BUT SOME REVOLUTION SONGS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS

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Without song, you and five thousand other people cannot speak together.

You and five thousand other people, however many ideologies and principles you may have in common, will word things differently. You will interrupt each other and will use nuanced, connotative language specific to your own individual experience. You and five thousand other people will have to clarify. You and five thousand other people will have to write and speak extensively; to clear up, to unify, to define. 

Only in song can you and five thousand other people speak together, the same words at the same time, meaning basically the same thing and sending basically the same message to those outside your movement. Revolution songs hold unimaginable power to unify, to give a collective voice to the voiceless, and to allow us to be heard clearly. 

But in the echoes of revolution, as the music persists and the record starts over, the mockery moves in. The original tune of the movement is drowned out as these songs are trivialized and gentrified by private enterprise and those in power, shaped into radio hits and phrases to print on the backs of Urban Outfitters T-shirts. Those who seek unearned power, who have blended into the movement wearing the appearance of someone who fights for you and me, change these songs only slightly (near unnoticeably), and soon they become the eerie reverberations of a movement turned upside down and commandeered by the rich, the white, and the abhorrently selfish. 

We see this on the contemporary, American stage as the white-indie-fication of Nina Simone and James Brown, the words Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud in colorful lettering or the album cover for Strange Fruit printed onto canvas posters, hung onto the walls of institutions that uphold and have always upheld capitalist, white supremacist ideals. Songs that once united folks for Civil Rights and anti-racism, commandeered to unite for personal and corporational monetary gain. 

All this music, stolen and changed, all playing at once in the constantly gyrating late-stage-capitalist market creates a rhapsody that seems fitting for where we are now. It’s more of a horror movie soundtrack than anything else.

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“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” is something Lord Acton wrote in a letter to an Anglican bishop in 1887; I learned recently that this quote in particular inspired Orwell to write his 1945 masterpiece Animal Farm. Although oftentimes the inspired creation can quickly become detached and separate from its inspiration, these two are innately correlated with one another. These words describe the plot of the book itself, Stalin’s Soviet Union (upon which the book is based), and countless other instances where power is misused.

In Animal Farm, a movement that begins very socialist in ideology, quickly landslides into a fascist dictatorship when Napoleon, Snowball, and Squealer (entirely un-subtle caricatures of Joseph Stalin, Leon Trotsky, and Vyacheslav Molotov) gain complete influence over the other animals. The three pigs gain control of the farm by inciting a revolution against the pre-pig leadership (a farmer), and then the pigs themselves become farmers, wearing human clothes, drinking liquor, and living in the farmhouse. 

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The symbolism here, as I’m sure most of us learned in 12th-grade English, alludes to the Russian Revolution, which began in 1917 and was brought on by socioeconomic factors affecting the working class in early 20th-century Russia. These factors included food shortages, government corruption, and overall economic hardship. Like Orwell’s farm animals, the people of Russia were dissatisfied with their leadership, and the first uprising over food scarcity kicked off a revolution that, in the beginning, seemed to be by the people and for the people; this obviously did not last long. 

The revolution song in Animal Farm, entitled Beasts of England, goes as follows:

Beasts of England, Beasts of Ireland

Beasts of ev'ry land and clime

Hearken to my joyful tidings

Of the golden future time

Soon or late the day is coming

Tyrant man shall lose his throne

And the fruitful fields of England

Shall be trod by beasts alone

Rings shall vanish from our noses

And the harness from our back

Bit and spur shall rust forever

Cruel whips no more shall crack

Riches more than mind can picture

Wheat and barley, oats and hay

Clover, beans, and mangold wurzels

Shall be ours upon that day

Beasts of England is based on the communist anthem Internationale, which has been used to unite many socialist and democratic-socialist movements throughout history. It was translated by Arkady Kots in 1902 for use during the Russian Revolution. As the Soviet Union came under Stalin’s leadership, however, the Soviet national anthem was changed to The State Anthem of The USSR instead, marking the erasure of the socialist Soviet dream of a working person’s paradise and the beginning of a harsh dictatorship under Stalin. 

This sentiment is reflected in Animal Farm when Napoleon decides that there is no longer a need for the “outdated” Beasts of England. 

Although these parallels are incredibly literal, Stalin’s Russia is not the only movement that inspired Orwell to write Animal Farm; in fact, without his experiences in my family’s own home country of Spain, he may have never written it at all. 

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After studying Spanish communism (evident in his referencing the battle for Madrid in his 1937 book The Road to Wigan Pier), Orwell arrived in Spain at the height of the country’s civil war. As described by William Chislett, the writer once spent three nights on a Barcelona rooftop with a shotgun in May 1937, defending the POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificación, or Workers Party of Marxist Unification that organized for the republican side of the Spanish Civil War and against the nationalist side). The POUM was created in opposition to the Stalinist communism that was infiltrating the Spanish government at the time through arms dealings and communications between the Spanish government and Stalin’s USSR. 

Orwell writes about the eye-opening ordeal of encountering members of the Stalin communist party whose “profession was telling lies” about the POUM, and these lies were effective enough that the organization as a whole and many of its members were eventually put to death by the Spanish government. Orwell’s commander and many of his friends were tortured until they eventually passed, and it was his wife, Eileen, who convinced him to return to England. 

There were many songs of revolution that were suppressed by the Stalin communist party in Spain during these years, including but not limited to El Himno de Riego, Hijos de Pueblo, and En La Plaza De Mi Pueblo. 

Much of Orwell’s work after that was influenced by his time in Spain and his front-row seat in viewing the threat of Stalinism on the Spanish people. In Why I Write, a piece published in 1946, Orwell declares, “Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism.” 

Photo courtesy of Barcelona Life

The animal that disturbs me most is not Napoleon, the leader, nor Snowball, the second in command. Squealer, representative of Soviet propagandist Vyacheslav Molotov, stands for the twisting of previously benevolent, democratic-socialist media, to subtly realign the public with Stalinist ideals. Applying this to the Spanish Civil War, Squealer represents the propaganda about the POUM that made opposing Stalinist communism so dangerous for Orwell himself during his time in Spain. 

For this reason, if you are compelled to action by a piece of media, consider first where this piece of media has come from and who has constructed it. One of many takeaways from the works of George Orwell is the prevalence and effectiveness of propaganda, and how media, in this case, songs of revolution, can be twisted and changed into perverted echoes of their original grandeur.