Posted by Claus B. Storgaard on October 30, 2002 at 00:47:34:
In Reply to: urgent question...help please posted by mei ling on October 30, 2002 at 00:23:35:
Orwell himself would probably say they are equally bad. The power struggle between Napoleon and Snowball does not mean that the pigs are divided. When it comes to defending their privileges against the other animals, they stick together. It is even probable that the situation would have been no different had Snowball won instead of Napoleon. In Catastrophic Gradualism from 1945 Orwell writes:
"[...] a resulting tendency to make all bad developments date from the rise of Stalin; whereas one ought, I believe, to admit that all the seeds of evil were there from the start and that things would not have been substantially different if Lenin or Trotsky had remained in control." [CEJL vol. 4 p. 35]