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Like the Battle of the Cowshed in Chapter IV, this is a light chapter wedged in between two heavy ones. If the Battle of the windmill is much darker and more painful than the earlier battle, the fighting is still treated as a mock-epic. And the chapter ends with a couple of poker-faced jokes at the pigs\' expense (although they\'re at the animals\' expense, in a way).
There is a kind of prologue to this chapter--really an epilogue to the last one--which highlights the giant step the pigs have taken toward betraying the Revolution. It\'s a highlight we\'ve seen before: a rewriting of an \"unalterable law\" follows a violation of that law by those in power. When Clover asks Muriel to read her the Sixth Commandment (Benjamin has already refused), she finds: \"No animal shall kill any other animal without cause.\" Once again the corruption of language--here, of a fundamental text--that accompanies the corruption of a political ideal. Power to change language, Orwell says, is power to change reality, and vice-versa.
As usual, Orwell treats the change with the irony of feigned ignorance. \"Somehow or other,\" says the narrator, \"the last two words had slipped out of the animals\' memory.\"
Clearly, Napoleon is absolute dictator now. Orwell saw that modern dictators rely essentially on terror (as we saw in the last chapter), propaganda, and other ways of changing the present and the past through language. Now there is one final element in the psychology of totalitarian dictatorship. It is an extension of the faith in Snowball\'s diabolical wrongness and Napoleon\'s infallible rightness: absolute adoration of the dictator as a kind of god on earth.
NOTE: Napoleon\'s wildly shifting alliances--and the switch in the propaganda line that goes with them--are like the changes in Stalin\'s policy toward the West in the 1930s and early 40s. Distrusting the democratic nations as much as the fascists, Stalin first sent out the line that there was no difference between any of the non-Communists, fascist or otherwise; subsequently, as the Nazi menace grew, the fascists became the enemy of mankind; then, in August 1939, Stalin signed a nonaggression pact and other agreements with Hitler, the German Nazi dictator. Finally, after Germany invaded Russia in 1941, everything changed again. What infuriated Orwell was the way Soviet sympathizers in the West managed to instantly develop a whole new set of beliefs with each change in the Soviet position.
It is not Napoleon\'s brilliance that wins the Battle of the Windmill, however; it is the collective rage of the animals that drives out the invader, at great sacrifice. And that sacrifice is terrible indeed, so that when the bleeding, wounded animals hear a gun firing for a victory celebration amidst the ruins of their \"windmill,\" they don\'t even understand what it is. Yet Napoleon manages to use the war as an excuse to heap more glory upon himself:
It was announced that the battle would be called the Battle of the Windmill and that Napoleon had created a new decoration, the Order of the Green Banner, which he had conferred upon himself.
Anyone who has ever had a hangover will appreciate Orwell\'s ironic joke on Napoleon and the other pigs. When Squealer appears the Morning After the victory party, \"walking slowly and dejectedly, his eyes dull, his tail hanging limply behind him,\" and \"looking seriously ill\"--and especially when the rumor goes round that Napoleon is dying, and he solemnly decrees the death penalty for drinking--we don\'t need to be told what is happening. The ironic technique Orwell uses to make his joke is the same technique he has used to make his serious points about the loss of liberty and the alteration of the truth: we know more than the animals do.
At the end of the chapter, nobody (well, \"hardly anyone\") can understand why Squealer is found sprawled next to the ladder and the paintpot on the barn floor one night. When a few days later Muriel notices that there\'s yet another Commandment they\'ve \"remembered wrong\"--\"No animal shall drink alcohol to excess\"--neither the narrator nor the animals make the connection.
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