Socialism’s Big Lie

After witnessing how mendacious, megalomaniacal dictators Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin used linguistic trickery to tout “the greatest good for the greatest number,” thereby manipulating whole nations of people into accepting increasingly oppressive levels of collectivism, author George Orwell focused his inimitable satirical skills on debunking the type of social injustice they promoted. In Animal Farm, Orwell anthropomorphized barnyard creatures to demonstrate how evolution from a progressive welfare state to totalitarian tyranny is a self-replicating cycle. He did so by endowing animal characters with a skill authoritarian autocrats hone to perfection: making lies sound incontrovertibly truthful.