Against Dictatorship

by
Richard Lung 
Animal Farm is pre-figured by Aesop fable
The Kingdom of the Lion. This “squib” is too hot
to handle for four publishers.
One demurred at the betrayers of the revolution as pigs!
I’d mocked “Marxism for Infants”
Yet this parable is in children’s libraries.
I desire to write prose clear as a window pane.
As Geoffrey Chaucers Chaunticleer parodied
the chivalrous romances, so did the romance
of the revolution. Our love of animals
delights in their naive joy at liberation
from the farmer -- an impossible idealism,
we still regret being betrayed, step by step,
with the laughably illogical but self-serving
after-thoughts like: All animals are equal
but some animals are more equal than others.

We pity the poor dumb animals, so easily
confused and deceived, like a modern electorate
of the “inattentive,” as Wells called them.
The pig dictator is the archetypal Napoleon.
His henchman, Squealer, uses informers to cow
the public, as in any nasty police state.
The devastation of invasion heaps sorrow
upon sorrow on the Russian experiment.

More than this homely satire was needed
to spell out the peculiar horror
of the twentieth century slave state,
the arrival of a tyranny
more monstrous than the world has ever known.
The feudal ideal of military subservience
suppresses all enterprise and brain-washes
the masses with production propaganda.

John Locke, on government at war with its people,
said that they have the right to revolution.
1984 shows governments crush this right.
A global “triopoly” perpetuates the age-old ruse
of foreign wars to crush dissent within nations.
This self-righteousness prevents self-correction.
The world religions of a brotherhood of man
are replaced by worship of “the Party.”

Big Brother is all-knowing and all-powerful
as a god. Big Brother is Watching You.
He is never wrong and always to be obeyed.
Mystifying policy changes are covered-up
by destroying old news, so unreason
can never be exposed. No-one learns.
If democracy means anything, it means saying
things that other people don’t want to hear.

 

 

 
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<td> Richard Lung is educated in Social Science, Manchester, England.
Brought back to nature and its poetry by Dorothy Cowlin, poet and novelist.
Poems published since the  'nineties in many UK magazines, such as First Time, Poetry and Audience, New Hope International, Pennine Platform, Psychopoetica.
More recently in: Cadenza, Sentinel, the Beat, Shine Journal, Kritya, Star*line, Strong Verse, Wisdom Crieth Without, Kaleidotrope, Dark Metre, Inkscrawl, and the WordAid anthologies for Save The Children and Shelterbox.</td>
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