Jared Whitley writes at Townhall.com about a pending update of one of George Orwell’s most famous books.
It was reported recently that Hollywood is making a new animated version of George Orwell’s classic Animal Farm, directed by and starring Andy “Gollum” Serkis.
The book is an explicit allegory of the 1917 Russian Revolution. Following a pig named Napoleon’s flag of equality, talking barnyard animals overthrow their human master under, only for “Comrade” Napoleon to quickly become an even worse dictator. Perhaps the most famous quote from the book is Napoleon’s justification that, “All Animals Are Equal. But Some Animals Are More Equal Than Others.” …
… While details about Serkis’s adaptation are still largely unknown, he has promised to “update” the material for the modern era. Quote:
“I mean, look around the world, what’s happening, you can see how eternally relevant that book is still. But the ways and the language of telling that story have changed. And the targets, the characters that are being satirized are not Stalin and Trotsky and all of those people, they are — I’m not going to say who.”
Eventually Serkis will of course, but those of us paying attention figure the targets will not be the actual communists among us today. The mindless pawn who wrote the afore-hyperlinked SlashFilm article mentions “totalitarian threats as pervasive and ruthless as Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and the Republican Party of the United States.” Yes, it shows an astute understanding of modern events to lump together parties who have respectively 1) invaded a foreign country, 2) put their own citizens in actual concentration camps, and 3) sent out mean tweets.
There’s every reason to update Animal Farm, but no intellectually honest way to update the villains as anything other than the woke.
For whatever reason, many leftists in academia or otherwise look the other way at communism’s century of butchery, insisting they’re Marxists as a sign of moral purity.
