STOCKHOLM, June 3 (IPS) – War and disinformation are intimately linked. May 29 is observed globally as Communication day and given the ongoing war in Ukraine, it is inevitable to think of the propaganda campaigns of solidarity, carried out by warring factions and far from indifferent bystanders.
What I want to do most… is to turn political writing into an art –George Orwell
Not only news reporting, but fabricated content such as movies, novels, fables and legends are part of a global media network and like news broadcasting, they can provide Insights and alternative perspectives to reality, as well as being used as a means of deception. An example is the novel by George Orwell Animal Farm.
I was reminded of this when a few weeks ago I watched Polish director Agnieszka Holland’s 2019 film Mr. Jones, a co-production between Polish and Ukrainian media companies. In Ukrainian, the movie is named а авдиThe Price of Truth.
It tells the story of Gareth Jones, an aspiring young Welsh journalist who in 1933, after gaining fame for his exclusive interview with Adolf Hitler, was able to apply for permission to enter the Soviet Union. A privilege mainly attributed to Jones serving as secretary to former British prime minister Lloyd George.
Jones’ intention to interview Joseph Stalin failed to materialize, although he was offered an exclusive guided tour of pre-selected industries in the Donbas. On the way there, Jones twice passed his “controller”, jumped off a train in the Ukrainian countryside and became a shocking witness to the Ukrainians. Holodomorcatastrophic famine that killed at least 3 million people.
Gareth Jones has documented empty villages, starving people, cannibalism and forced grain collection. Upon his return to the UK, he struggled to get his story taken seriously and was ultimately successful when his articles were published by Defender of Manchester and New York Evening Postthus revealing the conceit of the Soviet propaganda machine, which concealed and concealed the enormous scope of the disaster and the Soviet Government’s inferiority complex about its origin and development.
The film ends by documenting how Jones two years after his reveal was murdered while reporting in Inner Mongolia, betrayed by an undercover guide with connections to the Soviet secret service. .
Movie Mr. Jones highlighted the relevance of a group of deceived, or even corrupted, journalists, most importantly among them New York Times‘Walter Duranty, who from a life of privilege and indulgence in Moscow became the spokesman for Stalin’s terror regime. For his “unbiased and well-written” papers, Duranty was awarded the prestigious United States Prize in 1932. Pulitzer Prize.
While watching the movie, I was a bit bewildered when I saw some guests presenting George Orwell writing Animal Farm. The film seems to indicate that Orwell met with Gareth Jones and Animal Farm was inspired by the work of Jones. To my knowledge, Jones and Orwell have never met, although this fact does not preclude the possibility that Orwell read his articles and that Animal Farm had an important role in Ukrainian politics.
Famine and occasional government efforts to cover them up are an essential feature of Orwell’s fables. It was the famine that caused the revolt of the farm-animals. However, when their work and freedom are used to benefit the selfish happiness of the tyrannical pig Napoleon, hunger and suffering return to harass the animals. The great Napoleon and his friends hide embarrassing truths about the global environment, where the mighty pig manipulates and trades with:
Hunger seemed to stare into their faces. It is absolutely essential to hide this fact from the outside world. Napoleon was well aware of the dire outcomes that could result if the truth about the food situation were known, and he decided to use Mr Whymper to give the opposite impression.
Orwell wrote Animal Farm from November 1943 to February 1944, when Britain allied with the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany. Because the Allies did not want to offend Stalin’s troops, the manuscript was rejected by British and American publishers. After much hesitation, a pamphlet publisher released the novel at the end of the war in 1945. After the Allied relations with the Soviet Union turned hostile. Animal Farm became a huge commercial success.
It is clear to everyone that the novel’s harsh criticism of the Soviet State – this is an allegory that tells about talking and thinking peasant animals, who rebel against the peasants them, in hopes of ending hunger and slavery and creating a society where all animals are equal. , free and happy. The revolution was betrayed by infighting and self-interest among its leaders – the intellectual pigs. The static food production farm is owned by hardworking animals and proudly claims to be Animal farmwith its own hymns, badges, myths, and slogans, but it ended up falling into a state of repression and violence as bad, or even worse, as before.
