In this blog post, we will carefully examine how a “system that oppresses humanity” manifests and operates through the life and works of George Orwell.
George Orwell was a writer with a clear enemy. His life and works were both a struggle against that enemy, and at the same time, he understood that enemy better than anyone else. In some ways, one could say he knew them better than the enemies themselves. That enemy was, in a word, a “system that oppresses humanity,” and it manifested itself in different forms at various stages of Orwell’s life.
First, that enemy appeared in the form of a British boarding school. Orwell entered St. Cyprian’s Preparatory School on a scholarship; it was extremely strict and openly discriminated against children from poor families. Eton College, which he attended later, was also a place far removed from student rights. His experiences as a teenager are vividly captured in his essay “It Was Really, Really Good.” After graduating from Eton, Orwell went to Burma (now Myanmar) as an Imperial Police officer, where he experienced life as a “colonial policeman” and witnessed firsthand how imperialism oppressed people. Disillusioned, he returned home to explore poverty and the lives of workers; the works produced during this period are ‘Down and Out in Paris and London’ and ‘The Road to Wigan Pier’.
In the late 1930s, a massive system of oppression unlike any before emerged in Europe: fascism. Orwell participated in the Spanish Civil War and wrote ‘Homage to Catalonia’. When World War II broke out, he joined the BBC to assist the British government’s propaganda efforts. He also served as a war correspondent in Paris. Through his experiences in the Spanish Civil War and World War II, he sensed another formidable enemy beyond fascism and Nazism. Although it was part of the Allied forces and enjoyed the support of Western intellectuals at the time, Orwell realized that this system, while wearing the mask of human liberation, was capable of oppression as terrible as—or even worse than—that of the Nazis. That system was none other than Stalin’s Soviet Union.
The manuscript of ‘Animal Farm’, which targeted Stalin, was completed during World War II but could not be published initially due to rejection by publishers. After the war, with the support of the Western bloc—which viewed the Soviet Union as its next enemy—translations and publications of the book proliferated. Although it has long been read in Korea as an “anti-communist novel,” ‘Animal Farm’ continues to shock readers and provoke deep reflection even after Stalin’s death and the collapse of the Soviet Union. It is much like how ‘Homage to Catalonia’ remains a moving masterpiece even after the Spanish Civil War ended and the Franco regime fell. Neither work is merely propaganda directed at specific individuals or regimes. The reason is that Orwell deeply penetrated the essence of “systems that oppress humans.”
How do such systems emerge? What happens under such systems? How are the minds of the oppressors and the oppressed distorted? Yet why does the system persist rather than collapse? Why do the oppressed not resist? Orwell offers answers to these questions. In his essay “Shooting an Elephant,” he sharply analyzes how imperialism affects imperialist officials more than it does the colonized people. Orwell’s diagnosis is that such a system robs not only the oppressed of their freedom but also the oppressors of theirs. In “The Road to Wigan Pier,” he examines the psychology of coal miners who accept absurdities under the weight of “mysterious authority.”
“1984” does not merely imagine the chilling potential of a fusion between surveillance technology and power.
It demonstrates that power is always eager to indulge in such technology and that this is the very nature of power. The novel warns that once this combination reaches a certain stage, it can become extremely entrenched. Orwell’s imagination is so compelling that it plunges the reader into terror.
This is how I view the contemporary relevance of ‘Animal Farm’. The novel chillingly illustrates how an oppressive regime emerges and comes to dominate society. In particular, it lays bare, step by step, how the ideal of “overthrowing oppression” is immediately transformed into a new form of oppression. Even after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, this insight remains valid.
So what can we do? Ambitious figures like Napoleon can emerge in any society. It is difficult to completely prevent such a person from eliminating rivals through scheming and luck to seize power. The first thing that comes to mind is education. Squealer’s sophistry and demagoguery were effective precisely because the animals were ignorant. Clover could not combine letters into words, and Boxer could only recite A, B, C, and D. Democracy cannot function properly when there are many beings—like sheep, hens, and ducks—who have no interest in letters themselves.
Another is the protection of freedom of the press. There were clever young pigs who repeatedly pointed out Napoleon’s mistakes, but the dogs Napoleon had raised threatened them and eventually tore them to pieces. The scene where the young pigs meet a miserable death immediately after confessing to espionage starkly illustrates that democracy cannot function properly in a society where the press and journalists are under attack.
In ‘Animal Farm’, Napoleon is incompetent as an administrator but possesses exceptional political acumen. He understands better than anyone that education and the press are the lifeblood of democracy, and he skillfully employs not only physical threats but also psychological ones. In fact, the psychological threats are even more effective. The animals gradually become de facto hostages. The most chilling scene in the novel is when the people, having become hostages themselves, suppress freedom of the press. It is the sheep who silence the young pigs, shouting, “Four legs good, two legs bad!” This innocent, shallow, and sensationalist slogan shuts down the meeting and silences the voices of critics.
Every slogan carries that danger. That is why I am genuinely concerned about a society lacking complex discourse and substantive debate—a society instead overflowing with blind zealots, catchy slogans, and sensationalist conspiracy theories. Such a society stands on the slippery slope leading to totalitarianism. I doubt I am the only one who sees parallels with the current reality in Korea. Orwell remains a prophet of our time.
