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Things go from bad to worse in this chapter. It starts with hard times (hard work, cold winter, scarce food) and hard measures taken to deal with them (ruthless suppression of the revolt of the hens). When spring comes, there is growing hysteria about Snowball, whose invisible actions, like a witch\'s spells, are said to be responsible for all the farm\'s problems. In fact Squealer \"demonstrates\" that Snowball had been a traitor from the start. All this comes to a head when, in a special assembly, the dogs drag animal after animal out to Napoleon\'s feet, where they confess to all sorts of crimes they supposedly committed with Snowball, and the dogs immediately tear their throats out. The sickened, terrified animals seek consolation in singing \"Beasts of England.\" Then Squealer announces that the song has just been forbidden, since it\'s a song of revolt for a better society, and that society has now been achieved.
NOTE: In this chapter the \"charm\" of the fable seems to have disappeared. Orwell is not trying to charm us, but to make us see terrible things. The killings seem real; so does the sorrow, and, more moving still, the bewilderment of the speechless animals.
Orwell was dealing with historical events that disturbed him deeply. From 1934 to 1939, the secret police arrested and interrogated, and deported or killed hundreds of thousands of people in the Soviet Union, mostly Communist Party officials, army officers, and their families and friends. Two series of public trials were held in Moscow, in which old Bolsheviks, who had made the Revolution and fought in the Civil War, confessed one after another to the most awful crimes. Most of them were condemned to death and shot.
What revolted Orwell was not only seeing the triumph of the Lie in the Moscow Trials themselves, but the spectacle closer to home of intellectuals in the British Left (of which he was a part, after all) either swallowing this nonsense or defending it as necessary.
As usual, Orwell sketches in the background with bare, swift strokes: \"It was a bitter winter,\" he begins this chapter. With the hard weather and work somehow comes greater faith in the Leader\'s lies:
Out of spite, the human beings pretended not to believe that it was Snowball who had destroyed the windmill: they said that it had fallen down because the walls were too thin. The animals knew that this was not the case.
But their actions ironically contradict what they \"knew\":
Still, it had been decided to build the walls three feet thick this time instead of eighteen inches as before...
If there are lies to the animals about their problems, there are also lies to the humans. Mr. Whymper, the human agent through whom all their business is transacted, is shown sand-filled bins with grain on top, so that he will report to the outside world that there is no food shortage at Animal Farm.
But there is a real shortage of grain. Napoleon--who now is increasingly distant, surrounded only by growling dogs--sees no way out but to take the hens\' eggs and sell them; the money will buy grain. Now, for the first time, there is \"something resembling a rebellion.\" The hens want to keep their eggs, and rather than give them up, they lay their eggs from the rafters, smashing them on the floor. Napoleon acts \"swiftly and ruthlessly.\" He simply cuts off their food. Five days later, they give in. Nine hens are dead. (Then more lies: it\'s reported they\'d died of disease.)
NOTE: When Stalin decided that Russia needed large, mechanized, collective farms, and the kulaks (well-off peasants) refused to give up their private holdings, millions of them were deported or killed beginning in 1928 to 1929. Many of them felt so desperate that they slaughtered their own livestock.
Against this background of suffering, lying, and repression, the use of Snowball as a scapegoat grows and grows. First Snowball is reported to be in league with either Pilkington or Frederick, depending on which man Napoleon is thinking of dealing with at the moment. Then Snowball is reported to be performing all kinds of mischief on the farm, mostly under cover of darkness. Later we learn that the cows \"declared unanimously that Snowball crept into their stalls and milked them in their sleep,\" and that Snowball is said to be in league with the rats.
All this leads directly to the rewriting of history. Snowball had to be a traitor from the start, everyone decides. The last stand for rationality, objective truth, and unalterable History is taken by the unintellectual Boxer, interestingly enough:
He lay down, tucked his fore hoofs beneath him, shut his eyes, and with a hard effort managed to formulate his thoughts.
\"I do not believe that,\" he said. \"Snowball fought bravely at the Battle of the Cowshed. I saw him myself.\"
Even when Squealer shows them that \"secret documents\" (which, unfortunately, Boxer can\'t read) \"prove\" Snowball\'s treason, Boxer, unlike the others, stands firm--until Squealer, \"speaking very slowly and firmly,\" tells him that Napoleon \"has stated categorically--categorically, comrade--that Snowball was Jones\'s agent from the very beginning.\" Then Faith--or conditioning--triumphs, and Boxer falls back on his slogan: \"If Comrade Napoleon says it, it must be right.\" Squealer gives Boxer an \"ugly look\" and then warns the animals about \"Snowball\'s secret agents lurking among us.\" The scene comes to a menacing close.
NOTE: We\'ve seen that Orwell was intensely concerned with lying and hysteria in the Soviet Union, but perhaps he hits on a more general theme here. Is Squealer the only government official to use \"secret documents\" (which, unfortunately, the animals cannot see) to prove that things are as he said they are?
And what does Orwell imply about the way common people respond to outrageous government propaganda? Notice how hard Boxer tries to resist. It is, finally, his simple faith in the honesty and knowledge of his Leader that does him in--literally, as we\'ll see later. We\'ve seen the implications of this kind of trust for totalitarian societies. Are there people in non-totalitarian countries who tend to believe that their Leader is always right?
