{"id":3085,"date":"2014-05-02T14:57:45","date_gmt":"2014-05-02T20:57:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rayharvey.org\/?p=3085"},"modified":"2014-05-05T02:41:30","modified_gmt":"2014-05-05T08:41:30","slug":"animal-farm-and-the-krystal-ball","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rayharvey.org\/index.php\/2014\/05\/animal-farm-and-the-krystal-ball\/","title":{"rendered":"Animal Farm and the Krystal Ball"},"content":{"rendered":"

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MNSBC host and self-described \u201cDemocratic political strategist\u201d Krystal Ball was recently discussing<\/a> Thomas Piketty\u2019s latest book<\/a> — the subject of which is income inequality — when she foolishly introduced into her dithyrabmic George Orwell’s<\/a> famous book Animal Farm.<\/i><\/p>\n

\u201cEven the august and ostensibly economically literate Wall Street Journal<\/i> tells [Piketty] to read Animal Farm,\u201d Krystal Ball said. \u201cAnimal Farm, hmm. Isn\u2019t that Orwell\u2019s political parable of farm animals where a bunch of pigs hog up all the economic resources, tell the animals they need the food because they\u2019re the makers and then scare up a prospect of a phony boogie man every time their greed is challenged?\u201d<\/p>\n

No, it is not. <\/p>\n

George Orwell<\/a> was a soft socialist all his adult life and did not believe in laissez-faire, but that hardly means Animal Farm<\/i> is an anti-capitalist novel. Even the most liberal reading of Animal Farm<\/i> could not possibly conclude that it’s anything other than an indictment — an utter indictment — of Soviet Russia and totalitarianism in general, which, incidentally, was what George Orwell himself said:<\/p>\n

“Of course I intended it primarily as a satire on the Russian revolution” (source<\/a>).<\/p>\n

For those of you who haven\u2019t read Animal Farm<\/i>, every significant scene apes an actual event from Soviet history — including the Bolshevik Revolution, Trotsky fleeing the country, and Joseph Stalin\u2019s Obama–like cult of personality<\/a>.<\/p>\n

As CJ Ciaramella recently put it:<\/p>\n

“At the end of the book the once-egalitarian farm has devolved into a dictatorship where the animals toil harder, longer, and for less food than they did under the yoke of human masters before the revolution.<\/p>\n

“So Animal Farm might be the worst analogy for the problems of late capitalism. A better example might be that our system has produced someone with the critical reading skills of a potato, and then allowed her to rise to the position of a national TV news host, mostly by virtue of her membership in the entrenched political class.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Link<\/a>)<\/p>\n

Back to the books, Krystal Ball.
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MNSBC host and self-described \u201cDemocratic political strategist\u201d Krystal Ball was recently discussing Thomas Piketty\u2019s latest book — the subject of which is income inequality — when she foolishly introduced into her dithyrabmic George Orwell’s famous book Animal Farm. \u201cEven the august and ostensibly economically literate Wall Street Journal tells [Piketty] to read Animal Farm,\u201d Krystal … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Animal Farm and the Krystal Ball”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[2144],"tags":[2401,2404,2658,2402,1037,2403,2400,1019],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rayharvey.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3085"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rayharvey.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rayharvey.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rayharvey.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rayharvey.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3085"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rayharvey.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3085\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rayharvey.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3085"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rayharvey.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3085"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rayharvey.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3085"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}