This interesting short documentary by AJ+, explores the cultural war between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. In an effort to project Communism as the evil against capitalist West and the “free world”, CIA had to covertly interfere through various ways in art, music, literature, philosophy.
In one of these cases, the documentary reveals how CIA altered the ending of Orwell’s ‘Animal Farm’ to project Communism as the sole tyrannic system. It is also interesting the fact that the case involved an animated film, indicating that CIA’s cultural propaganda was targeting minor Americans in order to “train” them ideologically.
According to the story, George Orwell, who wrote such middle-school classics as 1984 and Animal Farm, described himself as a Democratic Socialist. And he was actually pretty anti-Stalinist and anti-Soviet-style socialism, something which was unusual among Leftist circles at the time.
The British government started this trend of translating Orwell’s novels and distributing them to foreign audiences. It was such good work. It was so readable. It was so accessible to foreign audiences. And the CIA noticed this and followed the British example.
His books Animal Farm and 1984 explored themes of totalitarianism, government control, repression of free speech and even individual identity and human relationships. And that’s where the CIA turned to Hollywood.
When the animated film, Animal Farm, was released in 1954, there was one major difference between the book and the film: the ending.
In the book, the oppressed farm animals look at both the human farmers and the pigs, and they’re unable to differentiate between the two. It was a metaphor for the tyranny of both capitalism and communism. The farmers were the capitalists and the pigs were the communists.
But that didn’t fly with the CIA. The CIA covertly provided funding for the film, and produced an ending that only included the pigs – meaning no equivocation.