SOURCE: Brown, Spencer. “Mealymouthed Critics Ignore Animal Farm's Anticommunist Flavor.” In Readings on Animal Farm, edited by Terry O'Neill, pp. 70-81. San Diego, Calif.: Greenhaven Press, 1998.

In the following essay, originally published in 1955, Brown contends that Animal Farm is one of the best anticommunist books ever written and was written specifically about the communist government in the Soviet Union.

Published in 1946, George Orwell's Animal Farm remains to this day, in my opinion, the best of anti-Communist books. If we had to do without all the others, fine as some of them are—Koestler, Dallin, Silone, Borkenau, Serge, and the rest—and were left with Orwell alone, we could still get by. For no other writer has shown us so clearly the worst tragedy of our age, worse in one respect at least than the crimes of the Nazis, for the Soviet tyranny combines with its terror the...