MSNBC’s Krystal Ball Claims Animal Farm Was Pro-Communist
There is great news for fans of George Orwell, who warned of the perils of the sort of government that is now consolidating power in our country. Even after liberals have total control, his books may not have to go the way of classics like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn — not if they can be repurposed with the help of outlandish lies made possible by ignorance and doublethink:
MSNBC host Krystal Ball suggested Tuesday that George Orwell’s famously anti-communist novel “Animal Farm” is an allegory for capitalism run amok – immediately setting the hair of literature professors across the country on fire.
Aside from the part about the hair on fire, this is completely on the level — even the preposterous name “Krystal Ball.” She ran for Congress (as a Democrat, of course) in 2010.
This fundamental transformation of a book attacking oligarchical collectivism into pro-communist literature occurred while Krystal was defending the views of French socialist Thomas Piketty, who is very much in vogue among the ever more openly Marxist Democrat party these days.
Krystal didn’t like it that proponents of economic liberty criticize Piketty:
“Even the august and ostensibly economically literate Wall Street Journal tells him to read ‘Animal Farm,’” she noted. “Animal Farm? Hmm. Isn’t that Orwell’s political parable of farm animals where a bunch of pigs hog up all the economic resources, tell the other animals they need all the food because they’re the makers and then scare up the prospect of a phony bogeyman every time their greed is challenged? Sounds familiar.”
For the benefit of those who like Krystal never managed to get through the weighty 140-page tome:
In the “Animal Farm” written by renowned British political writer George Orwell in 1945 – not the “Animal Farm” that exists in Krystal Ball’s head – a group of farm animals overthrow their human owner and declare “All animals are equal.” Food is evenly distributed and political decisions are made by the community.
But a group of pigs immediately sets about using the politics of equality to accumulate power, exhorting the most powerful and successful workers to toil for the common good while they bask in the fruits of that labor. At the end the pigs become indistinguishable from their former masters, and their farm’s charter is amended to “All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.”
Leaving aside the obvious historical parallels between Animal Farm and the Soviet Union, the inescapable message is that government-enforced equality inevitably leads to oppression and further inequality, as fallible humans (or pigs) use powerful enforcement tools for their own personal gain.
Orwell himself referred to Animal Farm as his novel “against Stalin” — a tyrant who exploited the same ideology advanced by Piketty and Ms. Ball, both of whom presumably see themselves as belonging in the farmhouse smoking cigars with the other pigs, not out in the barn with the animals who aren’t as equal.
Krystal Ball with a less equal animal. Yes, that is
really her.
On a tip from Jester. Cross-posted at Moonbattery.