The final dramatic scene of Animal Farm has been playing in my brain for some time now. And daily, it seems, new events appear that show how prescient was George Orwell’s 1946 “fairy tale” — particularly as it relates to the ongoing convergence of the ruling elites of the communist/socialist world and their counterparts from the crony-capitalist world. For those who may have forgotten (or may have never read) this classic parable, it is about the animals on Manor Farm rising up and overthrowing the tyranny of Farmer Jones to establish Animal Farm, where “All men are enemies. All animals are comrades.”

At first, all is hunky-dory. The cardinal rule of the socialist Republic of Animals was that “ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL.” However, since the pigs were more intelligent, they, naturally, assumed the running of day-to-day affairs. But the other animals noted that the pigs gradually accrued new privileges and powers. Pretty soon, Animal Farm’s original Seven Commandments were reduced to one: “ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL — BUT SOME ANIMALS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS.”

The pigs, being more intelligent and ruthless (and “more equal”), ultimately usurp total dictatorial power and unleash a reign of terror on the rest of the animals. It is not difficult to see that Orwell’s pig characters — Old Major, Napoleon, Snowball, and Squealer — represent, respectively, Russian Bolshevik leaders Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, and Molotov. Besides oppressing their fellow beasts, the pigs Napoleon and Squealer also begin fraternizing with the enemy — men — and begin adopting human habits, such as living in the farmer’s home, drinking alcohol, smoking tobacco, and enjoying other luxuries, while the other animals toil in misery and privation.

In the final scene of the book, the farm animals are drawn by curiosity to the farmhouse window by the sounds of conviviality. The ruling pigs and the local farmers were enjoying a festive card game and praising one another with toasts (lubricated with the once-forbidden alcohol). But the most startling thing observed by the animals peering through the window was how the faces of the pigs and the men had all become transformed: “The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”

It is much the same today, as we observe the billionaire capitalist pigmen of Wall Street and Silicon Valley hobnobbing with the billionaire communist pigmen of Moscow, Beijing, and Kiev. The most recent high-profile example of this phenomenon comes via the current kerfuffle over the $12 million donation by Soviet-born Ukrainian oligarch Len Blavatnik to the Council on Foreign Relations. Blavatnik is one of the many kleptocrats who have burst suddenly onto the financial firmament as instant billionaires by virtue of crony connections to Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping. The CFR, which serves as the main brain trust of the Deep State in America, is taking some heat from anti-corruption and human rights experts for the Blavatnik bequest. But CFR President Richard Haass defends taking the money, and the website of the CFR globalists boasts: “The Blavatnik Internship Program at CFR was established through a generous gift from the Blavatnik Family Foundation. The program provides paid internships to over one hundred interns each year.”

The cozy relationship between globalists and the communists has been growing rapidly in recent years, as communist “business moguls” have become standard features at the World Economic Forum and other lavish confabs. And, likewise, American and European globalists have flocked to glitzy tech and business summits in China and Russia. At these affairs, the recently minted Chinese and Russian billionaires are usually called “entrepreneurs,” but as we have noted many times previously, they have not earned their sudden wealth through entrepreneurial skill and free enterprise. They have amassed their enormous riches thanks to their Communist Party connections (in China) or “former” Communist Party connections (in Russia), which gave them special privileges in the “privatization” of resources previously nationalized in the name of “the people.” Russia’s super-wealthy oligarchs — Alisher Usmanov (steel, telecom, investments) — are all tied in to Vladimir Putin’s KGB-run Kremlin power structure.

Likewise, China’s economic hegemons have been hugely enriched not through the power of the market, but through the power of the state. The regimes in Moscow and Beijing are frequently (and absurdly) referred to as capitalist or “market-oriented,” but they are “capitalist” only if understood as being state capitalist or gangster capitalist, where rewards are dispensed through political power rather than through consumer choice.

If we allow the globalists to continue building their New World Order, we will soon find that our American Republic has been hideously transformed into a People’s-Animal’s Republic ruled by pitiless pigmen.

Graphic: Screen-grab from YouTube video of Animal Farm



This article originally appeared in the November 4, 2019 print edition of The New American.

William F. Jasper is senior editor of The New American.