Union Of Burma Quotes

After a slow few miles across the outskirts of the town, past the Scott Market and the Holy Trinity Cathedral and the ancient Sule Pagoda, Sir Hubert’s Rolls-Royce (now with a collector in Baltimore, Maryland) finally turned into Fytche Square, where a small party of British and Burmese notables were already assembled expectantly against the charcoal sky. Speeches were given, the Union Jack was lowered for the last time, and the new flag of the Union of Burma was hauled up, the faces of the young Burmese politicians beaming with happiness. The governor shook hands with the republic’s new president and prime minister while several of the Englishwomen, wives of senior officials, quietly wept.

The revolution is led by pigs with a vision of an egalitarian utopia free from tyrannical human beings, but their ideals are gradually abandoned as power goes to their heads and they become cruel and greedy. They decree that only pigs are allowed to eat the apples grown in the orchard (nutritionally essential for a pig’s brain, they claim), and they breed a terror squad of dogs to police the hens, sheep, cows and horses living on the farm. As the pigs take on the luxuries of the humans they fought to overthrow—sleeping in the farmhouse and swilling whisky—the other animals die of overwork and starvation. Orwell had based Animal Farm on the Russian Revolution of 1917 and Stalin’s fearsome drive to collectivize the Soviet Union’s farmland, resulting in the death of millions of peasants.