"Animal Farm" by George Orwell

[Marburg]

Orwell did see the world as it is now & did a stellar job hitting the nail on the head in his own way.

Granted, throughout history, Humans are time & again guilty of repeating past mistakes & have always & will always repeat them.

That's why alot of the things he wrote hit so close to home then, now, & will still hit home with people 500 years after every one of us here are dust in the dirt.

Now, assuming that Animal Farm & 1984 are similar just because they are written by the same guy & have politics as the driving force of both stories is like assuming that the flicks 'A Clockwork Orange' & 'Full Metal Jacket' are similar because they were both violent & both made by Stanly Kubrick...or assuming that 'Schindler's List' & 'Minority Report' are similar because they're both Spielberg flicks that deal with murder.

Animal Farm is a fairy tale about how absolute power corrupts absolutely regardless of the best intentions one may have in the beginning.

1984 is nothing like that.

::Edit- Incedently, another modern fairy tale that is highly worth checking into is 'Watership Down' by Richard Adams::

---

[Canadianguy]

It's not, however I could not find 1984 on the interwebz, and I have yet to read it. This is the book I chose for my project at collage.

I know where to find 1984 on the internet. Only problem is you need to be able to read french.

---

[n00bl3t]

Both 1984 and Animal Farm are well worth the read.

(Yes, I have read them both.)

---

Anything I say is not intended as offensive, and to try and deliberately misinterpret it as such would be an attempt at trolling via misrepresentation.

It's not a conspiracy, it's localised bias. They're not intelligent enough to form a conspiracy.

[ivr56]

Read both. Animal Farm and Movie 2 years ago.

Just finished a unit on 1984 in English :D
Have to do a essay on it tomorrow. x.x
Good Read, Haven't yet to see the movie though.

---

[Vergil]

You only need to read half of Animal farm. The rest is absolute **** dripping with venom.

---

Xelgion, you have done a marvelous thing. Eppy is begging for mercy, in full caps.

[Bubbles]

The movie:
1984

Another good read is 'Lord of the Flies' from William Golding.

Its about a group of children being marooned on an island, and the kind of society that they build without the experience of elders. Discovery reminded of this book a few times;)

Orwell did see the world as it is now & did a stellar job hitting the nail on the head in his own way.

The way it is now?
He was a social democrat describing the kind of society Stalin, Mussolini, and Hitler were building, if I remember correctly. During his time, democracies appeared to be losing against Fascism and Communism.

What do you mean with 'the world as it is now? His now or our now?

[FooFighter]

1984 and Animal Farm both are about roughly the same issue - Socialism/Communism combined with Authoritarianism - though quite different to read, aye. Without any doubt, both are very recommendable reads, and excellently suited for class presentations, too - just remember to analyze them thoroughly and to draw the parallels between characters in the books and historical personalities (Snowball - Trotsky, Frederick - Hitler, the Raven - the Church etc); there's a lot to be found in these books.

The way it is now?

Well, quite a few nations are slowly walking down the path to authoritarianism (again), usually for seemingly noble reasons. Australia wants to fight CP on the Internet - but do they take sites down? No, they create a Great Firewall of Australia, also blocking dissident's blogs. Europe wants to combat racism - what do they do? They introduce hate speech laws, which are even worse. The USA - look at laws like the PATRIOT Act, which, while a good idea and definitely helpful in fighting terrorism (something I wish to remark that I fully support), are *very* open to abuse.