Thursday, June 19, 2014

Why is Snowball's explanation that "the only good human being is a dead one" dangerous with regard to the spirit of the Seven Commandments?

From the most fundamental of viewpoints, the Seven
Commandments of Animalism stress a sense of community and empowerment of animals.  This
holistic vision of animal strength is rooted from how animals can come together, form
solidarity, and find strength amongst one another.  The commandments place primacy on
animals' collectivity and focuses out all else.  Snowball's explanation is problematic
to an extent because it moves this primacy to human beings.  In doing so, it helps to
make a situation whereby the animals focus their attention on the human beings.  In
trying to eliminate and focusing on what they end up despising, Snowball's comment ends
up moving the animals, specifically the pigs, closer to being human.  The idea of hating
something so much that it envelops and one becomes what they despise is evident here. 
Squealer's and Napoleon's constant justification for their power is that that animals
would not want Jones to return.  They end up using human beings as such an example of
what not to be that they end up replicating humans in their worst elements.  Snowball's
comment ends up setting the stage, inadvertently, for this.  It is the type of comment
that is manipulated by those in the position of power to substantiate their own being as
one that is closer to human beings, as opposed to divergent from it.  In doing so, the
animals, pigs specifically, lose their focus on what the purpose of the revolution was,
in terms of strengthening the animals, creating a realm distinctly different than that
of the humans.

No comments:

Post a Comment

What is the meaning of the 4th stanza of Eliot's Preludes, especially the lines "I am moved by fancies...Infinitely suffering thing".

A century old this year, T.S. Eliot's Preludes raises the curtain on his great modernist masterpieces, The Love...