Orwell's Windmill Sounds Familiar

(Originally published in the Northeast News, March 4, 2009, p. 19)

George Orwell’s Animal Farm, published in 1945, is one of the great novels of the twentieth century. It is typically read as an allegory, as a symbolic narrative in which the literal subject corresponds to another subject.

In Orwell’s novel, talking animals take control of the farm on which they live. The allegorical meaning the story is based on parallels to Stalinist Russia. The brilliance of great literature, though, is its peculiar relevance to all people in all eras.

Indeed, Orwell’s novel involves a windmill that brings to mind the potential Site C dam, providing an allegory for our times.

After taking control of their farm, the animals, led by clever pigs, consider their own megaproject, a windmill that will “supply the farm with electrical power.” The official justification is grounded in a vision of domestic well-being: the windmill is supposed to light the stalls (or homes), warming the populace in winter.

But the project is controversial: “The whole farm was deeply divided on the subject of the windmill.” The aptly named Snowball, a pig who dreams big, is one of the project’s early advocates.

Snowball is a visionary, a good talker with big ideas, an expert at forming committees. Snowball concedes that construction will be “a difficult business,” involving many logistical problems.

Another community leader opposes the windmill, contending that “food production” is “the great need of the moment.”

The animals become divided into factions, but the dream of the windmill wins out, long after Snowball’s exile, and all of the animals work “like slaves” to turn the vision into a reality: “they grudged no effort or sacrifice,” believing everything they did “was for the benefit of themselves and those of their kind who would come after them . . .”

As the project continues, however, the official goal of domestic well-being gives way to cross-border, capitalistic notions of free trade and commercial profit. Thus, even as the leaders deny their true motives, there is a kind of mission creep that possesses the ideology of a cancer cell: growth at all costs.

“One Sunday morning,” the animals are told that their farm “will engage in trade with the neighbouring farms: not, of course, for any commercial purpose but simply in order to obtain certain materials which were urgently necessary.”

In time, “the needs of the windmill” come to “override everything else.” And, long after its completion, the windmill is never put to its originally stated use: “The windmill . . . had not after all been used for generating electrical power [for the animals themselves]. It was used for milling corn, and brought in a handsome money profit.”

In the moral universe of Orwell’s fiction, the narrator expressly acknowledges that it’s hard to tell pigs from men and men from pigs. As the novel concludes, the animals are “hard at work building yet another windmill.” By this point, development has a momentum of its own, and genuine domestic needs are “no longer [even] talked about.”

George Orwell lived in tyrannical, violent times and was inclined to regard cynicism as the only healthy alternative to fanaticism. In our case, let’s hope that real life turns out better than fiction.