The menace of the preceding scene is confirmed when Napoleon, surrounded by his huge growling dogs, summons the animals to assembly: \"They all cowered silently in their places, seeming to know in advance that some terrible thing was about to happen.\" At a signal from Napoleon, the dogs seize four pigs by the ear and drag them, \"squealing with pain and terror, to Napoleon\'s feet.\" Orwell has set the tone.
The pigs\' ears were bleeding, the dogs had tasted blood, and for a few moments they appeared to go quite mad. To the amazement of everybody, three of them flung themselves upon Boxer.
The \"mad\" violence is of course coldly and politically calculated. We know why Boxer is being attacked (remember that \"ugly look\" Squealer gave him?). When he pins a dog under his powerful hoof but then just looks to Napoleon for orders, we know he has lost his chance to stop the violence.
The four pigs, the same ones who protested when Napoleon abolished Meetings, confess to all kinds of crazy crimes. We may smile when they declare that \"Snowball had privately admitted that he had been Jones\'s secret agent for years.\" But the swift, hard, \"animal\" detail that follows is very real and not funny at all: \"When they finished their confession, the dogs promptly tore their throats out.\" Three hens, ringleaders in the egg rebellion, confess that \"Snowball had appeared to them in a dream and incited them to disobey Napoleon\'s orders\"; then other animals confess to hard-to-believe crimes, and all are killed.
When it was all over, the remaining animals, except for the pigs and dogs, crept away in a body. They were shaken and miserable. They did not know which was more shocking--the treachery of the animals who had leagued themselves with Snowball, or the cruel retribution they had just witnessed.
Despite their solidarity, which is a solidarity of victims (\"crept away in a body\"), the animals still don\'t doubt what they are told. But their instinctive decency is revolted by these judicial murders. Above all, even if there had been slaughter under Jones, \"it seemed to all of them far worse now that it was happening among themselves.\" A chilling thought. All together, \"they all lie down\" as though huddling together for warmth. Boxer is the only one who can find it in him to say a word: he resolves to \"work harder\" (his other slogan) and goes off to do so. Clearly he is working off his own confused and despairing feelings.
This dim feeling that the Revolution--the faith that sustains them--has not been worth it after all swells into a veritable lament in one of the most striking passages in the book. It centers around Clover, as the animals are \"huddled about [her], not speaking.\" Through the animals\' eyes we see the farm as it lies before them on a spring evening.
Never had the farm--and with a kind of surprise they remembered it was their own farm, every inch of it their own property--appeared to the animals so desirable a place. As Clover looked down the hillside her eyes filled with tears.
The disillusion and sorrow are expressed wordlessly, as an immediate reaction, without analysis: the farm doesn\'t really belong to them, we realize, no more than it did when Jones was there. Ownership means power, and the animals are powerless.
And now comes the only part of the book in which Orwell enters the mind of one of his characters. It is all the more moving for being the thoughts of Clover, someone who cannot articulate them: \"If she could have spoken her thoughts, it would have been to say...\" Like millions of simple, decent, working people, Orwell is saying, Clover feels what is wrong:
These scenes of terror and slaughter were not what they had looked forward to on that night when old Major first stirred them to rebellion.
And she longs for what is right, not for a theory, but for an image:
If she herself had had any picture of the future, it had been of a society of animals set free from hunger and the whip, all equal, each working according to his capacity, the strong protecting the weak, as she had protected the lost brood of ducklings with her foreleg on the night of Major\'s speech.
Then she expresses a clear picture of just how far they have slipped from the ideal:
Instead, they had come to a time when no one dared speak his mind, when fierce, growling dogs roamed everywhere, and when you had to watch your comrades torn to pieces after confessing to shocking crimes.
NOTE: There is a brutal irony in comparing the state of Animal Farm under Napoleon with the main points of Major\'s speech. It is an irony that Clover senses but does not precisely see. When Major talked of Man\'s exploitation and cruelty, he addressed the hens (he says their eggs were being taken from them), the young pigs (he says their throats would be cut within the year), and Boxer (he says he would be sold to the horse-slaughterer). Now after the Rebellion, when Man has been eliminated, the hens have faced the same fate they had under Man, and so have at least four of the young pigs. We\'ll see what happens to Boxer in Chapter IX.
Orwell suggests, without saying, how strong is Clover\'s habit of submission, her patience, her faith. He says that she\'ll continue to work, to obey Napoleon, to believe that things are better now than in the days of Jones. \"But still\"--and Orwell ends the passage with rhetorical repetition, closing with a moving, paradoxical reminder of how inarticulate she is-
it was not for this that she and all the other animals had hoped and toiled. It was not for this that they had built the windmill and faced the bullets of Jones\'s guns. Such were her thoughts, though she lacked the words to express them.
It is precisely because she can\'t find words to express her thoughts that she begins to sing the song of the Rebellion, \"Beasts of England.\" The others join in, and they sing it slowly and sadly, as they never have before.
And that\'s when Squealer tells them the song has just been forbidden, since the Rebellion is now \"completed\" and there\'s no need for it anymore. Orwell\'s irony has never been heavier.
The new song, written by Minimus--\"Animal Farm, Animal Farm, Never through me shalt thou come to harm\"--is, we note, a patriotic song rather than a revolutionary one.
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