about suppressing revolt even from within the proletariat.  Lenin dismissed reports of cannibalism among Ukrainian peasants by laughing that this meant they were too weak to oppose him.  The rare examples of sincere patriots inevitably became the first victims of the purges, in which the revolution weeds out the idealists in favor of the pragmatists - who are the only ones devious and ruthless enough to survive or prosper under such regimes.

1984 & Animal Farm.  George Orwell’s pair of books, each explaining these concepts in a different way.  1984 examines the nature of the state itself, which ultimately exists for its own sake, against its own people.  Ayn Rand once defined “dictatorship” as a war between the government and its own, legally disarmed, people.  And this is explained in even more detail in the book Winston reads, provided to him by O’Brien, who is pretending to be part of the resistance but is in fact an officer of the secret police.  Odd, though:  O'Brien turns out to be more of a source of information to Winston than the other way around, and the torture Winston endures is not to extract information - he knows far less than O'Brien does, and little of value - but to corrupt him, force him to betray his lover, and destroy him as a person and an individual.  Indeed, the movie "The Lives of Others", concerning a Stasi agent in East Berlin in the mid 80s, shows that the quality of life of the secret police really wasn't that much better than that of the poets, playwrights, actors, etc. who were the victims of the police state.  It was all one big  dark, depressing prison for everyone concerned.

            Animal Farm works on several different levels.  The animals sincerely want liberation from their human master, and were reasonable in following the pigs’ revolution.  But you can also see how the worker – Boxer, the horse – is ultimately exploited by the same revolution, and how the pigs eventually took over the same role as the human farmer.  Even the vicious, snarling, dogs act as the enforcers for the pigs.

Nazi Germany.  The notable exception, the only totalitarian regime which was not communist.  The Nazis had an ideology, a Final Solution, the SS, the Gestapo, and the will to carry it out.  Hitler had a master plan, as described (vaguely) in Mein Kampf, for anyone patient enough to read it.  Cloaked in German nationalism and anti-semitism, the Nazis terrorized not only the Jews and subject occupied nations, but their own people, as willing victims, co-conspirators in mass insanity as they may have been.  But while the world is fairly unanimous in challenging and condemning this form of totalitarianism, equally oppressive and evil forms – especially Soviet Russia – found no shortage of “useful idiots” apologizing for, or even supporting, their ideologies.  Tom Morello, I’m talking to you...

Statism vs. capitalism.  For all its faults, capitalism remains the ideal form of economic system.  Authoritarian and totalitarian regimes (Nazi and socialist) can be collectively referred to as statist or collectivist.  They boil down to the priority: individual vs. collective, the needs of the many vs. the needs of the few.  The cruel irony of collectivist regimes is that in their rampant and fanatic devotion to “the people”, “society”, “the collective”, etc. they completely negate the individual, yet society is, ultimately, nothing more than an aggregate of individuals.  The ultimate minority is, of course, the individual, who is the ultimate victim, the sacrificial offering to the sacred collective.  By destroying the individual as a person with any rights or importance per se, the collectivists ultimately destroy themselves.  Without freedom for the individual, there is no freedom for anyone.

The response to this, from most socialists, is that left to its own devices, capitalism produces various market failures: poverty, hunger, economic injustice, inequality of wealth and income.  Politics and economics, the distribution of scarce, limited and finite resources, is too important to be left up to the whims, caprices, and apparently random vicissitudes of at best an impersonal market and at worst an aggregate of sometimes monopolistic and oligopolistic markets.  Why leave this to chance, when there are highly intelligent planners who can redistribute wealth and income, and micromanage the entire country, far better?  If we need to do this by a brutal dictatorship, well, so be it – better than being run by Big Business, right?  Raise the spectre of a country run by GM, IBM, Ford, or Bill Gates to scare us into the arms of Big Brother.  (Comrade Moore & Comrade Nader will be happy to oblige).

Who are these geniuses?  They’re the socialists themselves.  Have we ever met an avowed socialist who was not highly intelligent AND fully confident in his or her intelligence and wisdom (e.g. Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, or Christopher Hitchens).  The one problem with their “brain the size of a planet” issue is that no two socialists can ever agree on anything (see “Life of Brian” for this symptom of continually splitting socialist factions).  Fortunately for us, that is.  But there were no shortage of highly intelligent opponents to collectivism, including, but not limited to, Ayn Rand, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, and Ludwig von Mises.  Bottom line is that for all its faults, capitalism keeps us free – which is far more than can be said for its alternatives.