The almighty pig Napoleon (name in the French translation has been changed to “Caesar”) is, without a doubt, a caricature of Stalin, with his fearful and deceitful expressions, his guardians. ferocious murders brought up by himself, showing trials, political repression, murder, Stakhanovites/ Super workers, and remove ethnicity. A world full of nightmares Orwell developed further in his next novel – 1984. With Big Brother tracking your every move and where citizens are brainwashed through torture, double thinking, thought crimeand newspaper:
The Ministry of Truth – Minitrue, in Newspapereak … is amazingly different from any other object in sight. It was a giant pyramid of sparkling white concrete, soaring from terrace to terrace, 300 meters into the air. on a white face with elegant handwriting, three slogans of the Party: WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLOW, FORGETTING IS POWER.
It’s a volunteer in Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) Orwell expressed dislike of Stalinism, disgusted with Fascism, and angered at “Western indifference”:
The most confusing thing about the Spanish war was the behavior of the great powers. The war was actually won for Franco by the Germans and Italians, whose motives were clearly enough. The French and British motives are less understandable. It was well known in 1936 that if Britain only helped the Spanish Government, even with a few million pounds worth of weapons, Franco would fall and Germany’s strategy would be seriously derailed. .
In his preface to the Ukrainian edition of Animal Farm Orwell writes that after the Stalinists had gained some control of the Spanish Government, they began to hunt down and execute socialists of different views. The manhunts coincided with the great purge in the Soviet Union:
It taught me how authoritarian propaganda can easily control the opinions of enlightened people in democratic countries “the changeability of the past”. Forging, airbrushing, rewriting history: memory holes in a nutshell. And so for the past ten years, I have firmly believed that eradicating the Soviet myth is essential if we are to revive the socialist movement.
English edition of Animal Farm to refugee camps, where Soviet Army soldiers and some civilians sometimes committed suicide, instead of returning to the Soviet Union. Ihor Ševčenko, 24, a refugee of Ukrainian origin, is part of a movement for Ukraine’s independence. After learning English from listening to BBC radio, he translated Animal Farm into Ukrainian and it was spread in handwritten, or read aloud, in refugee camps. On April 11, 1946, Šev? Enko wrote to Orwell asking if he could publish his novel in Ukrainian. Orwell agreed to write the foreword and refused any royalties.
The translation was published in Munich and shipments of the book were quietly delivered to refugee camps. Its Ukrainian title is Kolhosp Tvaryn, A Collective Animal Farm, a clear allusion to Stalin’s forced collectivization made possible by the terrorist famine. However, only 2,000 copies were distributed; A truck from Munich was intercepted and searched by American troops, and an estimated shipment of 1,500 to 5,000 copies was seized and handed over to Soviet repatriation authorities and destroyed.
The first time was a few years later, the Ukrainian translation of Animal Farm highly prized by Western covert operations organizations and secretly distributed into Ukraine as anti-Soviet propaganda. It is still commonly read and appreciated in a Ukraine liberated from Soviet/Russian oppression.
If you read the novel today, it is easy to see the relationship between Napoleon’s dictator pig and the current Russian warlord, Vladimir Putin. Like Napoleon, Putin seems to want to turn the clock back to the golden age of the Russian imperial fantasy, or as in the title of Putin’s Masha Gessen study of Russia, The future is history: How totalitarianism recaptured Russia. In the animal farm Napoleon began walking upright on his hind legs, dressed in human carnival attire, and announced that the name Animal Camp had been abolished:
From there, the farm became known as the Manor Farm – which, he believed, was its correct and original name.
Source: George Orwell – Animal Farm: A Fairy Tale, also included in two appendices Orwell’s Proposed Preface and Preface to the Ukrainian edition. London: Penguin Classics 2004, Nineteen eighty-four, 1984. London: Penguin Classics 2015.
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