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Windmill In Animal Farm

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In George Orwell’s Animal Farm, the windmill that the animals build symbolizes totalitarian triumph, highlights the novel’s Soviet parallels, and emphasizes various themes and character traits. The windmill reveals the despotic and megalomanic tendencies of the pigs, particularly Napoleon, and the hardworking and naïve nature of Boxer, the horse. It also brings the themes, such as the abuse of language to bolster power, and the danger of a naïve working class, to light. Animal Farm’s symbolic windmill certainly functions as a device to draw parallels between the failed communism in the Soviet Union and the failed animalism (the animals’ version of communism) in the Animal Farm. In the novel, the windmill is proposed as a necessary technology that would improve the lives of the animals drastically in the long run, but would require hard work and some concessions on the animals’ part. This closely mimics the forced industrialization attempts carried out by Stalin in the USSR. Like forced industry in Russia, the windmill was a useful way for Napoleon, or Stalin, to gain full, despotic control over the working class. The windmill allowed Napoleon to enforce harsh restrictions on food and sleep, as well as remove equality from animalism by presenting the pigs as higher beings. This is clearly an example of the triumph of autocratic power. Industrialization in Stalinist Russia was similar in that it placed Stalin as the dictator, and allowed him to exploit the working

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