Greed for Power, and Cruelty: Making Followers In Animal Farm, George Orwell demonstrates the danger of unquestioning acceptance of ideas and actions that are “supposed to represent” a better way of life. Throughout the book there are many examples of hatred and evil undermining what sounds like a great utopia when introduced, but not when they are lived. The ideas are very familiar because they are based on those that drove the Russian Revolution, and what went wrong with it. The difference between a nice Utopian idea and what goes wrong in real life has to do with human nature. Greed is real, in that it drives people to do things. There is greed for power, greed for food, and greed for whatever a greedy person might want. While not everyone is greedy, some people are very much so. The very greedy people make life difficult for the rest of us. This is not such a big problem in democracies, which are constructed to balance any action with the ideas of many groups and rights. In a dictatorship, like the Soviet Union, a person like Stalin can determine every key aspect of most individuals’ lives. The more violent a Stalin is, the more power a Stalin has; and the farther from Utopia are the lives of the common people. Napoleon’s ideas and actions in Animal Farm were similar to those first of Lenin and later of Stalin during the development of the Soviet Union, which resulted in the deaths and terror that deeply affected the lives of tens of millions of Soviet citizens. For example, Napoleon had made other high-status animals confess to things they had never committed. When the eggs of the three hens were crushed really by Napoleon’s dog, they were forced to confess, “…Snowball had appeared to them in a dream and incited them to disobey Napoleon’s orders” (93). The dogs were then murdered, making Napoleon the only ruler. Even though Napoleon clearly killed the hens’ eggs, they st...
