Figures

Snowball

SNOH-bawl
The inventive pig expelled by the dogs, thereafter blamed for every failure, Trotsky written in hoofbeats.
Documented

The Trotsky function

Snowball organizes committees, designs the windmill, and fights at the Battle of the Cowshed before being chased out by Napoleon's nine dogs, mirroring Trotsky's 1929 expulsion. Afterwards his record is rewritten: the battle hero becomes the battle saboteur, and eventually an agent of Jones from the start.

Assessment: Documented: the parallel to Trotsky's exile and demonization is Orwell's stated design.
Stories

The scapegoat algorithm

The general lesson: once a regime has an expelled rival, all explanation costs drop to zero. Crop failure? Snowball. Broken eggs? Snowball. The absent enemy is the perfect enemy because he never contradicts the accusation.

Assessment: Stories: the novel demonstrates it so cleanly that 'Snowball did it' survives as political shorthand.
Interesting claims

The other pig hypothesis

The heretical question the fable leaves open: would Snowball have been different? He takes milk too; he sits at the committee table. The book refuses to show us the other timeline, which is itself the answer: systems select for Napoleons regardless of who draws the plans.

Assessment: Interesting: Orwell kept Snowball sympathetic but never innocent; the milk detail is on page one of the regime.
Sources and further reading
  1. George Orwell, Animal Farm (1945), chapters 4-7
  2. Trotsky's expulsion from the USSR (1929), historical record
  3. Orwell, 1947 Ukrainian preface on the allegory's design
Worth asking

Why does every regime need an enemy more than it needs a friend?

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GR8YFILES · competing origin stories, labeled by the strength of their evidence · readers 14+