At the end of the celebrated novel Animal Farm by George Orwell, the farm animals look from their revolutionary leaders, the pigs, to their former oppressors, the farmers, and begin to see that they are both essentially alike. Orwell’s point was eloquently made: under the enticing delusion of liberation, the animals replaced one set of thugs with another.
Orwell has been widely interpreted as inferring that capitalism is okay, because he so obviously illustrates how communism betrayed humanity. Most people miss a very important point: the farmers (capitalists) are as bad as the pigs.
George Orwell died in 1950. The CIA’s Howard Hunt (who later helped burgle the Watergate offices of the Democratic National Committee on behalf of Richard Nixon’s Re-election Committee) dispatched some agents to Britain to buy the film rights of the book from Orwell’s widow. In the subsequent animated version of the movie, the farmer-capitalists in the conclusion were deleted.
And here, of course, the wonderful incidence of enemies ending up behaving like each other. The U.S. government lied to encourage Americans to believe that the Communists are liars.
[When you think about it, that’s quite an admission. It’s as if the CIA was admitting that the “good” capitalists it was defending were intent upon slaughtering and eating the “workers”. But that was okay, because the Communists were going to do the same thing anyway. 2011-03-04]
The Animal Farm revisionism was only part of a concerted campaign by the CIA to try to discredit communism by sponsoring a steady stream of propaganda against it through cultural agencies, exhibitions, writers, and academics.
Obviously, the very means by which the CIA tried to prove that the capitalist west was “free” powerfully undermined the very notion that the U.S. and it’s allies were substantively more honest, truthful, or ethical than their communist enemies.
Among those who were compromised by this campaign: Nicholas Nabokov (the writer’s cousin), Stephen Spender, Isaiah Berlin, Encounter Magazine, James Mitchener, and Mary McCarthy.
I recall a piece in Reader’s Digest by James Mitchener in which he essentially argued that the students at Kent State deserved to be shot by the National Guard because some of the female protestors used obscenities, and this was an extreme provocation to the National Guardsmen who were largely effete southern gentlemen who were shocked that ladies would use obscenities. I wonder if that particular piece was subsidized. Perhaps it should have been.
These and other gems are recounted in a book by British writer Frances Stonor Saunders, in “The Cultural Cold War: The C.I.A. and the World of Arts and Letters”
Trust no one.