Yes, Animal Farm Is Banned!

The animals of Manor Farm overthrow their human owner and establish a society based on equality. The pigs, being the smartest, take charge. Gradually, the pigs accumulate privileges, rewrite the rules, and become indistinguishable from the humans they replaced. George Orwell wrote Animal Farm as an allegory of the Russian Revolution and Stalinism, but its portrait of how revolutions devour themselves applies well beyond any single country or era.

The book has been banned from both ends of the political spectrum. During the Cold War, the New York State English Council identified it as a “problem book” in 1968 because “Orwell was a communist.” Meanwhile, Jackson County, Florida challenged it in 1982 for being “pro-communist.” DeKalb County, Georgia objected to its “political theories” the same year. Bay County, Florida, banned it from schools in 1987, though 44 parents sued and got it reinstated. In 2017, Stonington, Connecticut removed it from the eighth-grade curriculum despite teacher protests.

Why You Should Read This

Orwell wrote Animal Farm so clearly that a child can follow the plot and an adult can’t escape the implications. The commandments on the barn wall start simple (“All animals are equal”) and get quietly revised (“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others”). That single sentence is one of the sharpest political observations ever written.

The book is 112 pages. It takes an afternoon. And it will change how you read the news. Every time a leader explains why an exception to the rules is necessary, every time history gets quietly rewritten, every time the powerful insist their privileges serve the common good: you’ll hear Squealer’s voice. Orwell didn’t write a Cold War artifact. He wrote a manual for recognizing corruption, and it works on any system, any century, any revolution that starts with idealism and ends with a pig sleeping in a bed.