Snowball’s Chance is being published at a time when Orwell’s reputation has been under attack because of revelations that in the late 1940’s he gave the British Foreign Office a list of people he suspected of being “crypto-Communists and fellow travelers” labeling some of them as Jews and homosexuals as well. One of those condemning Orwell has been the writer Alexander Cockburn, whose father, Claud, a British journalist and member of the Communist Party, was a bitter foe of Orwell’s. “How quickly one learns to loathe the affectations of plain bluntishness,” Mr. Cockburn writes in an introduction to Mr. Reed’s novella. “The man of conscience turns out to be a whiner, and of course a snitch.”
Smith writes about her conversation in John Reed’s apartment, “Reed said he was watching the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on television in his East Village apartment on Sept. 11 when the idea came to him to rewrite the Orwell classic. ‘I thought, “Why would they do this to us?” ’ he remembered. ‘The twin towers attack showed us that something is wrong with our system, too.’ ”
At the time Reed was writing Snowball’s Chance, it was becoming more widely known that Orwell had turned sharply to the right in his later years. He was closely associated with the British spy Celia Kirwan and through her handed MI6 a list of those “crypto-Communists” Smith cites. Alexander Cockburn’s introduction to the first edition rewards the reader with details of Orwell’s indiscretions that resulted in the list of “unreliable” intellectuals being ultimately handed over to CIA, and the individuals were proscribed under the McCarran Act
Far from justifying Stalin’s policies as some critics have asserted, Reed’s novel identifies the pigs as any individual or class seeking power over people laboring quietly in their own “fields.” Rather than simply pointing the finger at one party or another, the apparatchiks in Snowball are all “democratic” policy makers, feathering their own nest at the expense of others. From the beginning, Reed makes that clear. As the old pigs died, who should return to the farm (firm), dressed in human clothes, carrying a briefcase, and walking on two feet but Snowball the pig.
Reed renews Snowball, not as a champion of justice as he was in Orwell’s novel, but as a power broker, declaiming the phrases of democracy and prosperity for all, but in reality lining his pocket and gathering power to himself at the expense of the rest of the animals. In a little over a hundred pages Reed captures a vivid picture of American policy and reactions from the Islamic world. Financial inequality, imperialist repression, immigration policy, voting irregularities, civil rights abuses and the rise of the ultra rich reverberate throughout the pages of Snowball’s Chance. And the attack on the World Trade Center is explained carefully and humorously—down to the willful blindness of the pigs. To the beavers, “Snowball looked weak, and with his many pursuits, overextended.” This, too, was Bin Laden’s calculation. And when the attack does occur what is the farm’s response? “Revenge, justice, retaliation! The blood of the beavers will flow in the river of the Woodlands! … Kill the beavers! Kill! Kill! Kill!”
And here we are, more than ten years later.
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